Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

“The European immigrants’ experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where Europeanness—that is to say, whiteness—was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to.”

Jacobson introduces his theory of whiteness as a form of property, enabling one to own other humans as property as it also protects one from ever becoming human property. Naturalization as white, then, conveyed more than just citizenship; it conveyed privileges that other races, even when naturalized, did not fully possess.

“As scholars like Leon Higginbotham, Jr., have suggested, in practice the idea of citizenship had become thoroughly entwined with the idea of ‘whiteness’ (and maleness) because what a citizen really was, at bottom, was someone who could help put down a slave rebellion or participate in Indian wars.”

This theory of early whiteness as defined by the 1790 naturalization legislation revolves around violence as well as gender, which Jacobson includes only as a parenthetical here. Jacobson’s analysis of whiteness generally assumes maleness, paying little attention to the ways women were excluded both implicitly and explicitly from citizenship. Though gender is not his focus, his analysis often assumes a collapse of maleness and whiteness.

“Deeply embedded racial assumptions of a republican ideology, then, in combination with the practical ‘necessities’ of a slaveholding, settler democracy on a ‘savage’ continent, lead to an unquestioned acceptance of whiteness as a prerequisite for naturalized citizenship.”

The turning point that is the Naturalization Act of 1790 occurs in the wake of the Revolutionary War. The act’s explicit prerequisite that all applying for naturalization be “free white person[s]” is both exclusive in its refusal—and thus support—of slavery as a form of exploitation grounded in Blackness and also “inclusive” in its openness to immigrants who were not British.

“If the political meaning of whiteness seems barely to have changed with the advent of scientific inquiry into human types, the epistemological basis of whiteness and its ‘others’ did change drastically.”

While whiteness remained grounded in supremacy, so that its political meaning remained constant, ways of understanding whiteness changed. Science validated white supremacy in its categorizations and rankings of populations that science itself racialized.

“Science provided an alternative vocabulary to the polarities of ‘heathendom’ and ‘Christianity’ of religious discourse—a vocabulary keyed to physicality and ‘nature’ rather than to belief, yet marking peoples nonetheless as possessing an inherent degree of righteousness, now refigured as innate capacity. Scientific debate between the late 18th century and the late 19th shifted from natural sciences that merely classified types, toward biological models that apprehended, explained, and thus ranked these types.”

The religious binary of Christian/heathen was replaced with a secular white/Black binary that gained authority by way of science in the 19th century. Scientists studying racial difference claimed that these differences were biological and that they could measure and rank the moral worth of racial groups by way of external calibrations of the face and skull, which revealed internal capacity and moral value.

“What is easily missed from our vantage point is the staggering inclusivity of the 1790 naturalization law.”

Jacobson asks the reader to consider both the exclusivity of the Naturalization Act, which is obvious to current readers, but also to consider the act’s inclusivity. The act could have required, for example, that naturalization be contingent on a national origin of England. The word “white” was ambiguous and opened political space for a range of what were considered different white races to be included in citizenship.

“Whereas the salient feature of whiteness before the 1840s had been its powerful political and cultural contrast to nonwhiteness, now its internal divisions, too, took on a new and pressing significance.”

Before the 1840s, the question of how to define the whiteness required by the 1790 naturalization law was generally theoretical, as there were no large waves of immigration coming from populations that the British colonists did not perceive as white. The potato blight in Ireland in the 1840s, however, generated a wave of Irish immigrants to the United States. The British had colonized Ireland, and the Irish were considered “savage” and thus not fully white, leading to internal divisions within whiteness that increased from the 1840s through the first third of the 20th century.

“The shifting perception of racial difference among ‘free white persons’ points up two critical but largely neglected dimensions of the history of American nativism: first, nativism was a response to the political crisis created by the 1790 naturalization law—the over-inclusivity of the category ‘white persons.’ Hence, second, the history of American nativism from the 1840s to the 1920s is largely the history of a fundamental revision of whiteness itself.”

Jacobson draws explicit attention to what he sees as his contributions to whiteness studies and, specifically, American nativism: His grounding in a historical approach to whiteness allows for an understanding of the naturalization law as inclusive and, as a result, the necessary revision of whiteness that occurs with a range of immigrations that begin in the 1840s.

“The Johnson Act did not invent the hierarchy of white races, but merely formalized a refined understanding of whiteness that had steadily gained currency since the early Celtic famine refugees had dragged themselves ashore in ‘Black Forty-Seven.’”

The Johnson Act restricted immigration from Central and Southern Europe by way of a hierarchy of white races—and it is crucial to note that these are considered white races (hence Jacobson refers to the famine refugees as Celtic), not just one white race—that had developed and been refined. Anglo American anxieties rose as the numbers of people coming from Ireland and other “lesser” places. Nineteenth-century science corroborated these political rankings, lending authority to the Johnson Act’s detailed quota system that reflected a hierarchy of white races and restricted less desirable whites.

“In the decades following the 1924 legislation, the problem posed to the United States by the non-Nordic races of Europe would lose salience in public concern, to the extent, finally, that their perceived ‘difference’ would cease to register at all.”

While the Johnson Act of 1924 severely limited by setting quotas on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the civil rights movement and its explicit attention to and criticism of the racial binary of Black/white drew political energies away from the “problem” of non-Anglo-Saxon whites and toward the “problem” of Blacks, consolidating all white races within the white race in opposition to Blackness.

“Although the categories ‘white’ and ‘Caucasian’ may have overlapped almost entirely, the idea ‘Caucasian’ did accomplish something that the more casual notion of whiteness could not: it brought the full authority of modern science to bear on white identity, and it did so in a way that challenged the scheme of hierarchically order white races which had itself been created and policed by the authority of modern science.”

Political notions of race and whiteness existed in relation to scientific definitions of race and whiteness, which increasingly supported racist policies. By the 20th century, the scientific theory of the racially based category of Caucasian enabled whiteness to congeal in opposition to Blackness. Jacobson argues that the discipline of science, supposedly objective, once again enabled white supremacy.

“‘Caucasian’ identity represents a whiteness discovered and apprehended by that regime of knowledge whose cultural authority is greatest.”

The scientific category of Caucasian packages the political category of whiteness with unassailable authority. The distinctions between white and Caucasian thereafter bleed together in cultural consciousness, lending more authority to “common sense” understandings of whiteness as natural.

“But it is worth noting the age of minstrelsy roughly coincides with the age of problematic whiteness.”

Jacobson theorizes that the minstrel show, which involves caricature of Black people and the use of blackface as a genre of entertainment popular with whites in the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, does the cultural work of clarifying who counts as white by presenting them as Black, thus demonstrating the “truth” of their whiteness, no matter how liminal it may be. Jacobson is particularly interested in the phenomenon of Jews performing in blackface and becoming “white” through blackface.

“If race as a conceptual category is indeed a theory of history, then race as a perceptual category embodies that history in all its complexity and contradiction.”

Jacobson is interested in the ways that both American art and science present the theory that race can be discerned visually. Not only does this influence the way that certain peoples are approached, but it is embedded within a racial theory that insists that physiognomy narrates an internal “truth” of race, so that something essential about a person can be read by way of their face, which reveals their internal “essence.”

“Their presence in the republic was doubly troubling from a racial standpoint: if their essential racial inferiority as non-Anglo-Saxons posed difficulties for the workings of a free republic, then their whiteness gave that inferiority as wide a field as possible to wreak real havoc.”

The wave of Irish immigration that began in the 1840s and that was followed by immigration from eastern and southern Europe confused the generic whiteness articulated in the 1790 Naturalization Act. Anglo Americans were forced to accept these “inferior” peoples as white.

“Culture, as a creature of history, destabilizes race by layering different conceptual schemes atop one another in response to shifting social and political circumstances. The palimpsest of race maps the terrain of ascription, perception, and subjectivity for a number of immigrant groups whose ‘American experience’ has scarcely been recounted as a racial experience at all.”

Late-20th- and 21st-century understandings of race elide or simply forget the racialized experiences of becoming white of many populations that we now consider as generically and obviously white. Many immigrants who became politically white did not consider themselves white before immigrating to the United States and thus experienced a racialization that conferred privilege as it simultaneously consumed their ethnic difference.

“Thus the history of racial Jewishness is not merely the history of anti-Semitism; it encompasses the ways in which both Jews and non-Jews have construed Jewishness—and the ways in which they have seen it—over time.”

Jews were seen as a race—often called the Hebrew race—in the 19th century. This racialization facilitates anti-Semitism in its grounding of Jewishness in innate biology, but Jacobson is also interested in the ocular epistemologies that accompany this racialization of Jews: For both Jews and non-Jews, there is a sense of Jewishness making itself visually apparent in particular features, as if Jewishness is a mystery that can be solved by way of facial analysis.

“The history of 19th-century American expansionism had a racial contradiction at its core: while US conquests across North America and the Pacific at once enacted and reinforced a principle of white supremacy, between at least the 1840s and the early 20th century they were carried out under an ideological banner of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.”

The United States became increasingly non-Anglo-Saxon as it simultaneously became increasingly white because of immigration from other parts of Europe. These people were incorporated into white supremacy, under which imperialism occurred in the name of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

“Often, paradoxically, it was not imperialism but anti-imperialism that rested upon the more virulently racialist logic of civilization, sovereignty, and self-government.”

Many white supremacists rejected imperialist maneuvers out of fear of too intimate contact with non-white others. Thus, some of the most explicit proponents of white supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries argued for the autonomy of places and peoples to avoid their “infecting” the United States.

“Property-in-whiteness was a principle clearly recognized not only by those in power, moreover, but also by the petitioners themselves.”

Petitions for naturalization were made from a range of racialized positions—Indian, Japanese, and Syrian, for example. These petitioners to the courts argued their whiteness not only to gain citizenship but also to gain the privileges that were conveyed with whiteness, which Jacobson refers to as Property-in-Whiteness. Petitioners did not come before the courts to argue the injustice of this property-in-whiteness and the need for it to be dismantled; instead, they attempted to gain this property-in-whiteness for themselves.

“The courts’ endorsement of the traditional interpretations of the 1790 law cemented whiteness for the probationary white races; and again, problematic Europeans owed their inclusion to the exclusion of others.”

Jacobson stresses that inclusion within whiteness is always achieved by way of exclusion, which is unjust. The courts, however, were preoccupied with defining whiteness in the early and mid-20th century rather than dismantling whiteness, thus directly enabling the injustices that legal definitions and exclusions of whiteness achieved.

“Like Homer Plessy, like George Dow and the South Carolina Syrian community, like the Armenians who had requested the aid of Franz Boas, John Mohammad Ali seemed comfortable enough with the principle of exclusion on racial grounds—it was simply his exclusion on racial grounds that bothered him.”

Jacobson draws attention to the deeply conservative nature of petitions before the court that claimed citizenship by way of arguing within exclusions rather than challenging these exclusions. Petitioners sought entry into an unjust membership rather than challenging the injustice of the group to which they sought inclusion.

“While pervasive patterns of racism themselves signified a degree of racial awareness among whites as whites, the emergent racial politics of the 1930s and after dramatically heightened the salience of ‘Caucasian’ identity by imploring whites to dwell upon their whiteness and to work toward the eradication of its unjust privileges.”

The scientific definition of Caucasian came into rhetorical favor after the Johnson Act of 1924, resulting in white people understanding whiteness through this scientifically authorized, geographically based grouping that authorized the formerly inchoate category of whiteness as “real” and provided firmer borders to this category. The notion of a Caucasian group took emphasis away from former races, thus enabling liberals to concentrate on white-Black relations.