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.
Index of Terms
Blackface
Blackface is the practice of non-Black, usually white, people blackening their faces with makeup or, in the past, burned cork. The act of making one’s face up to be Black, however, is only part of what blackface usually entails. Performers had often blackened their faces, for example, in portrayals of Shakespeare’s Othello in 17th-century England, but these performances did not entail any kind of caricature or stereotyped performance of Black people, which more modern definitions of blackface usually do.
In the United States, blackface was a popular form of entertainment for whites in the 19th and through the mid-20th centuries that revolved around such caricatures and originally was part of minstrel shows. Jacobson is interested in why the enormous popularity of blackface performances as entertainment drops off in the second third of the 20th century, theorizing that it becomes less popular due to the racialization of formerly “lesser” whites as Caucasian.
Jacobson lingers over the infamous blackface performances of Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. He argues that the binary of racialized whiteness and Blackness enabled those who were seen as lesser whites, such as Jews (Jolson portrays Jewish Jackie Rabinowitz, who metamorphoses into Black Jack Robin when in blackface), to claim full-fledged whiteness in performing in blackface, a performance that signified that they were not Black. Once fully racialized as Caucasian, such performances were no longer entertaining because such “whitening” by way of blackface was no longer necessary.
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law in the United States that banned all members of a national group. Specifically, the act barred immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. This legislation provided a precedent for subsequent 20th-century legislation aimed at limiting immigration from specific nationalities due to racial affiliations and anticipated the Johnson Act of 1924.
The Great Famine
The Great Famine (also called the Great Hunger and the Great Potato Famine) occurred in Ireland from 1845-1852. As a result of Great Britain’s colonization of Ireland, land was confiscated from Irish Catholics and formed into plantations in which monocultures were grown, including potatoes. A blight hit the potato crop in 1845, and as a result of the lack of crop diversification and forced evictions by the British for the unemployed, the famine became even more lethal.
Southern and western Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, were struck the hardest. Over 2,000,000 people left Ireland, and 1,000,000 people died in Ireland because of the famine. The population of Ireland, so reduced by the famine, did not recover for 100 years.
The huge wave of immigration from Ireland in the 1840s required what had previously been only theoretical regarding the inclusivity of whiteness to be decided.
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, also called the Immigration Act of 1924, was a federal law that set reduced quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe to the United State and entirely restricted immigration from Asia. For these groups, immigration was reduced by 80% of what it had been in 1914.
Naturalization
Naturalization is the legal process by which a foreign national becomes a citizen of a country to which they are not native. The process generally involves an application and an oath to obey that nation’s laws and stated allegiance to that nation.
The Naturalization Act of 1790
The Naturalization Act of 1790 was enacted by Congress and legislated that only free white persons of good character were eligible for naturalization, determining that the only immigrants who could become citizens were white. This was the first law to set federal laws for naturalization and sets the stage for Jacobson’s historical analysis.
New York City Draft Riots
New York City draft riots occurred from July 13-16, 1863 in Manhattan in response to new laws passed by Congress to draft men to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War. The event is considered the largest urban political disturbance in United States history. The protesters were predominantly poor Irish men who resented that wealthier draftees could afford to pay a substitute to serve for them in war. The protest became a riot in which the Irish lashed out against free Black people because they were generally paid more than the Irish for labor, and they were not being drafted into military service.
The protesters damaged several Protestant churches, many Black homes, and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum down. It is estimated that approximately 2,000 people were killed in the riots.
