50 pages • 1 hour read
Matthew Frye JacobsonWhiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Critical Context: Whiteness Studies
Whiteness studies became a recognized academic field in the early 1980s, emerging in relation to Black studies and poor white studies. Whiteness studies is grounded in an exploration and analysis of the ways that whiteness, which has functioned as a legal, racial, and social category, has been constructed and how it is maintained, resisted, and continues to manifest. Before academia’s official recognition of whiteness studies in the 1980s, however, Black authors—most notably W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin—were doing much of what is now called whiteness studies. Many white scholars, too, such as Lillian Smith and Winthrop Jordan, and white fiction writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner, were also carefully presenting, analyzing, and critiquing whiteness before the field was officially named. Critical whiteness studies, like critical race studies, is explicitly political in its resistance to racialized norms and the unjust power structures that these racialized norms produce. While whiteness studies is generally critical in this sense, it also includes less explicitly political analyses, such as Matthew Frye Jacobson’s, that focus on historical shifts in definitions of whiteness and are not explicitly critical of them.
Jacobson’s contribution to whiteness studies in Whiteness of a Different Color is in his careful tracking of the historical changes in whiteness in the United States. Citing other scholars of whiteness who focus on the relation between labor and whiteness, such as Theodore Allen (The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control) and David Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class), Jacobson turns his attention to the historical vicissitudes of whiteness. Jacobson pays particular care to the ways that whiteness has expanded and coalesced around populations that were not considered fully white until the 20th century, such as the Irish, Southern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans, revealing how these groups, previously seen as distinct races, were homogenized within whiteness by way of “becoming” Caucasian.
Sociohistorical Context: Naturalization, Racialization, and Citizenship in the United States
The British colonies became the United States of America after the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Indigenous North Americans were present long before the British arrived, Africans were present as enslaved and also free people from the beginning of the colonies’ existence, and many of the British immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants. The Naturalization Act of 1790, however, explicitly named “free white persons” as the only immigrants eligible for naturalization, thus denying citizenship temporarily to indentured white servants, who could apply once their term was served, and permanently denying citizenship to any immigrants who did not qualify as “white.”
The Naturalization Act, however, did not define what “white” meant, and debates about this whiteness remained largely theoretical until the huge wave of Irish immigration that occurred in the 1840s because of the Great Famine. The Irish had been colonized and subjugated by the British and had not been understood as “white” socially or politically. Jacobson traces the ways that the Irish are legally rendered white upon arrival, though they remain socially liminal until the mid-20th century.
After the Civil War (1861-1865), Black people are made eligible for citizenship, even as other populations are explicitly denied citizenship, as occurs with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Although Black people become citizens, however, whiteness and Blackness continue to be conceived as a binary, with whiteness carrying privilege and Blackness not holding such privilege. Thus, petitions for citizenship are made by way of arguing whiteness, not Blackness, so that a range of people—Indian, Japanese, Armenian—seek citizenship by way of a conservative claim to whiteness, leaving the inherent injustices of the white/Black binary, as well as explicit inclusions of other races, intact. These petitioners, and the courts themselves, relied on and referred to Jim Crow segregation policies that maintained the privileges of whiteness. Although these petitions sometimes effected a crack in whiteness, allowing more to enter its ranks, whiteness remained the foundation for racial injustice.
