A Paler Shade of White

"The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color—white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black—but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as 'white.'"

Linda Gordon in The New York Times reviews Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.