Carmen Thompson

Portland, OR — The Oregon Historical Society is proud to host the official launch party on Thursday, April 6, for Dr. Carmen P. Thompson’s new book, The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, a ground-breaking work that changes the narrative about the origins of race and Whiteness in America. Using an exhaustive range of archival documents, this book shows what Whiteness looked like in everyday life in the early seventeenth century, finding it eerily predictive to Whiteness today.

Doors to the Oregon Historical Society will open at 5:30pm, and a short conversation between Dr. Thompson and Portland State University professor emeritus Dr. Darrell Millner will begin at 6pm. Books will be available for purchase and signing by the author through the OHS Museum Store, and light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to all, though guests are asked to kindly register in advance online.

Thompson is a highly sought expert on race and Whiteness in America and was a co-guest editor with Dr. Darrell Millner for the Oregon Historical Society’s Winter 2019 special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, “White Supremacy & Resistance.” In an introduction essay, Thompson discusses the concept of Whiteness ­— “an expectation (sometimes an unconscious expectation) that the government will maintain laws and policies generally benefitting White people.” Thompson also provides an analysis of critical scholarship in the field and makes connections between the articles in this issue and “two core characteristics of Whiteness that are present in Oregon’s White supremacist history — expectation and exclusion.” Thompson’s introduction along with the full Winter 2019 “White Supremacy & Resistance” issue is free to read online.

Carmen P. Thompson earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her master of arts in African American studies from Columbia University in New York. Thompson’s scholarship was quoted in the December 2022 Oregon State Supreme Court decision, Watkins, Jacob Keith v. Ackley, regarding the disparate racial impact of non-unanimous jury decisions. She wrote the introduction to the forthcoming book, Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage, a photo book that chronicles the yearlong protests in Portland, Oregon, after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. She has held visiting scholar appointments at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University in New York and in the Black studies department at Portland State University and has taught a wide range of courses on the Black experience and Whiteness at Portland State University and Portland Community College.

About the Oregon Historical Society

For more than a century, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of objects, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms, educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all. We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and rich as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view.