Just a heads up, y'all. This episode contains some salty language, which means it's finna be some cussing. What's good, listener? You are listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. All right, so let's just set the scene. Okay, so last week, there was a Senate hearing in Washington for President Trump's pick for Assistant Secretary of State for international organizations within the State Department. This is somebody who will be working closely with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and other folks to shape American foreign policy. And Trump's pick for this post is a dude named Jeremy Carl, a dude who has some very particular positions. I think that while, of course, all races in different contexts can be subject to really severe discrimination, that when we look at our legal structures, white Americans are often very disfavored in overt ways. We're seeing this in the Small Business Administration, many other places. So your belief is that white Americans face more discrimination, at least prior to the Trump administration, fixing this than black Americans? On average, Senator, yes, that's correct. And I'm not running away from that statement at all. That's Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, asking Jeremy Carl about the argument that Carl made in his recent book. The argument says, quote, Anti-white racism is the predominant and most politically powerful form of racism in America today. And that hearing detoured into a conversation about what makes white people white people. You know, I understand Irish American culture. I understand Italian American culture. I maybe don't understand white culture as well. Tell me the values, the white values that you believed are being erased by the current American government or prior American governments. Murphy was basically like, okay, okay, what is white identity? And Jeremy Carl explains, or at least, I mean, he tried to. I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average. Foodways could often be different. Music could be different. Well, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not in English this year. So our ability to access white churches or white food. Jeremy Carl's book is called The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. And it got a lot of attention in conservative and right-wing media when it dropped, but it was, you know, it was crickets mostly everywhere else. And it makes arguments that lots of conservative commentators have made over the years, but that have been getting much more oxygen in Trump's America. You know, the idea that white people are more discriminated against than people of color and that white culture, you know, that thing that Murphy and Carl were back and forth and about is under grave threat. And so, yeah, obviously you can kind of hear Jeremy Carl sort of fumbling around there. Right. And I just got to say that that's the irony in this thing we call race. And in particular, this thing that we call whiteness, it just becomes clear that it doesn't really hold together when you try to explain it out loud. Like, for instance, in that hearing, Jeremy Carl laments what he calls the decline of Scots-Irish military culture. Okay, okay. But, like, it does not follow that. If that's happening, it's happening because of anti-white racism. Just, like, walk with me for a second, y'all. So people in the United States who are Scots-Irish are outnumbered by other kinds of people in the U.S. descended from Europeans, which is to say they are outnumbered by other kinds of white folks. People of German descent make up the largest group reporting a country of origin to the U.S. Census Bureau, right? So they might be the biggest ethnic group in the U.S., if you want to think about them that way. Germans were not even considered the right kind of white folks in the U.S. for a lot of the 19th and 20th centuries. But today, German-Americans or people descended from Germans are just regular, degular, invisible white folks. The same is true for Italian immigrants and Irish immigrants to the United States, right? Like, white people have been the numerical and cultural majority in the United States for so long, not least because of the shifting rules for who gets to be in the club to begin with. By all this intermixing among European Americans, that is necessarily required that people downplay their countries and cultures of origin. So, yeah, white people are a melting pot. And then Jeremy Carl mentions the white church. Like, OK, if you take his point, which I do, that the white church in the U.S. and the black church in the U.S. are foundationally different from each other, which is because the vast majority of black churches in the United States come out of a response to slavery and racial oppression. Like, still, do Jeremy Carl know white people churches? Because the distance in doctrine and practice between a white evangelical church in Texas and like a mainline white Protestant church in suburban Boston is so vast that they aren't even like really compatible. So again, what are we even talking about materially here? Like, what are the things that are central to whiteness and being white in this country? Like, is it all just about not being black or brown? And I mean, I can already anticipate the emails in our inbox. Actually, there's a whole long history of not white people in this country living as white people in the U.S. So that doesn't follow. The point is, this question, this question about whiteness is really hard to answer. And I just want to say, this is true for everybody. Like, not just white folks. Black people, Latinos, Asians, like, those categories are so broad as to be almost meaningless. I mean, except for the fact that they are enormously consequential to us, like sometimes even matters of life or death. We still get the causation backwards. As scholars of race have pointed out, race did not create racism. Racism created race. Whiteness and race, just like capitalism or the nation state and all the other stuff we take as a given today. those notions have not really been around for all that long. But for as long as they have been around, people have been casting about, kind of like Jeremy Carl, fumbling around in the dark, trying to codify it, right? And over all this time, the borders of whiteness have been shifting constantly and moving all around. But you know, this is code switch, baby. We still gonna get into it, because even if white people belong to this gigantic category, right, there is a history of white people. And maybe Jeremy Carl should have done this, but we called up the person who wrote that history to help us make sense of it. Her name is Nell Irvin Painter. She's a Princeton professor who wrote the influential 2010 book, The History of White People. Nell Irvin Painter is a historian at Princeton University, and she's the author of the influential 2010 book, The History of White People. I start with what made me decide to write it It was a long time ago It was the turn of the 21st century and Russia was bombing the Bejesus out of Chechnya And Chechnya is in the Caucasus And I thought, well, why are white Americans called Caucasian? And nobody knew. You know, white people felt they should know, and they were too embarrassed to ask. Nobody knew. So I thought, well, let me just look into this. And so I got to the answer, which was Blumenbach, pretty soon. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German scientist way back in the 1800s. And Nell Painter said he's considered the father of physical anthropology. And Blumenbach's work laid a lot of the groundwork, which we now know is like straight quackery, that became race science. Like, he believed that there were populations in the world that had distinct characteristics and abilities. He saw five varieties of people. And they had to do with where people were. It wasn't the color of them. It was all based on skull. Blumenbach had a kind of, like, framework map of skulls, right? And the skull at the center of his framework belonged to the people of Europe, who he called Caucasian. The skull was a beautiful skull. And then at the ugly ends were the African and the Asian. And then in between, between the African and the Caucasian was the Malay. And then between the Caucasian and the Asian was the American. And look, like, this skull stuff sounds bananas, but again, this was a real common position in science, like, well into the 20th century. This lasted a long time. Blumenbach was very influential. But wait, wait, wait, hold up, back up, back up, back up. Because this is the central idea that got Nell Urban Painter obsessed with this question. Why did Blumenbach call his perfect skulls Caucasian? Like, the people of Western Europe were nowhere near the Caucasus. But now, painters said, this naming thing, that's true for so many of the terms that came to describe the default European at different points. Like, Teutonic, or Nordic, or Aryan, or even Anglo-Saxon. Like, they don't really make much geographic or historical sense in terms of the people being described. Right there, you can see what a mess racial classification. Right. Mm-hmm. People sort of half-understanding a bunch of stuff. They make it up. They're making it up. They make it up. And all of us are living with the consequences of that. Well, we make it up too. When I published this book and I was on my book tour, people would say, but really, what's the real scientific truth about race? I said, there isn't such a thing. There is such a thing in political economy as racism. And it has material consequences. You can die of racism. You can be kept poor through racism. But there's no freestanding definition of your race. So they'd say, well, what's the truth about race? And I'd say, it depends on who's speaking, to whom, for what reason, when, and where. To that end, have you been following the news around Jeremy Carl? He's President Trump's nominee for a senior position. I saw the headlines. I did not delve into it. But the Trump administration is just too full of bullshitty white nationalists. They just make it up and it's ugly. To get our listeners up to speed, so Jeremy Carl is a government official. He's a political commentator. And he's the author of this book that came out two years ago in 2024 called The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. And on February 12th at his confirmation hearing, he was asked to define what white identity is. And suffice it to say, he struggled to answer the question. Yeah. And so as we've established, you've written this book about the history of white folks or how white people came to be thought of as a concept. So I'm wondering how you would have answered that question. I would say, what is white people? And I would say, depends on who's talking to who, where and when, for what reason. That's what I would have said. And of course, nobody would have been happy with that answer because they want it to be a real thing. It's not. I mean, why do you think it's difficult for so many people to define whiteness or white culture? Well, it's really important. The United States was not founded solely on racism or white supremacy. But white supremacy came along very quickly. And by the time of our founding documents, it was a problem, mostly because of slavery. And slavery was a financial and economic and even sociological foundation of a lot of American-ness. So it's a really important concept of ourselves as Americans or their concept then as what it meant to be American. But it's a very slippery concept. And so you have to keep tinkering with it to make sure it does what you need. So, I mean, it keeps tinkering with being tinkered with in the United States. do you, he's, part of the reason he was struggling was that I think I'm just having a guess is that like whiteness has been constructed, like you said, like to do this. So it was like a technology, right? There's mechanism to do this thing, but it's not a thing. It's not a thing in itself. There's no white people state. I mean, many of us who live in the United States or live in the West or live in the world can feel oppressed by a state that seems controlled by white people and whiteness. But you can't raise an army on that. You can't raise a police force on that, even though it often feels though that is the case that we talking there about racism not race I mean they so intimately bound up it hard to separate them But we can I don think anybody would try to talk about racism as a scientific concept But everybody talks about race as if it were a scientific concept. I think this has changed some over the course of the time we've been doing this show, that one of the things that was very prevalent in our early reporting is the way that the discourse was, white people often did not see themselves as having this thing called race, right? And so part of the thing that we're talking about when we're talking about white culture and whiteness, that was just like, air quote, normal, like the sort of median American existence, whatever that even is. And it was always defined as sort of in contrast to things that were not that. This is default. This is default, right? This is the stuff that black folks do, or we think black people do stuff that we think they do. Only black people or people of color had race. And, you know, if you try to talk black people out of the scientific basis of race, you'll have a job on your hands. Because if somebody asks me, am I black? I say, of course. Yeah, of course. But white people, you know, you can thank Trump for that, actually. You think so? Oh, yeah. Yeah. He changed American whiteness. Actually, it was in 2017 or so, 18, white people started understanding themselves as white people. Hmm. Before that, white people were individuals. And you hear Americans believe in individualism. This is only true of white people. Every black person I know understands that we are somehow connected. When you are black, you are connected to your black brother-in-law, even though he's your brother-in-law. But white people were individuals. And the decisions and the lives they made, they often usually considered those individual decisions and an individual life. And it made sense to talk about American society as individualist. The history that I read and write over and over and over again, I have Black people talking. I see, hear Black people talking about us. And I think one of the great things that Black people have offered to the United States is a sense of solidarity, is a sense of being connected to other people, even though you don't know them personally, and you're concerned with their welfare. That is such a good, strong thing. And it's a gift of Blackness. Before 2017-18, white people didn't easily turn to solidarity thinking unless they were, say, members of unions or socialists or communists or feminists. Or like avowed white supremacists, white nationalists. There's that, yes, of course. And nobody wanted to be associated with them. So before Trump, white people could freely see themselves as individuals. And Trump was so strong on, you know, make America white again. I know he didn't say that, but that's how it sounded. And that's how millions of people heard it. And he surrounded himself, especially in the second administration, with white nationalists and people who speak that language freely. But the Trump era gave white people race. I mean, could we even go back a little bit further, though? Like, I mean, because Obama's presidency, and there's a million things to be said about Obama's presidency, but we've talked to political scientists who've talked about the way his presidency gave a lot of white people, who did not think of themselves as white people, they just thought of themselves as normal, regular, right? Individuals. Individuals, right? Did not think of themselves as race first, right? Like, race was not prominent in their sort of self-concept. Yeah, the people who did race first were Klansmen. They were Klansmen, right. But Obama and his family sort of sent, suddenly the sort of family at the center of American political life is a family, not like theirs, at least appearance-wise, right? And created a sense of, like, status loss, that there's something has changed, even though not much did, right? But, like, that was a sort of cleave for a lot of people. Like, Trump is a result of that, like. Yeah, yeah. But you mentioned this beautiful thing that Black people have been able to give to America is this idea of solidarity. And I think about this all the time, right? There's these tendrils, right? These psychic tendrils that connect Black folks all around the country in different regions, class backgrounds, and certain states. I mean, you can't always count on it. The most anti-Black person I ever knew personally was my father's half-sister. And I think every Black person knows somebody like that. Oh, yeah, of course. who says, in effect, black people ain't shit. There's always somebody like that. But I think I'm right that that is not the prevailing ethos. And so when I talk to people over and over and over, I get, how are we going to help so and so? These are black people talking to and about other black people. You know, there's a concern for other black people, even if they are not in your family. And I hear that kind of sense of solidarity on the left among white people, but I don't think of it as one of the defining characteristics of American whiteness in the way I think of it as a defining characteristic of American blackness. Now, I'm going to complicate it in another way, too. I was hoping you would. Since the 1990s, we've had really a big wave of black immigrants, largely from Africa, lots of people from Nigeria. And first of all, they don't come with a sense of blackness. They come with a sense of being Nigerian or Ghanaian or Kenyan. Even in Nigeria, right? It's like, are you Igbo? Are you? Yeah, right. Right. But they're not going around thinking, how can I make life better for black people? Which a lot of us in the United States do. Now American racism can turn black immigrants African descended immigrants into black Americans but not necessarily And so I think part of the variety of black voices that you can hear now part of that reflects people whose experiences are more like white Americans' experiences. You know, they come as individuals and they succeed or fail as individuals. So it sounds like what you're saying is that these things that have bound Black people are becoming less intense, right? And so that is going to sort of complicate or just soften this sort of shared, broad identity that Black folks have in this country. For white folks, it feels like you're saying that what is happening is they, in many ways, lots of white people, are starting to see themselves as bound together. I don't know if they see themselves as bound together. Huh. I don't go around asking white people how you see yourself. Well, you were writing this book, though. You're writing the history of white people. I know, but that's the history of white people. it was published in 2010 so that's a different time you know when i was on my book tour this was during the obama time and it was also a year of a census and white people in my audience would say does this mean we're post-race and everybody would say no That was a question that never went anywhere. Part of what seems to be happening there is the sort of like that Obama thing, that sort of status loss thing. It seems like a lot of white people are having to sit with what it means to not always be the default on the TV screen. Evidently, they're telling us that. Now, if that's a lot of white people, I don't know. Is there anything else you think that we should be thinking about? We've touched on one thing, which is what is race really? And it's who's talking where and when to whom for what purpose. But my book is called The History of White People. And there is a history there. Things change. So, for instance, the last time Americans got hysterical about immigration was the early 20th century. And it ended, not ended, but the outcome was laws that virtually shut down immigration in the mid-1920s. And at that time, the discourse between about 1900 and the early 20s was about alien races. These were white people. They were considered people of white race, but there was considered to be more than one white race. So there were several white races that you could rank hierarchically. So the Saxons were at the top or the Anglo-Saxons. But these other inferior races were considered to be East European Hebrews, Northern Italians, Southern Italians, Slavs, Greeks. Irish were considered the Celtic race. Right. So it was considered that there was more than one white race. So when people say their group became white, no, they were always white, but they were the inferior kind of white. Right. So first of all, to remember that 100 years ago, educated people thought there was more than one white race and we could rank them. And the way we rank them was often by measuring their skulls. And then when tests of social IQ came in, you could test their IQ and rank them in that way. It was the Nazis looking back at American race science and taking their cues and then killing people over it. That gave that kind of race talk a really bad, it smelled, you know, it was just. And so by the 30s and 40s, right-thinking Americans didn't want to talk about the Jewish race, which Nazis were, and then killing people over it. So in a way, you can thank the Nazis for moving Americans off this idea of many white races. and after the Second World War, American anthropologists who were the experts on this said there were just three races in rank order, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. And that's kind of held up, but everybody has trouble with it because it just doesn't work anymore. So change over time. And a hundred years ago, educated people thought that a mixed marriage, that wouldn't work out on racial grounds was Italian and Irish. So things change. That's the real takeaway. Things change. Even whiteness. Nell Irvin Painter is an American historian and the author of the book, The History of White People. Nell Painter is her alter ego, who is a visual artist and the author of Olden Art School, A Memoir of Starting Over. Professor Painter, thank you so much for coming on Code Switch. You're so welcome. I enjoyed talking to you. And that is our show. But you can follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. That's all one word. If email's more your thing, ours is codeswitch at NPR.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know what I mean? But you should also subscribe to the Code Switch newsletter by going to NPR.org slash Codeswitch Newsletter. and just a reminder that signing up for Code Switch Plus is a great way to support our show and to support public media and you get to listen to every episode sponsor free so please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Code Switch This episode you're listening to was produced by Kayla Lattimore It was edited by Leah Dinella and Dahlia Mortada and I would be remiss if I didn't shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive You know what I mean? Like, it's Christina Calla, it's Xavier Lopez, it's Jess Kung and it's B.A. Parker and it's me, Gene Demby Be easy, yo Yeah.
