“An intellectual history of the white race for a wide audience.” The New York Times. “Whiteness has been built for centuries on the basis of deception and disguised political imperatives.” The New Yorker. The notion of race is making a violent comeback in language and social conflicts in France, as if the subject had been repressed. Visible minorities no longer hesitate to assert their color or their racialized identity. The African-American historian, Nell Irvin Painter, adopts a revolutionary point of view: instead of studying negritude, she questions the construction of the notion of the white race, from the Scythians of antiquity to the racial categories used in the contemporary West. It traces how the designation of whites and non-whites has evolved according to political beliefs. By showing the transfers between American and European thoughts, she sheds light on racial identifications today.