A Historian Reconsiders Ideas of Race, Politics, and Identity

Nell Irvin Painter shares 5 key insights from I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays.

What can our own lives teach us about the broader world? Author Nell Irvin Painter has long blended personal narrative with historical inquiry and she collects some of this writing in the new

book I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. Nell is an emerita  Professor of American History at Princeton University and the author of books including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; and the National Book Critics Circle finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. Here she is to share 5 of her key insights.

1. Whiteness is a racial identity, just as Blackness is a racial identity.

We tend to assume that White people are individuals, while racial identity applies primarily to people who aren’t White. When I was writing my 2010 book The History of White People, public discourse most often treated Whiteness as an invisible default, not as a race shaped and often protected by history and society. It was unusual to see White people as people of a particular race with its own history. The wonderfully rich Princeton University Library, where I did my research, has multiple shelves of books on race as Black, but hardly any books on race as White. Although commentary on race as White still lags behind commentary on race as Black, the virtual silence I encountered before 2010 on Whiteness is no longer so dense. It’s no longer widely assumed that White identity could be reduced to one of its worst aspects: White nationalism. It’s so much more with its own history.