Nell Irvin Painter's History of White People is necessary reading. We think so often of a Black/White binary that we forget all the racism *within* whiteness. We forget how permeable whiteness is. Oh, we understand that the Irish weren't always white. But it's more than that.

Europe colonized itself before it colonized elsewhere, and the same is true for race theory. Within Europe they envisioned multiple races, eventually settling on a Teutonic/Nordic, and then just Nordic, ideal of whiteness. Celts and Gauls were lower races and fit for slavery.

Southern Italy was descended from Roman slaves and even the Greeks were not the same as they had been. The ancients, including Jesus, were remade as Nordics who were overrun by lower races ..

A cautionary tale for America and one that you hear again and again in anti-Immigration rhetoric. Immigrants, particularly darker immigrants, are cause for concern. Canadian PM Stephen Harper's "old stock Canadians" not only echoes these thoughts, it quotes them directly.

The Anglo Saxon myth is a myth, an ahistorical myth to explain why English, and a particularly kind of English at that, were at the top of the heap. Transformed from barbarians outside the Roman boundaries they became the ones that Rome couldn't conquer.

And tracing your lineage back a thousand years to claim some kind of purity of descent is ridiculous, but that's what Thomas Jefferson and others did. They claimed some unbroken descent, a purity of race that has never existed because races don't exist.

Poor whites were a real problem though, one that got explained as degenerate or defective genes, heritable flaws likely related to mixing with the lower races.

Socially minded people loved this, and social work owes a lot to this kind of thought.

Trump is not an aberration. His followers are not some flaw in America. They are America. They are the unbroken thread of descent going back to the earliest arrivals on the Atlantic coast. And the only solution is to overwhelm them. Reject them. Stop trying to join them.

And we try in a thousand different ways. For the Irish, policing was a powerful way into whiteness, but we all do it. We get their degrees. Join their politics. Work to transform the institutions from the inside and get transformed ourselves.

Whiteness is nothing if not adaptable. Painter's book demonstrates that. It will absorb and consume to maintain power. But that central ideal will remain the same. One race to rule them all.