Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado

Dr. Antoinette Jackson

Critical Race Discourse
October 4, 2018.

Book review

The History of white people is a book that tries to approach racial conflicts from a

different point of view, since it proposes to explore the process of racial formation of what is

known as whiteness to, from this, analyze the relationship of whiteness with the establishment

of hierarchies based on skin color and biological characteristics of human beings. For the

author, the race is an idea and not a fact (Painter, ix, 2010), and therefore it is necessary to

analyze the consolidation of white races to understand how power and domination relationships

are unleashed with other racial groups.

The book is important since it proposes to evaluate the conceptualization of the race

from the point of view of the dominant categories, and in that sense that approach is not only

relevant but also necessary since it helps us to understand the process through which they are

created. these binaries and value or specific characteristics are added to the biological condition

of people (Painter 17, 2010). In addition, it is important to look deeply at the establishment of

pre-racial categories, which demonstrates the innate need of the human being to categorize and

establish hierarchies based on these categories to justify social inequities and systematic

violence.

It is important to mention that the book not only uses the biological differences to

explain the categorization processes, but also delves into the process under which the whiteness

category is constructed and modified, and how the concept fluctuates to include and add to

groups previously excluded for the purpose of establishing a dominant mass powerful enough
to justify and dominate some numerically larger groups and weaken them to place them at the

bottom of the social pyramid. This occurs, for example, in the case of the Irish population,

which is initially compared to the black population (Painter, 136, 2010), to be included in the

white category or the case of the divisions established among the Americans from the north

and the south, which were later eliminated to closely relate whiteness to freedom, and thus

build "scientific" justifications that support the subordination of the African-American

population in the United States.

Discussion questions:

1. Why did whiteness not focus on building a culture that would make the category more

consistent in time?

2. When do the white Latinos fit in this concept of whiteness?

3. How will the concept of whiteness be transformed with the new migration processes

that the United States faced?