The History of White People in America

Through the entertaining and engaging lens of musical animated shorts, The History of White People in America examines how skin color has come to define race in the United States. Episode 1 introduces viewers to Virginians' invention of the white “race” in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Episode 2 picks up the exploration a few decades later with an African man and an English woman—husband and wife—singing about the fate of their future as new laws render their love illegal. In Episode 3, President Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and one of their five children share illuminating insights on how skin became color, color became race, and race became power. Episode 4 features Afong Moy, the nation’s first Chinese woman, who is exhibited as a circus oddity in 1830s New York, while episode 5 focuses on Ann Williams, a woman born into slavery who won freedom for herself and her children in 1832 after leaping from a third-floor tavern window in an act of desperation and defiance. Lastly, episode 6 explores the ties between citizenship and race with the passing of the Alien Naturalization Act by Congress in 1790, which excluded anyone who was not white from becoming a citizen.

Viewed collectively, these shorts capture what it means to be American—that “us” and “them” are constantly redefined, that racial history deserves contemplation, and that Americans are bound by rich differences in experience and identity.