" Race is an idea, not a fact," Nell Irvin Painter wrote in The History of White People. Regardless, race evolved through a collective complicity where virtually every wave of "white" immigrants learned to shed their old cultures. These "expansions of whiteness," Painter argues, included more and more immigrants and ethnicities until only "people of color" were left behind. "

― Thomas Page McBee , Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man