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

Theodore Allen was an independent scholar who conducted deeply innovative work on whiteness and white privilege. Though born into a middle-class family in Indiana, his family moved to Paintsville, Kentucky and then Huntington, West Virginia when he was a child. Allen did not follow the conventional trajectory of acquiring intellectual authority via higher education. Instead, he started working after completing high school, believing that college did not foster intellectual independence. He joined labor unions immediately, becoming an activist and organizer in the labor movement and a member of the Communist Party.

Allen was published as an independent scholar by 1965. He was a coal miner in West Virginia, where he was a member of the United Mine Workers and co-developed a trade union for Marion County, West Virginia. He moved to New York City in the 1940s, where he had a range of jobs from postal carrier to librarian to factory worker to design draftsman.

Allen devoted his life to his research and activism, publishing outside out of academic presses during the civil rights movement, when his work was highly influential. He worked diligently, through both his research and writing as well as his participation and leadership within unions, for the emancipation of the working class.

By the turn of 20th century, race was understood not to be biologically valid and, instead, a social construct, which Allen had long argued in his insistence on the study of whiteness and “white skin privilege” as a method of control by the ruling class. His Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: Invention of the White Race (1975) is considered a seminal work of whiteness studies. His two-volume Invention of the White Race (Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Control and Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America) remains a foundational text in whiteness studies though he was working before whiteness studies was coined in academia.

David Roediger is Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas with a focus on race, ethnicity, labor, and 19th-century American history. His academic monographs include Wages of Whiteness; Working Toward Whiteness; Class, Race, and Marxism; Seizing Freedom; and The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch).

Roediger is interested in the construction of whiteness in relation to labor and shares this focus on labor and class with Theodore Allen. Wages of Whiteness (1991) was instrumental, along with Allen’s radical work that anticipated whiteness studies, in forming the foundation of whiteness studies.

Nativists are people who privilege those who are native over those who are not. In a political context, nativists endorse policies in which natives of a nation—which generally means those who are Indigenous, those whose ancestry stretches back to historical events deemed crucial (generally by nativists themselves), or those who are native born—seek to limit a non-nativist presence.

In the context of American nativism, nativists have generally been of British ancestry and can trace their American ancestors back to various key events in the history of the United States: passage on the Mayflower, the founding of Jamestown, the American Revolution, etc. Daughters of the American Revolution, for example, is a nativist organization in its requirement that members prove at least one blood ancestor who aided in the Revolutionary War though the group is not politically nativist.

American nativism, however, is not exclusively ancestrally British. Indigenous people have argued for certain nativist policies based on their indigeneity to the United States. African Americans have also supported nativist policies, as have recent immigrant populations, such as the ethnic whites that Jacobson discusses. Nativism is often grounded in the belief that immigrants and newer populations will threaten cultures, jobs, or other national resources and ways of being that are valued.

In the more specific context of Whiteness of a Different Color, nativism generally refers to Anglo American citizens of the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1790 can be classified as nativist legislation, as it is written and ratified by whites who legislate naturalization (and thus citizenship) by way of whiteness.

Jacobson, however, traces the ways that this Anglo American nativism gradually shifts to become a much broader white nativism that then shifts, in the context of civil rights, to domestic concerns about Blackness that move out of nativist context.

Caucasian is a racial category that was theorized and supported by a range of academics, including historians, anthropologists, biologists, and physicians in the 19th century and continuing up until the 20th century. The category of Caucasian is premised on civilization being grounded in the region surrounding the Caucasus mountains, supposedly the region where the biblical Noah’s Ark landed and includes people of Europe, Northern African, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of the Near East.

Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid were theorized as the three great races as early as the late 1700s, but the term Caucasian did not come into full legal use in the United States until the postbellum era and was used by the courts in the many petitions for citizenship that depended on proof of whiteness.

The racial group of Caucasian, though theorized and argued by scientists, has since been retracted by scientists. While racial groups were once classified—and also hierarchized by scientists—scientists now insist that race is not biological. Nonetheless, the United States in particular continues to use the term in a range of contexts, including medical ones, holding onto this term that lent authority to the older, more nebulous category of whiteness, perhaps because the term provided whiteness with the weight it needed.