February 21, 2005

Inventing White: Professor Looks at History for the Answers

Dr. Gary Taylor
(photo: Chip Cooper)

by Joanna C. Hutt

When you look in the mirror, do you see a white person? A person of color? Has anyone ever referred to you as a white person? A person of color?

Have you assumed that the concept of racial "whiteness" came from comparisons with people with darker skin, maybe about the time Europeans were discovering other worlds? Or about the time American plantations were worked by African slaves?

Have you ever wondered how the concept of racial "whiteness" has come to be synonymous with power and privilege?

If you have answered "yes" to any of these questions or if you have answered "no" to any of these questions, then the new and groundbreaking book by a UA professor is for you.

In his Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop, Dr. Gary Taylor, director of UA's Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, explores the concept of racial "whiteness" from Columbus to Eminem and the very slow emergence of use of "white" in its generic, racial sense. At the least, the book may break all the assumptions readers bring to the subject. At its best, it may be as liberating to read it as it was liberating for Taylor to write it.

Taylor's research crossed several disciplines including history of art, law, science, religion, philosophy, and political science. The 24 color and 20 black-and-white plates, for example, demonstrate the gradual whitening of skin color in art, and one entire chapter deals with the biblical justifications of "white superiority."

"For me, a white person with blue eyes," said Taylor," it was liberating to learn that there is a history behind the emergence of this concept that acquired a name — 'white', at a moment in time for a particular reason and is documented as well as anything can be documented."

"You might be surprised that there have been long periods in history when you wouldn't have been called 'white'," said Taylor. "There have been times that if someone called you white, you would have punched them in the nose."

Taylor has recently written a piece for London's The Guardian, and the following are excerpts from that piece. If you're left wondering about the 1613 date, Taylor's book is available at the UA SUPe store.

"Like any other word, 'white' — in the modern, racial sense — was invented. And it's possible to pinpoint, with absolute confidence and precision, the first popular appearance of the idea that the English are 'white people.' It was in a play, in 1613.

"So who was the dramatist who decided that the English were "white"? It wasn't Shakespeare — despite his racist caricatures of oversexed black males ( Aaron, Morocco, Othello, and — almost certainly — Caliban).

"For one thing, Shakespeare himself was not white. The only full-colour portrait with any claim to authenticity, the funeral monument in Stratford-upon-Avon, reveals a very brown bard: his family obviously did not idealize whiteness. More important, Shakespeare did not contrast the black men in his plays with 'white men'. Instead, he routinely contrasted black men with white women.

"Like other bodily features that tend to differentiate the sexes, the relative pallor of women was, in Elizabethan England, fetishised, exaggerated and faked. Elizabeth I — like many other well-to-do women in classical, medieval, and Renaissance Europe — painted her face white.

"When the King's Men performed Othello, one of the male actors blacked up to play the Moor of Venice, and one of the male actors whited up to play the 'whore of Venice'. None of the actors thought of black, or white, as their own, natural, biological, 'racial' color.

"Shakespeare was a racist, but he didn't think he was white. The notion that Anglos were "white" did not originate on slave plantations in the American colonies. The modern racial sense of the word entered the London popular vocabulary in 1613. There were few English colonists at all in 1613, and no slave plantations. English whiteness was not originally defined in contrast to the blackness of African slaves, but in contrast to the blackness of civilized monarchs in India, south-east Asia, and the spice islands. The Great White Bard was not white at all. And racial whiteness is not a biological fact, but a historical invention."

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