The History of White People

An eminent historian takes us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing the invention of the idea of race and the worship of whiteness for economic, social, scientific, and political ends. The concept of race did not exist in Greek and Roman antiquity, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Obsession with whiteness flourished in the eighteenth century with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. Spread by intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, white race theory reached North America with a vengeance, excluding blacks and all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. This book forces us to confront our notions of race and the history behind them.