Point of view is the big challenge for the historian. After years of research, travel, interviews; years of note-taking, transcribing, sorting-out, arranging, using the floor of one’s study to map out chapters; years of consultation with trusted colleagues willing to read drafts and offer suggestions – the writing begins, and you have to decide: Where do I stand vis a vis my subject?

Even if the facts at hand are as real as today’s headlines, history is not journalism. You regard situations sui generis at some distance: an arm’s length, a decade’s, or a century’s. You may also be looking at a culture foreign to your own. Every few pages of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss seems to be reminding the reader of his invasive behavior; so does De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America.

Two Frenchmen in foreign countries spring to mind not only because the past is a foreign country, but because, in The History of White People, instead of geographical travel, Nell Irvin Painter historicizes a race that is not her own. When well-meaning people approach her at symposia and cocktail parties, as they are wont to do, and ask her if she is “writing as a black woman,” her response – after the possible joke riposte-question, “What are my options?” – is, simply, “I am writing as an historian.”

The History of White People is therefore a scrupulously well-chosen title. The core of the story is made up of discrete individuals with defined cultural roles. This book is not a litany against racism. It is not a catalogue of injured aberrations and finger-pointing. It is not a guide to the oppressed. It is, rather, a narrative in the most accomplished and deliberate sense, as the beautifully-paced genesis and evolution of an habituated definition.

The story begins in antiquity, a time we already tend to idealize, made all the more fascinating as we learn – or are reminded – that “back in the day,” Scythians, Celts, Gauls and Germani knew no such thing as race. It was where you were from, the climate of your home, that defined you. Nevertheless, slavery was omnipresent; before the color-line there was social hierarchy.

Before too long, the reader is on home ground, among the slave-owning colonials of America. Slavery was an integrated practice, and remained so for some time. This perversely mirrored the alabaster-skinned ideal of the odalisque. Painter skillfully guides us through the convoluted path of race-awareness in the plastic arts. Winckelmann and Blumenbach and Meiners and de Stael, eighteenth-century standard-bearers for whiteness, contributed in important ways to the elaborate taxonomy of race on the edge of modernity in America. Painter maintains stride as she penetrates the mind of our quintessential, prototypical intellectual, Thomas Jefferson, and his depiction of Saxon forbears – again, by process of elimination, tilting the balance toward whiteness.

Painter casts “The First Alien Wave,” the immigrant explosion of the first decades of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the myth of the Melting Pot, in a disturbing new light. She shows how the influx of Irish Catholics and their brand of “blackness” made them “people bred to be dominated,” thereby an accelerant upon the flame of indigenous race-thinking. From there, she segues to Ralph Waldo Emerson, presenting a chillingly authoritative discussion of the Transcendental idealist as polluted by the machismo, rough-hewn Germanic philosophies of his close friend Thomas Carlyle. Idealizing “English Traits,” Emerson devalued the darker hues. In his eyes, the paradigmatic “American” was a white male.

The line from Emerson to William Z. Ripley, Franz Boas, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Goddard and Madison Grant is likewise Teutonic. By the time the second great immigrant wave – the Jews – engulfed our shores, prejudice was systemic. Henry Ford, with his publication of The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem emerges through Painter’s saga as the one of the prime movers behind American anti-Semitism, an integral ingredient in race-thinking.

A keystone in this historical arch, the black power movement, arrives in the mid-1960s when heightened black identity and black pride turned the white man into The Other. Painter’s analysis here trenchantly torques the preceding story into a distorting mirror wherein white America was caught by surprise – the intellectuals seized upon Malcolm X as a man whose excoriations brought them closer into empathy with black nationalism. But Malcolm’s effect on right-wing American society was the opposite: “If black people could proclaim themselves black and proud, white people could trumpet their whiteness.”

“Any nation founded by slaveholders,” Painter writes, “finds justification for its class system, and American slavery made the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, which nineteenth-century Americans rarely disputed.” The History of White People is replete with this kind of causal reasoning, sophisticated, fact-based logic that has always been foundational to the praxis of history. The facts in this book do not “speak for themselves.” No facts can do that. Facts need to be substantiated by a scholarly apparatus, which these are; but the scaffolding of The History of White People is never allowed to overwhelm the artful edifice. By the time Painter concludes her study of whiteness on the minutest, granular level, the genome – upon which “race-talk” is still being grafted – makes eminent sense.

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010. 496 pp.