100 Books - The Works of Nell Irvin Painter

One Hundred Books. This is a short list of 100 books I have read, listed here in no particular order.

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

I enjoyed reading The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter and found it well-researched and thoroughly informative. The book details the history of more than just white people but also discusses the whole idea of race and how the human understanding of these concepts has historically been used to categorize, oppress, liberate, judge, and define cultural roles and norms in the ever-changing world of human beings. The conclusion I have drawn from Nell Irvin Painter's writings is that the idea of the races as used throughout history, at best, needs to be revised. The fact that our DNA only differs by approximately 0.01% percent from one another and that we are 99.99% the same as every other human being on the planet shows that we truly have more in common than we do in differences. While we don't have a lot of choices in who we are in our genetics, we do have some options in how we express our sameness and differences culturally. I heard Nell Irvin Painter discussing her work on a C-SPAN book review program quite some time ago and was moved by some of her comments to read some of her works. Her statement, which I heartily agree with, was that there is only one race: the Human Race. All else is simply tribalism. While I am brownish pink in color and would fall under the typical definition of white, my family over the years has included many representatives from many ethnic groups. All of us are simply human, which is not a bad thing.

An additional work by Nell Irvin Painter, still on my reading list, is titled Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. 

Creating Black Americans

In this book, Nell Irvin Painter brilliantly details the history of African-Americans, telling much of the story through art and historical statistical information as well as documented accounts of events and issues relevant to the history of black people in the Americas. Highly informative and well worth the time spent reading.