Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School. Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.

Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.

Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.

Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.

As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.

Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.

Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.

Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.

She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”

Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.

Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).

The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.

Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.

Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One, is due out May 2025.

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity lately. That word is thrown around so much right now that I’m afraid it’s losing some of its power. But regardless, we all seem to be craving it, right? Real interactions with people. Authentic connections. The rough, messy truth of things. It’s definitely one of the big reasons I started Wild Card, and it’s what I want in my own life. I want it in my relationships, but I also want it in the music, the films and the books I consume, all the things.

Every artist is after authenticity in some way, but the thing I love about Kacey Musgraves is that she just is it. From the beginning of her career, the songs she wrote were just about the life she was living and how she saw the world. She sang about falling in love with fellow country musician Ruston Kelly and getting married to him. And then later on, she sang about falling out of love with him and getting divorced. But she also sings about smoking pot and queer relationships. And she’s the kind of artist who will put a disco song on one of her albums and not give two hoots if you think she’s not country enough, thank you very much.

Musgraves is making her art her way and she’s making it for herself. That other people dig it, that’s some sort of major fringe benefit that has put her at the top of the charts and won her album of the year at the Grammys in 2019 (and it was only the fourth country album to ever get that honor). Musgraves’ latest album is Deeper Well and she’s on tour now.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What’s something about the place you grew up that you couldn’t wait to leave behind?

Kacey Musgraves: First of all, I’m going to say that I had a wonderful childhood, but I did grow up in a very conservative part of East Texas.

Rachel Martin: Tell me the name of the town.

Musgraves: Golden. It’s really small. There is a post office, but there’s not a school. It’s not big enough for a school. So I think growing up there, it’s different than growing up in a city where there’s, like, a million different viewpoints and there’s a million different religions and a million different cultures and languages. There’s a lack of diversity where I grew up. And I just had this urge to see the world and travel – that’s when I started really understanding that everyone is the same, you know? And I wouldn’t have gotten that if I would have stayed there.

Martin: I get that. I came from a small town in Idaho. I totally felt that too. And I can’t figure out how I knew any different, you know? Because it was just my whole world and my family had been, like, from the same place for five, six generations.

Musgraves: Right.

Martin: Did you have family who lived in other places? Like, how did it come into your imagination that there was a different way to live?

Musgraves: I think it’s just a natural curiosity. And thinking that really anything is possible. And that I don’t have to do it the same way as everyone else.

Question 2: Was there a bedrock truth in your life that you came to find out wasn’t true?

Musgraves: This also gets to where I grew up and preconceived notions about certain things. For instance, the acceptance of people in the queer community was kind of nonexistent where I grew up. I could count on one hand the amount of times I encountered an openly gay person. That’s not to say that I encountered people who weren’t closeted. But, there was a majority view of, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” That kind of mentality.

So I left Texas with this kind of idea that, “Well, people choose to be that way.” And when I moved to Nashville, I started making friends in that community. And I had a boyfriend at the time who did me a huge favor. He was from a completely different upbringing than me, a liberal family in upstate New York. He had a ton of gay friends and he just sat me down one day and we had a real hard and honest conversation about it.

Musgraves performs in Nashville in March.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images for ABA

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He was like, “Listen, you do not have the right perspective on this.” He just helped me completely open up my eyes and see and I was just like, “Damn, I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to get out of where I came from, and to have my eyes and my heart open to this really wonderful community, and they’ve made me way more well rounded.”

Martin: You talk about queer relationships in your art. I mean, that’s clearly intentional. Do you feel sort of an obligation to use your platform that way?

Musgraves: Well, one of the best compliments that I’ve ever received in terms of my music and who I am in the world is that occasionally people will come up to me and say, “Hey, I grew up in a really small town like you did, and I’ve always loved country music, but I’ve never felt invited to that party.” Honestly, it really wasn’t about ever pushing buttons. It just was me observing what was happening around me and doing my job as a songwriter to put that in the form of a song.

And to me, country music is always about real people, real stories. And why wouldn’t it continue to evolve?

Question 3: Does time feel like a positive or negative force in your life right now?

Musgraves: Honestly, the passage of time is something that like, really f***s me up.

Martin: Really?

Musgraves: Yeah. There’s something so melancholy about it. Just seeing your grandparents get older, your parents get older, relationships changing. Looking in the mirror and seeing wrinkles that weren’t there before. It’s really trippy, like how it moves and bends.

I’m just thankful. I’m thankful for it. I’m thankful for the time I have. And I do feel like life keeps getting better as I get older. That’s something that everyone that’s older than you tells you, and you’re like, “Yeah, whatever.” But, I do feel that.

I’m in a period of time where this chapter is not defined by anyone else but me. And I don’t know what’s going to come next. And that’s rare for me. I feel like I’m usually jumping to the next relationship because I love companionship and it’s just been really nice to like, slow down time and enjoy exactly where I’m at. And enjoy the not-knowing of what or who might be next, you know?

Martin: That’s such a lovely answer. Because it’ll come.

Musgraves: Yeah, and it’s funny, even in terms of looks, you know, we see pictures of ourselves five years ago and we’re like, “Damn, I wish I would’ve known how great or how in shape I was then. I was so down on myself.”

Rachel: Kacey, we are the youngest we will ever be right now!

Musgraves: Right now! I know. I hate it. I’m just kidding. When I kick off my shows I’m like, “Hey, everybody, we’re existing right now at the same exact time on this crazy planet in the middle of this crazy universe. It’s a miracle that we are here at the same time. And this moment right now, who you’re with tonight, what you’re going through in your life, what I’m going through in my life, is never going to be the same as it is right now. So, let’s just be as present as possible.”

It’s just a nice reminder, like, let’s put our phones down. I mean, you know, take some cute pictures, get the good angles, tag me [laughs]. But let’s be present.