"He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."  Thomas Jefferson

  "There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance." -- Goethe

"The search for truth is never wrong.  The only sin is to lack the courage to follow where truth leads." -- Duke

"He alone deserves to be remembered by his children who treasures up and preserves the memory of his fathers." -- Edmund Burke

The History of White People

by Nell Irvin painter

aka Race Hatred is a National Duty

Review and Comments on Nell Irvin Painter's book, "The History of White People", W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2010

Being curious how a black historian could write about the history of a people not her own, I decide to procure Painter's book and read it for myself to see where she believes my People came from.  I quickly realized, within the first few pages actually, that Painter has no intention of tracing the origins, wanderings, and locations of the people we today consider "White."  Instead, what Painter has done with her "history" book is denigrate all White people and trace what she considers the history of White supremacy.

This is probably the most anti-White book I have ever read.  It is a racist rant from the Introduction to the Index.  Painter should have titled it "My Theory on White Supremacism."  Of course, then no self-respecting White person would have purchased her slanderous book and Painter, a "historian", along with her publisher, would like to sell copies of her "history" to unsuspecting Whites.  Painter's vile denigration of my People begins with page one and continues to the last sentence.  Her purpose is clear:  denounce White culture, Heritage and civilization by using select quotes, cleverly chopped up, from historical sources intermingled with Painter's own words and thoughts.  Painter counts on the fact that not many people will have enough knowledge of the true history of White people to catch her clever twisting of words.

Painter's mis-information starts right at the beginning with page one where she states that people did not think they were "white" in antiquity or "that their character related to their color."  Why?  Because "neither the idea of race nor the idea of 'white' people had been invented."  She goes on to say that northern Europeans were known by "vague" tribal names such as Celts and Scythians, then Gauls and Germani.

As if the idea of race had to be "invented" at all!

The idea of "black" had not been "invented" in antiquity either but I guarantee you that, just as in northern Europe, the people of Africa absolutely distinguished themselves by their tribe.  Come to think of it, in 1994, (not antiquity) the Hutu and Tutsi of Rwanda decided they didn't like each other very well.  The result?  Over 800,000 were slaughtered, mostly Tutsi.  I'm quite sure neither "tribe" was thinking of each other as "black."

Go to Angola, Somalia, Congo...tribal warfare is active, violent, and vicious in Africa.  These groups don't look at the "blackness" of their victims.  They look at the "tribe."  Tribal warfare provided Painter's ancestors as slaves.  Not "black" warfare.  Attempting to say that ancient Whites had no knowledge of their skin color is disingenuous at best and academic falsehood at worst.  Just as an ancient African knew the differences between their own tribes and would have openly stared if confronted by the strangeness of an ancient European, my ancestors were perfectly aware of what they looked like.  There was no need to verbalize color until those "colors" started crossing continents and coming into contact with each other. 

For a more in-depth look at the falseness of Painter's statement, "thousands of years before the invention of the concept of race..." see the excellent review of her book by John Harrison Sims in the July, 2010 issue of American Renaissance.

On page 1 Painter starts with White history by asking, "who are the Scythians?" and then answering that questions by claiming this is a slippery slope, no one knows who the Scythians are because they were non-literate and left no documents "describing" themselves.

Crud!  Guess Painter didn't do a google image search for Scythian artifacts.  And here I thought research was an integral part of writing a "history" book.  Silly me.  One of the many Scythian artifacts found and preserved shows a Scythian man riding a horse.  He's obviously "White" with a thin, straight nose.  He's wearing a beard and his hair is long, down his back.  Another Scythian artifact also shows a man riding a horse, again, obviously White, wearing a beard, his hair shorter but still long.  I'll  call them handsome.  Painter would think that was Anglo-Saxon "chauvinism".  There are more artifacts, but you get the idea.  The artifacts are made of gold, a precious metal that has to be extracted and  purified.  Something the White "race" has been doing for thousands of years.

As for the Scythians being non-literate.  Just because Scythian writings didn't survive doesn't make the people non-literate.  Study about their culture and Heritage and you soon realize they were highly developed.

By the way Nell, what have your African ancestors left us in the way of ancient artifacts?  There's gold in Africa, but your ancestors never mined it.  You see, if you're going to denigrate a people, at least be honest.  While the Scythians were creating artifacts made of gold, black Africans were making, well, not a darn thing that lasted for their modern descendants to enjoy.

Historians have documented the Scythian tribes, their wanderings and their culture, history and people.  Some historians have even documented who the Scythians were and where they came from.  They're just not historians that Painter wants to read because they don't fit her anti-White agenda.

Painter then goes on to quote White historians through the centuries such as Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and others to show their views on White people.  But instead of writing what her book title claims, a "history," Painter chooses to find the strange, weird and sometimes the most vile parts of these authors she can find that really has nothing to do with history.  You see, I must be weird because I thought a history book about a people actually traced the beginnings, movements, locations and final destination of that people throughout time.  That's not what Painter's book does.

For instance, Painter quotes Pliny, from his book 7, where he said that some Scythian tribes ate each other, other people called the Arimapsi only had one eye in the middle of their forehead, still others in Albania could see at night better than during the day, and one group of people had feet so big they used them as shields from the sun.

Yep, definitely important when tracing the history of the White people.

Probably Painter's worst White hatred is saved for America.  A land that has given her every opportunity to spout her hatred.  She immediately goes against Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers who gave her the privilege to write and print such material, including perpetuating the falsehood that Jefferson fathered children with his slave woman (page 110).  She bad mouths Jefferson's beliefs in his Heritage (page 111), denigrates southern Whites (page 126) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (page 139, 159) making sure to use only his most inflammatory quotes taken out of context.  Nothing is put in historical context.  No attempt is made to understand the political, social, religious or economic times, other than black/white, rich/poor.

Theodore Roosevelt is sarcastically ridiculed for his belief in White racial suicide. (page 247, 254)  Yet she gives no proof that he was wrong when all the historical data, including White birth rates in every White country being below replacement levels, which prove that Roosevelt had a right to be concerned.  Instead, Painter closes that section with a quote from a socialist ranting about the White race, "who do they think they are as a race, these arrogant whites?  From where do they think they come?  The blacks are at least a race, but the whites...how many of them are bastards?  How much mixing is their 'pure' blood?  And how many kisses have their women asked for from the strong and virile black servants?...For these, race hatred is a national duty." (page 255, emphasis mine) 

Using this quote alone proves that Nell Irvin Painter had an agenda when writing her book.  She had no intention writing about the "history" of White people.  Painter set out to write that "race hatred is a national duty" and to prove this with her book.  Get everyone to hate the White man, especially White people.  Ironically, Painter is the one who is mixed race.  The admixture of white blood in the black population of the US varies, but Painter can't help but be aware that White blood courses through her veins and the veins of practically every black person in the United States.  Is it self-loathing of this part of her identity that compels her to write such a warped, hateful "history?"

In her chapter titled, "Early American White People Observed," Painter quotes a couple of non-White writers from the early 1800s.  Did she not read the title of her chapter?  Anyway, the first, David Walker, is a black man that she labels "thoughtful and politically engaged" (page 118).  He "thoughtfully" calls Whites "cradled in bloody deceitful ancient Greece."  She quotes him as saying that "the whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority." (page 119)  In one of his "thoughtful" rants about the White people he calls them "acting more like devils than accountable men" (page 120).  Why would Painter quote such racist rhetoric? 

Walker claims that the central feature of whiteness is murder and since their moral and behavioral weaknesses are so great, he wonders which is the inferior race. (page 120).  Painter claims that his rants "struck a strong blow against the notion that whiteness...deserved to be judged positively." (page 121)

Maybe self-hating Whites or racist blacks won't judge whiteness positively.  But anyone with any historical sense at all can see that the rants of Walker are full of misrepresentations and historical half-truths.  Only a "historian" such as Painter, who has an agenda of deceit, would use such drivel.  What she doesn't tell you is that Walker, born into freedom, urged slaves to resort to violence to win their freedom, if necessary.

The next non-White quoted by Painter is the Reverend Hosea Easton who was of mixed-race, part White, black and Indian. (page 121-123).  He echoes Walker's hateful anti-White rants, considering European history as one long saga of bloodletting.  He called the White people a "cloud of locusts" rolling ever westward.  Painter says, "what white supremacists praise as the products of energy and enterprise, Easton describes as booty obtained 'by the dint of war, and the destruction of the vanquished.'" (page 123)  It's obvious where Painter's sympathies lie and it's not with the people whose "history" she's writing about in this book.  Painter says that Easton only connects civilization to white people as a result of violence, not because of any innate intelligence.  It's obvious that she agrees.  She claims that Easton's point is, "white people are not smarter; they are meaner."

Guess us "mean" White people should have left you heathens to your human sacrifices, cannibalism, female circumcision, abject poverty and starvation.  Women's rights are non-existent in most non-White countries.  Go live in Saudi Arabia or Somalia Ms. Painter and see just how "mean" the White man's civilization is.  You make me want to puke.  Your agenda is glaringly clear Ms. Painter, you hate White people.  You hate our culture.  You hate our Heritage.  Your book is so anti-White is screams "hate Whitey."  You are not a historian.  You are an anti-White activist.  You make me sick.  Anyway, I digress...

What is Painter's point in listing two obviously very hateful, anti-White writers from the early 1800s in what is supposed to be a history of White people?  Walker and Easton are people that only a rabid anti-White person doing an obscure google search would ever find and read.  Why use people that any reasonable person would dismiss as not helpful to any useful dialogue between the races?

Because Painter has an agenda and it isn't to learn the history of White people.  Instead, it's to further inflame her audience, mainly blacks, against Whites.  She wants to indoctrinate her black audience with hatred of White people.  And while she's at it, let's ratchet up White self-hatred and White guilt just a little bit more.  The writings of these two racist blacks fit her agenda perfectly.

Racial truth isn't part of Painter's anti-White rant.  By bringing in Walker and Easton she hopes to deflect from the stark reality that her own race commits violence in staggering numbers.  When Whites were forced to give up their rule to blacks in South Africa, violence raged to epidemic proportions.  Amnesty International has warned that the Boer farmers are being murdered at such a rate by blacks it's becoming genocide.  South Africa, according to the United Nations, is the rape capital of the world.

Put that in your book Ms. Painter.

Blacks in our own country are seven times more likely to commit murder and eight times more likely to commit robbery.  Blacks commit 85% of interracial crimes and when they commit a violent crime, 45% of their victims are White.  When a White commits a violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a White than vice versa.  They are 136 times more likely to commit a robbery against a White.

Blacks rape Whites at more than 30 times than the reverse.  As a matter of fact, Whites rape blacks so little that the numbers are statistically insignificant to the number crunchers.  And black males make up just 6% of the population of this country, even fewer of those are adults.  Frightening.

Put that in your book Ms. Painter.

These figures are all easily found from our own Department of Justice's web site, if a true historian doing true research for an honest look at history wants to find them.  But Painter is not attempting to be honest in her look at White history.  Her distortion of facts will not allow truth.

The Marxist leanings of Painter's rants are so obvious it's scary.  She calls anyone who cherishes his White Heritage as "Teutonic/Saxon race chauvinism."  (page 159 and others)  I can't help but wonder if she is a member of the NAACP and if so, is this Afro-centric feminism/chauvinism?  Would she call me "racist" for saying this?  Is a Latino who joins La Raza guilty of Latino race chauvinism?  Why is a White person who is proud and cherishes their Heritage guilty of race chauvinism?  Please Ms. Painter, explain this to me.

Painter never shows that Bolshevism was Jewish (page 296,-298) except when quoting Lothrop Stoddard (page 319, 320) and then it's only the product of "white race chauvinists."  She never mentions that Bolshevism and the murderous communist state that it spawned murdered tens of millions of White Russians, mainly Christians.  Guess this isn't relevant in Painter's "history" of White people.  She does flippantly say that White people in America thought that Bolshevism was "the world turned upside down." (page 296).  Again, proof that Painter is either a poor researcher or has Marxist leanings herself.  Because Bolshevism was the world turned upside down!  Millions murdered in Russia.  Communist agitation in Germany that caused great turmoil.  Communist agitation in America, Italy, Spain and other countries.  There was a real threat of the murderous rampage that destroyed Russia spreading to other nations as the purveyors of that warped ideology spread outward like vermin, bringing their influence with them.

But Painter never used the world "communist" when describing any of these early struggles in America.  Her favorite term, like the "historians" she emulates, is "anarchist."  How clever she is!  And she hopes that the reader doesn't know that W.E.B. DuBois, whom she calls a "sociologist" was really a communist because she mentions him in her book in obviously glowing terms several times (232, 295-6, 328, 343, 355).  What she does do is quote from the leftist, Marxist Italian newspaper Il Proletario and twist the truth of the danger our country faced from Jewish communists, and communists in general, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For instance she calls Emma Goldman a "famous anarchist" (page 209) who was "certainly not Russian" yet was "shipped to Russia as a bolshevik" during the "great unrest," a chapter in her book devoted to that time in White "history."  (Painter never capitalizes the word "bolshevik.") Yet Emma Goldman was an atheistic Jew, something Painter doesn't disclose, and she was born in Kovno, the Russian Empire.  Today this town is called Kaunas, Lithuania.  But when Emma was born, she was absolutely considered Russian.  She founded the anarchist journal called "Mother Earth," she advocated birth control (considered taboo in those days and one of the reasons for the declining White birth rate), free love, and homosexuality.  Goldman spoke against capitalism and militarism.  It was believed by many that she inspired the assassination of President McKinley.  She and her Jewish lover tried to assassinate someone else but he protected her and was the only one jailed.  She did go to jail several times for "incitement to riot" over the years.  She supported the Bolshevik Revolution and then changed her mind.  She supported the Spanish communists in their civil war.  After spending two years in prison for conspiring to convince people to be draft dodgers during World War I, she and her lover were deported to, guess where, their mother country, Russia.

By this time the Russian Revolution had caused the disintegration of the Russian Empire.  Like most people who don't have a clue what they're talking about, Emma had written in her leftist paper that the Bolshevik's had "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being."  That's fine for a communist to say from the comforts of the United States.  Not so great when you actually get to experience the realities of your words.  Days after being returned to St. Petersburg, she realized that there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of press, no outlet for her hate filled propaganda.  She eventually went to Berlin and stirred up communist activities there before moving on to Spain and partaking in their communist activities.  She died in Toronto, Canada and for some reason we allowed her body to be brought back here where she is buried in Illinois next to her fellow early anarchists.

Emma Goldman was a committed "anarchist", aka communist by any definition of the word.  Yet Painter attempts to make her sound like a victim of White paranoia.  It's twisting of history like this that Painter commits over and over again in her disgusting "history" of a people not her own for an agenda meant only to manipulate and denigrate.  Even the great Henry Ford is not safe from her vitriolic rhetoric.  (page 300, 325,326, 340)  Where Painter could use truth, she uses outright distortion and lies.  She chooses to denigrate Charles Lindbergh (page 340) making sure the reader is aware how anti-Semitic she believes both men are.  Throughout her book, Painter pounds relentlessly into the mind of the reader that being White is synonymous with being racist, anti-Semitic, hateful...you get the picture.  Pick a great White American, she probably slandered him in her "history" of hateful White people.

Painter starts her book in the Introduction by falsely claiming that "race is an idea, not a fact" (Introduction, page ix).  Maybe she should do more homework before writing such a bold statement.  The gene for white skin was discovered in 2005; DNA can tell you what "race" you belong to and some police departments are using the technology to narrow down their suspect list in especially heinous crimes; even the scientist who started the human genome project, Craig Venter, has had to admit that human variation is seven times greater than previously thought.

Racial differences in blood are well documented.  If you need an organ or bone marrow and you're multi-racial, your chances are not good.  Within Painter's own community the Red Cross has created the African American Black Blood Emergency project.  Why?  Because, in the words of the Red Cross, "the problem for African American Blacks in the United States is that there is a disproportionately large number of individuals with rare Blood types unique to that race."  A problem so "different" it's causing serious health concerns to over 70% of Painter's people.  Is she so out of touch that she doesn't know?  Maybe so.  After all, she is married to a White man.  The Red Cross, devoted to collecting blood and saving the lives of people all across our nation, states that, "in every country in the world and with every individual in the world, the most compatible Blood transfusion is most likely to come from someone of the same ethnic, racial and genetic background as the patient."  (emphasis mine)  Aren't they just racist.  Biology alone tells us that our bodies are different clear to the bone.

Yet a racist book such as Painter's doesn't like these facts.  She would rather rely on writings that back-up her warped point of view.  These "historians" and  "dissenters" are overwhelmingly Jewish.  She starts with Frank Boas who hid his Jewishness by claiming to be German when he immigrated to the United States. (page 228-244).  She uses other Jews such as Otto Klineberg, Alfred L. Kroeber, Ruth Fulton Benedict and others to "refute" racial science.

Jews are not White even though a lot of them look White.  DNA proves this fact.  Jews have known this for a long time.  Using a non-White to "refute" racial science in a book about the "history" of White people is academic cheating of the highest order.  It's twisting the reader's concept of truth to fit an agenda.  Shame on Nell Irvin Painter.

Painter's book closes with the idea that racial "schemes" rest on "concepts of skin color" of black and white.  (page 394).  She then points out that people come in all shades and some "black" people are lighter-colored than some "white" people.

Good grief Painter!  Only because of race-mixing!  Go look at your kindred in Africa.  Not one light-skinned one in the bunch.

Painter then mentions the equally ridiculous idea that "ancient scholars were wiser than they knew when they related skin color to climate" claiming that today's biologists concur!  The sunnier the climate you live in, the darker your skin, no matter your race.  Cold climate means White skin. (page 394)

Okay.  I just can't help myself.  Is she that ignorant?  If this is the case, why aren't the Eskimos pasty white?  And why aren't the Incas, Aztecs, and Peruvian Indians coal black?  Someone slap me to keep me from laughing right off my chair.  Better yet, pinch me and wake me up from this nightmare of stupidity.

The only part of her book where Painter has any intellectual honesty is in the chapter about White slavery (page 34).  But even there she only goes part way.  While acknowledging that White slavery was widespread and horrific in early America, Painter never mentions that it overshadowed black slavery for decades and that some blacks were not only indentured servants who gained their freedom but that some even owned slaves themselves, including White slaves, right up to the Civil War.

Then she can't help herself yet again.  Painter goes into how White slavery and the ideal model of beauty became one.  She goes to great lengths to quote early travelers who saw White slaves and then remarked on their beauty.  She calls this the "enduring legend of beautiful white slave women" (page 47) when instead Painter should have showed the stark reality of White slavery.  After all, the word "slave" comes from the frequent enslavement of Slavs in Central Europe during the middle ages.  The predominantly Jewish slave trade provided African Arabs, Turks and others with White slaves for centuries.  White slavery become so common that the Roman Catholic church outlawed Christian slavery to try and save her people from this heinous practice.

It's the White man's fault that the darker races preferred White over dark slaves, especially for sex.  Painter doesn't get that because this would be acknowledging a basic truth, White is beautiful, not only to Whites.

But this doesn't fit into Painter's "history."  She would rather bemoan and ridicule the fact that artists depicted the poor White slave woman as the object of beauty.  Never mind the fact that these were White artists depicting their own people.  Because in her very next chapter, "The White Beauty Ideal as Science," Painter makes it very clear that to think whiteness is beautiful is just wrong.  She calls the love of Greek art the "fetishization of ancient Greek beauty" (page 60).

Besides, in Painter's view, Whiteness is wrong.  To consider Whiteness beautiful is wrong.  To paint Whiteness, sculpt Whiteness, depict Whiteness as beautiful in any way is simply equating color with "primitivism." (page 61)  Taken one step further, simply wanting to protect, nurture and be with your own kind is taboo to Painter.  After all, she married a White man.  Did she do this to "prove" she's not racist?  What agenda could such a racist black as this have for marrying a White man?

Painter cannot accept the naturalness of the simple act of wanting to be with your own kind, with people you can relate to, people you look like, think like, feel like and naturally want to associate with.  As a matter of fact, something her own people naturally do all the time.  Yet when White people choose to self-segregate, we're "racist."  As I recall, there's an organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a Congressional Black Caucus, the United Negro College Fund, there are 106 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, a Black Miss America Pageant, just to name a few.  Are these organizations racist?  If not, why not?

How about we have a White Miss America Pageant, like in the past?  Wouldn't Nell and her ilk have a screaming hissy fit!

There's so much more disgusting anti-White propaganda in this book I could write a book of my own refuting Painter's non-history of White people.  But I've spent enough time already.  Suffice it to say I do not recommend you waste your time, energy or money purchasing, reading or even looking at "The History of White People".  The "critics" singing Painter's praises should tell you why.  Russell Banks claims it was "deeply researched," something I've proven is not true.  Edward Ayers, Jew, states that Painter "makes the story of American history into something new."  He should have added "twisted."  Ellen Goodman, syndicated columnist calls the book a "race-bending narrative."  Race-baiting would have been a much better term.  Goodman then says that Painter "confronts the myth of white people as race-less" and that "this is storytelling at its best."  More like fiction at its worst.  David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1919:  Biography of a Race just gushes in his praise and  Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a book filled with intellectual dishonesty of its own calls Painter's book "a brilliant meditation on the invention of the idea of 'whiteness.'"  She also claims that it is "deeply researched and elegantly written."   With slanted critics like that, let's hope Gordon-Reed's other point, that the book would spark conversation and controversy, means it won't be read.

I cannot think of another book that I found as disgusting and hate-filled as Nell Irvin Painter's "The History of White People."  Thank goodness I did not waste my money and purchase this anti-White book but went to the library to find the copy I read.   I would not have wanted to have a pile of fire starter left to deal with after reading this poorly researched, race-baiting book.  In today's climate where our country is being over-run by foreigners from our southern border, those who are here need to stand together and fight for our national Heritage.  Not bait each other into more racial mis-understanding.  It's time for truth, not lies.

by L. R. Olson

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