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" . . . in the words of J. Creig Venter, then head of Celera Genomics, ' Race is a social concept, not a scientific one. We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tibes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.' Each person shares 99.99 percent of the genetic material of every other human being. In terms of variation, people from the same race can be more different than people from different races. And in the genetic sense, all people-- and all Americans-- are African descended."

– p. 391. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"We have already seen the lowering of racial boundaries starting in the 1940s, when 'ethnic' began replacing 'race' as applied to the descendants of European immigrants. The use of 'racial groups' for white people has become a moribund category, too, partly because white people are so mixed up. Finally, the prerequisites of mere whiteness count for less in the present situation, while the stigma of blackness-- once just one drop sufficed to curse a white-looking individual-- also seems less mortal. Back in the twentieth century, white people were assumed to be rich or at least middle-class, as well as more beautiful, powerful, and smart. As citizens and scholars, they said what needed to be known and monopolized the study of other people-- with themselves hardly being marked or scrutinized in return. Think of Francis A. Walker and William Z. Ripley, for whom formal education, New England ancestry, and useful connections assured authority. Half a century later, the upheaval of the civil rights era turned the looking glass around, bringing white people under scrutiny. Think of Malcolm X and James Baldwin."

– p. 386-7. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Reminders that Jews and Italians had been labeled as 'races' a generation earlier might have prompted a retort that 'race' was used more loosely in the past. This is true. But every use of 'race' has always been loose, whether applied to black, white, yellow, brown, red or other, No consensus has ever formed on the number of human races or even on the number of white races. Criteria constantly shift according individual taste and political need. It was clear, however, that in the olden days, Jim Crow had kept the 'colored' races apart from whites and African Americans largely hidden behind segregations' veil. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the end of legalized segregation began to propel black people into national visibility as never before."

– p. 383. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Rejecting the burden of white guilt that Malcom X laid on them, white Americans were morphing into Italian Americans and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans. What they had in commons was not being black. Basically, white versus black now sufficed as an American racial scheme-- for the moment."

– p. 382. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Pushed along by an avid media, the black pwer movement remade the notion of American racial identity. Now the most fascinating racial identity was black, no white, a flip certain to disturb those who had struggled so hard to measure up to Anglo-Saxon standards. Working-class whites who resented being ignored, Catholics who felt vulnerable in academia, and Jews who were used to having the last word were all deeply offended. And white people pushed back. The rise of the 'white ethnic' identity arose in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors. If Black people could proclaim themselves black and proud, white people could trumpet their whiteness. But therin lay a gigantic problem embedded in the long-standing American tradition of white nationalism. The Klu Klux Klans and white nationalists had already co-opted the white label, leaving 'ethnic' for the aggrieved third and fourth European immigrant generations. They were innocent, they maintained, having nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow. And they embraced identities rooted in Europe as though it were still the early twentieth century. But that time had passed. White ethnics could not reenact Horace Kallen's 1915 version of cultural pluralism, for they no longer spoke the old languages, wore their ancestors' clothes, or respected their grandparents' outmoded conventions of gender. The white ethnicity of the late twentieth century was little more than a leisure activity, one that American entrepreneurs embraced. Ethnic consumers could buy T-shirts imprinted with European flags, take tours of the old country, and parade in the street on ethnic holidays. This "symbolic ethnicity" seemed to offer a warm, family-oriented middle ground between stereotypes of plastic, uptight, middle-class Protestant Anglo-Saxons and violent, disorganized impoverished blacks."

– p. 377. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"In The Fire Next Time, a brilliant essay that troubled white readers, Baldwin called white Americans' relationship to Europe 'spurious'; they were hypocrites for Anglicizing their names, pretending to be real white Americans in recognition that the real America never could be only white. Embracing white supremacy and losing their ethnic identities, Baldwin maintained, were the price second-generation immigrants paid for the ticket to American whiteness."

– p. 376. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Here are a few of Malcom X's iconic statements: 'When I say the white man is a devil, I speak with the authority of history . . . The record of history shows that the white man, as a people, have never done good. . . He stole our fathers and mothers from their culture of silk and satins and brought them to this land in the belly of a ship . . . He has kept us in chains ever since we have been here . . Now this blue-eyed devil's time has about run out.' To this blanket of blame, descendants of European immigrants, the children of Louis Adamic's Peter Malek, answered, 'Racists? Our ancestors owned no slaves. Most of us ceased being serfs only in the last two hundred years.' But few heard them."

– p. 376. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010. (Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies [New York: Macmillian, 1972]), 71-72)

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"To be American American had rapidly come to mean being 'middle class' and therefore white, as in the facile equation of 'white' with 'middle class.' It was as though to be the one was automatically to be the other. Such a conflation of class and race had popped right out of postwar politics' weakened organized labor, and led to dwindling visibility of the working class."

– p. 370. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Before the war, Italian Americans had rarely achieved a higher education. But around 1940 their rates of college attendance quickly approached the national norm. Educational mobility led to economic mobility, which fostered political clout. Rhode Island, with its large proportion of Italian Americans, elected John Pastore its first Italian American governor in 1946. Italian Americans in Rhode Island's state house numbered four before 1948, when their number doubled. By the late 1960s they numbered sixteen. Less numerous, Slavic Americans did not succeed as brilliantly in politics, although their timetable for gaining office was similar. The first Slovenian governor of a state, Frank J. Lausche of Ohio, got elected in 1945 and was sent to the U.S. Senate in 1956."

– p. 365-66. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"With real American identity coded according to race, being a real American often meant joining antiblack racism and seeing oneself as white against the blacks. Looking back to the war years, an Italian American recalled a tempting invitation to take sides during the Harlem riot of 1943: 'I remember standing on a corner, a guy would throw the door open and say 'Come on down.' They were goin' to Harlem to get in the riot. They'd day, 'Let's beat up some ni****s.' It was wonderful. It was new. The Italo-Americans stopped being Italo and started becoming Americans. We joined the group. Now we're like you guys, right?'"

– p. 363. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"As Adamic Describes them, most in the second generation are ashamed of their parents and filled with feelings of inferiority, rendering them 'invariably hollow, absurd, objectionable persons,' whose 'limp handshakes' give him the 'creeps.' In time they may contribute to society, but at the moment they constitute a problem, and here Adamic's ambivalence emerges full blown. The children of immigrats present 'one of the greatest and most basic problems in this country; in some respects, greater and more basic [than] the problem of unemployment, and almost as urgent.' They are a 'problem' thirteen times in the articles eleven pages, on account of their 'feelings of inferiority' (sixteen times). Their 'racial' identities (ten times) separated them from "old [Anglo-Saxon] stock' Americans (nine times). Even their champion was using the language of races to paint a dismal picture."

– p. 354-355. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010. Quoting Adamic, "Thirty Million New Americans."

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"When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising. A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best there ever was."

-- 13. Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Harper Collins e-books.

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"Benedict's role had been significant in popularizing new scientific views of race, altering, if not obliterating, the notion that Europeans belonged to different races and that the children of European immigrants posed insurmountable social problems. Hers was a critical transition away from 'the races of Europe,' reinforced by fundamental changes in American life."

– p. 342. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Describing the actual existence of race as a meaningful category of analysis, Benedict and Weltfish were not willing to go as far as the literary critic Jacques Barzun and the anthropologist Ashley Montague. In 1937 Barzun had published Race: A Study in Superstition, whose title says it all. Montague's 1942 Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race called the idea of race 'the witchcraft of our time.' Both these books sold well in multiple editions, but soial scientists world-wise could not agree. (Even the antiracist UNESCO statement on race [1952] retained the notion that races actually do exist.) Benedict and Weltfish were writing from within the scientific mainstream, confused as it was at the time."

– p. 338. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Earlier studies had taken for granted the factual existence of races (as in 'races of Europe'). Therefore, studies of racial mental differences were considered interesting as scientific research topics that could be studied objectively. But by the late 1920s psychology and sociology had begun focusing on the subjective nature of racial ddifferences in society. Soon race prejudice became a subject work analyzing. Here Robert Park, Bond's disseration adviser, pioneered. Park's classic 1928 essay, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man," emphatically separated race from culture. The migrant was to be seen as a person emancipated, enlightened and even cosmopolitan. Recent immigrants to the United States were creating, not injuring, civilization. This migrant might be a man living 'on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.' But that was a good thing. Take as an example an emancipated Jew like the Berlin-born, South Carolina-raised novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn, who had published his autobiography Up Stream: An American Chronicle in 1922. For Park, Lewisohn bridged two cultures, offering the best example of 'the processes of civilization and progress.' Here notions of change and promise replaced the frozen biological determinism of eugenics. EA Ross, who had trashed immigrants before the war, could by 1936 write, 'Difference of race means far less to me now than it once did.'

– p. 316. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"Whereas Chamberlin adored all Germans, Lapouge prized the dolichocephalic, blond Nordic he called Homo Europeaus, who was hardly the same as modern Germans. Lapouge classified 70 percent of northern Germans as dolichocephalic and only 20 percent as pure Homo Europaeus. In southern German, he counted 20 percent as dolichocephalic and only 3 percent as Homo Europaeus. The rest were hopelessly brachycephalic Alpines. Only a few dolicho-blonds still existed in Franc, he lamented, while-- thank heaven-- Americans were as Nordic as northern Germans. This was supposed to be bad for the French but good for the Americans, since Alpines were acquiring a mean reputation."

– p. 316. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

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"As a racist thinker, Gobineau could have been a great deal meaner. As we have seen, applause came to Gobineau from Mobile, Alabama, in the 1850s, when Josiah C. Nott sponsored an edited translation under the title The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. When Lapouge flattered himself to be the 'first prophet of the Nordic race after Gobineau,' he was ignoring the mid-nineteenth-century Amerian racists' translation. Lapouge's ignorace is understandable, for the Nott translation, like the original, went largely unnoticed at the time. Who could have known that such arcan weirdness would flourish in the twentieth century as science? "Gobineau's great breakthrough in the English-speaking world came long after his death when a Dr. Oscar Levy, whose motives remain obscure, sponsored a new and more faithful translation, published in London and the United States, It was this 1915 translation that brought Gobineau to the attention of racists in the United States and made 'Aryan' a favorite racist term. Like Gobineau, Lapouge believed that two antagonistic races lived in France-- long-headed (doliochocephalic) Nordic/Aryan aristocrats and round-headed (brachycephalic) Alpine peasants. Such racist theory swirled throughout the West, with oceans no barrier. Madison Grant and William Z. Riplet shared and enthusiasm for Lapouge's anthroposociology. The bibliography of Ripley's Races of Europe cites Lapouge twenty-five times, and Lapouge's statistics appear repeatedly in Ripley's tables."

– p. 313. Painter, Nell Irvin,  The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.