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Jun 4, 2020 · John Biewen: To tell the story of the construction of race, and therefore of whiteness, let’s go back to the beginnings of Western civilization. Why? Why? Well, because of course it’s Westerners who would come to call themselves white.
The Caribbean scholar Mervyn C. Alleyne states that the Romans used the term candidus, a neutral term for white, to refer to themselves. [81] Romans would also use the term albus, which referred to the physical phenomenon of whiteness, to refer to their skin colour.
Sep 12, 2016 · Initially, Irish, Slavs, Poles, Jews, Italians, Serbs, and other Southern and Eastern European immigrants were not quite white. Yet in becoming American, they became white or Caucasian—a term that is itself a piece of historical baggage, adapted from a German of the 1790s who believed the palest people came from the Caucuses.
Jul 14, 2022 · In colonial Barbados, 17th-century labour codes described indentured Europeans as “white” and gave them more rights than enslaved Africans on that basis. This ensured that the two groups would...
- The Concept of Race
- The Slave Trade
- The Shakespearean Treatment
- Race Might Not Be Real, Racism Is
Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in The History of White People (2010) that “race is an idea, not a fact”. Middleton alone did not invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so o...
There is little verisimilitude in describing anyone with either term, which explains their malleability over the centuries. How arbitrary is it to categorise Sicilians and Swedes as being white, or the Igbo and Maasai as both black? This kind of racial thinking developed as the direct result of the slave trade. Hall explains: “Whiteness is not only...
Consider the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In sonnet 130, he says of his mysterious paramour that “her breasts are dun”; in sonnet 12, he references her “sable curls”; and in sonnet 127 he writes that “black wires grow on her head”. As is commonly understood, and taught, Shakespeare subverted the tradition exemplified by poets such as Petrarc...
Yet our particular criteria concerning how we think about race did develop, and it did so in service to colonialism and capitalism (and their handmaiden: slavery). Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalised that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as “white people” would begin to ...
Why? “Because white in the white west tends to be the unthinking default,” says Kanta. “A human is imagined as white.” And this has translated into human-like machines also looking white.
however, once we realize that a large part of the "story of Western slavery" involved peoples we now call white people—Slavs, Caucasians (Circassians, Georgians), Britons, Irish, and others who have had long histories of slavery and indentured servitude. This is an important point, but Painter's discussion involves one politically
