Why write a history of whiteness?
We’ve spent so much time in this country on various racial issues. It’s our national sport, in a way, and it’s always as if there is only one side: nonwhite. But this is one of those binaries where you need both sides to make sense of it. I want to point out that this book is not about white nationalism. It’s not about how bad white people are. It’s about how we have thought about people now considered white. I used to encounter reservations about the project, and people would ask, “Why are you doing this as a black person?” People hear it’s a book called “The History of White People” and that it’s by a black author, and make assumptions. We’ve all seen the word “Caucasian,” usually when we’re filling out forms, but most of us have no idea where it came from. What is a Caucasian, exactly? It comes from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who applied it to a large swatch of humanity on the 11th of April, 1795, with the publications of the third edition of his dissertation, in Latin, about the
