Month: July 2015

This past June, like many months, has been filled with both tragic and absurd US news items regarding both ideas of racial identity and the ongoing realities of white supremacy. Responding to the white supremacist terrorist attack on Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the viral story of Rachel Dolezal, an N.A.A.C.P. chapter leader of Spokane, Washington, who for years had presented herself as a black woman despite being white, historian Nell Irvin Painter (author, The History of White People) unpacks what it means to be white in America.

Painter traces the evolution of whiteness from its Anglo-American origins, to eugenicists classifications of “Nordic,” “Alpine,” and “Mediterranean” Europeans, to the operation of whiteness today “on a toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness’ and ‘racist hatred.’ ”

Read her insightful commentary in full via the New York Times. 

 

As members of the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia seek federal recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the impact of a long-dead Virginia eugenicist, Walter Plecker, continues to be felt, reports the Washington Post. As the head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, Plecker was the architect of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which “criminalized interracial marriage and required that every birth in the state be recorded by race with  the only options being ‘White’ and ‘Colored,’ ” effectively erasing “Indian” as a recognized racial category. The impacts of that legal erasure continue to be felt.

Read the story in full here.