Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop

White people are not literally white. When and why did they decide to call themselves "whites"? That story has never been told, because the belief in a "white race" presupposed the existence of permanent biological distinctions. But Gary Taylor's original and magisterial history shows that the modern racial sense of the word "white" is relatively new. From prehistoric cave paintings to medieval stained glass, Europeans did not depict themselves as white-skinned. Modern biological theories of human difference began with the third voyage of Columbus (1498), which disproved classical theories about the relationship between geography and body color. Over the next two centuries, Taylor tracks the evolution of idealized white identity through the history of art, language, geography, biology, labor, law, literature, masculinity, optics, philosophy, and religion. From Shakespeare's Othello (which does not include a single "white" man) to the works of John Locke (the first white philosopher) and William Wells Brown (the first African-American novelist), Buying Whiteness will transform the way you read our past and revolutionize your understanding of what it means to be white.