A Few Notes on Whiteness

"If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while all the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis have eight, or nine, or ten--it's simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?" -- Theodore Roosevelt

TR and others inventing Great Replacement Theory around the turn of the 20th Century. TR, worse than you ever imagined.

Quoted in "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter. Some books require you to kind of work your way through them. No so Painter, whose text flows as easily as you would like.

One of many questions provoked in this book, how did the morons promoting their wacked-out race theory in the 19th century, founded in great part on the measurement of skulls, become so highly esteemed? Why did my English profs never tell me Ralph Waldo Emerson was a complete nitwit? What does it mean when figures such as TR or, say, Winston Churchill, vicious racists both, are lifted to the heights of nobility and statesmanship?

If nothing else, Painter's story elevates the salience of the study of whiteness, to the point where we would do well to invert the prevalence of whiteness scholarship and race-blind humanities.