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.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “The Fabrication of Race”
The introduction presents the book’s thesis that races are “invented categories” and that “Caucasians are made and not born” (4). Jacobson provides the broad terrain on which he will make his exploration of the ways that racial designations have “framed the history of European immigration” (6) in the United States. These include shifting designations of “white” and “Caucasian” as well as more specific designations (Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Hebrew, Nordic, Mediterranean, etc.).
Jacobs breaks the history of whiteness in the United States into three periods. The first period begins with the US Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” Beginning in 1840, however, a massive wave of Irish immigration began, which led to new definitions of whiteness. The second period lasts from 1840 until 1924 when whiteness was divided into a hierarchy of smaller races within itself. The third period begins in the late 1920s onward when whiteness was “reconsolidated.”
Alongside these three historic periods are the book’s two premises: that race is central to European immigration and citizenship in the US and that race is cultural and political rather than natural.
Introduction Analysis
The introduction provides the general framework for the book’s exploration of whiteness as a social construction that functions in relation to the category Caucasian. These two categories generally overlap but are not one and the same: Caucasian generally referred to an original geographic location of a people, revolving around the Caucasus mountains, while whiteness generally refers to how one is perceived and so is perceptual as well as conceptual. While Jacobson’s focus is on the construction of whiteness, he insists that all notions of race are constructions. While there may be distinct cultures and group identities, race is a social construction and not a biological reality.
Jacobson’s focus on whiteness places him within the field of whiteness studies. Black authors such as James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. DuBois discussed whiteness as a construction that needed to be acknowledged and abolished. As an academic field, whiteness studies became known as such in the early 1980s. Jacobson’s focus is on changing definitions of whiteness and the reasons for and ramifications of these changes, which he examines in the three historical periods of 1790-1840, 1840-1924, and 1924-1965.
These historical periods are determined by shifting definitions of who “counts” as white and thus do not follow expected temporal categorizations (the Civil War is only marginally relevant to Jacobson’s historical timeline, for example). These shifting definitions occur both on the margins of whiteness (who barely counts as white) as well as in contrast to whiteness and thus at a distance from whiteness by way of its opposite, Blackness (who counts as Black), and Jacobson pays attention to both the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of whiteness. Whiteness’s opposition to Blackness and the injustices in which this opposition is grounded are recognized, but Jacobson is particularly interested in how populations we would now consider unequivocally white, such as the Irish and Germans, were only considered liminally white in the mid-19th century, and it is these vicissitudes that are his focus. Moreover, whiteness as a way of categorizing people is a modern invention, having developed over the last 500 years.
