Aeon Ideas: The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.’ As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’.
6 comments:
Huh. What an interesting read. Honestly, I never thought that “white people” was ever invented. I’m sure that’s extremely race centric of me to think that. But I also never though that “black people” invented either. It has been so ingrained into our society that black and white people are such commonplace phrases that it seems like they’ve always been the terms to use, and not ones that have been invented. How fitting, though, Thomas Middleton (the whitest white boy to ever white other than Shakespeare) was the first one to coin the phrase. How strange though, that a white man created white people. It seems strange that Middleton would like to confine his race into one phrase. Makes sense, if you had to pick one word that could be a blanket term to describe all Europeans that all would understand on sight, white people is a pretty good choice.
I've always had a very acute sense that race, and even whiteness itself are constructs. However, I had no clue that the phrase was coined by one person. It's so interesting that the language of one white man in a play centuries ago has so much to do with the defining of a construct as old as skin color itself. The most interesting part of this article to me was the ways that Shakespeare used coded language, though admittedly it was not heavily coded by any means, to explain and demonstrate a black woman. The commentary around Shakespeare's commentary gets more interesting everyday as they start to add more and more types of people that Shakespeare could have loved, including men and black women.
It is also interesting that white people don't think of whiteness being a phrase that needed to be coined. The article itself even slightly points out that whiteness has changed and shifted in its definition since its inception. I think that this lack of awareness might indeed be due to the mixing pot that is America and the lack of distinguishable culture between most white people here.
For a portion of this article, it seemed that they were building up to the conclusion that race and racism are illusions. A summary that is incorrect and harmful for many people that racism affects every day. For those of us who it doesn't affect, believing that race and racism are made up concepts allows us to think that if we just don't think racist thoughts or buy into racist ideologies, racism will no longer exist. That is passive non-racism not active anti-racism. However, at the end, the author writes, "Race might not be real, but racism very much is. Idols have a way of affecting our lives, even if the gods they represent are illusory." I believe that race may very well be a societal construct but that doesn't mean if we just stop thinking about it it will go away. It is not as though before Thomas Middleton coined the term "white people" society did not discriminate based on skin color. Humans discriminate based on anything that makes others different, all the way back to the homo-sapiens and the Neanderthals. But the fact that we can point to a single moment when that people became a part of our language, demonstrates how this instinctual fear and hate for anything different than ourselves became hardened and formalizing into the racist structures and institutions that shape our society.
This article reminded me of how often language has been used to, consciously and subconsciously, “other” a people that is being subjugated or killed via war.
There is a book called War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges (a book I highly recommend) that examines the way feelings of cultural or ethnic unity along with threat from an “other” can often psychologically manipulate otherwise average humans into a selective empathy that allows them to commit atrocities. It was one of the greatest weapons of colonialism and, by extension, the slave trade. Often this othering was more subtle than outright lies about a people’s inferiority or the use of binary language delineating “black” from “white.” If you read books from the British Colonial era (ex: Typee by Herman Melville) you’ll find that often other-ing came in the form of using adjectives that either feminized or animalized native and black people. Implying animal-like and feminine characteristics encouraged the perspective that subjugating them followed a perceived natural order.
Words matter. And sometimes it's the subtle words that matter most.
It was incredibly interesting to hear about racism's role in plays and how through specific plays, the idea of black and white was more of to show contrast than to set social standards. I also found the fact that white Europeans coined the idea of white superiority to justify selling Africans in the slave trade. It is interesting to read this article for me because I am currently reading another article for my interp class about race. In his article, Winegard, the author, is stating that yes race is a thing, but not because of just out skin color. He claims that each race has a multitude of genetic differences based on the origin of each race, because of evolution. Though Winegard and the author of this race and theater article argue different things, they both end their thoughts with race being something we can't touch, but racism being something very much alive and a problem.
Since race in and of itself is a construct there of course had to be a time when it was created to serve a societal purpose. It is really interesting however that it would have begun in a theatre. This is a really good article that speaks many truths about "whiteness" that I didn't expect it to confront. The fact that "whiteness" only exists when juxtaposed with "blackness," that "they are abstract formulations, which still have had very real effects on actual people,"and that these constructs only exist for "their self-perceived superiority" in order to justify the horrors of the slave trade. The damage done by this construct is impossible to calculate and is an ongoing persecution. The question I have is that since theatre is so often a mirror to public society, was Middleton simply reflecting a term that was already emerging or making a comment on the shift in society that he was observing?
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