Who counts as white—what they look like, where they come from, even what they believe—has shifted over time according to what Painter describes as “individual taste and political need.”15 White supremacy, however, is a constant. It began with slavery and the extermination of Native people; endured in the wake of the Civil War; found footholds in the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Progressive eras; seeped into policies governing everything from education to immigration to incarceration; and shaped lasting cultural paradigms.
