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.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Political History of Whiteness”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “‘Free White Persons’ in the Republic, 1790-1840”
Theodore Allen’s Invention of the White Race and David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness are the most notable works studying whiteness at the turn of the 21st century. Allen’s work studies the relativity of whiteness, tracing how the Irish gain standing in their transformation from Celts to whites upon immigrating to the United States. Like Allen, Roediger is interested in whiteness as framed by questions of labor, and he focuses on the ways that impoverished workers are compensated by white privilege, thus undermining labor alliances outside of whiteness.
Despite Jacobson’s admiration for these texts, he describes three ways that he thinks they are short-sighted: first, neither deals fully with the “vicissitudes” of whiteness, so that neither asks how the categories of whiteness, Caucasian, and Celt interact with each other in the case of the Irish, for example. Second, neither thinks about whiteness against history, broadly conceived, asking how whiteness might be perceived and constructed differently from the 1700s to the 1900s. The third, most important shortcoming is that neither approaches the construction of whiteness outside of issues of class and social labor control.
Jacobson does not want to minimize the context of class and labor surrounding whiteness, but since these two pivotal works have already considered whiteness in this context, he wants to examine other contexts, especially those concerned with national subjectivity. In 1790, Congress enacted that only free white persons could be citizens, and discussion surrounding this legislation revolved around whether this category for citizenship was too inclusive. Political identity from the beginning of the American colonies had been articulated in opposition to Indigenous people, specifically in the context of Christianity. Part of the reason for rebellion cited in the Declaration of Independence is the king’s “bringing on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages” (23). Scholars, such as Leon Higginbotham, have argued that citizenship became wrapped up with an idea of white maleness because citizenship was conceived as the demographic through which a group could best be organized to defeat slave rebellions or defeat Indigenous peoples in war. The idea of whiteness as category set in opposition to these slaves and Indigenous people laid the groundwork for the 1790 Congressional act.
National subjectivity is determined by citizenship. In 1790, whiteness explicitly determined citizenship so that the earlier category of Christian as opposed to non-Christian was replaced by white as opposed to non-white. In the 19th century, the discourse of race became fully developed, largely by way of science: The political meaning of “whiteness” did not change much, but its epistemology did. From the late 18th century to the late 19th century, science moved from classification of human groups toward biological, hierarchical ranking of groups. Scientific frameworks surrounding race changed racial epistemologies as they simultaneously granted these epistemologies authority. European supremacy was assumed, and it became a question not of the scientific reality of this supremacy but, instead, how it was to be employed.
With the arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, however, whiteness began to “lose its monolithic character” (38). With the Great Famine and migration out of Ireland, science again shifted its taxonomical and hierarchical models within the larger category of whiteness. The earlier conquest of the “Wild Irish” by the English provided the very model for conquest of Indigenous people in the colonies. These former Irish “savages” became white, as whiteness shifted in response to the Irish, who nonetheless were considered of lesser value.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840-1924”
The 1790 Naturalization Act limiting naturalized citizenship to free white persons is almost always approached, from the present moment, through a consideration of its exclusivity, with whiteness defined in opposition to Indigenous people and African Americans. This exclusive definition of whiteness also enabled the later exclusion of the Chinese and anticipated the Japanese internment camps. Yet the inclusivity of this naturalization law is simultaneously “staggering,” Jacobson insists.
The law’s inclusivity, as well as its exclusivity, created political crisis in the 19th century. While there was discussion of the law’s radical inclusivity, this was predominantly theoretical until the massive wave of Irish immigration that began in the 1840s.
There are three main currents in the period from 1840-1920: rising industrialization, which demanded cheap labor and resulted in a huge rise in European immigration; growing nativism in response to a perceived threat from these immigrants; and a fracturing of whiteness via scientific classification systems and political concerns over fitness for citizenship of these immigrant populations. Rather than a monolithic white race, there are now white races within these 19th-century taxonomies. The two European populations with the greatest rates of immigration were Ireland and Germany. Yet Germans were not as invested in their national and cultural identity as the Irish. The Irish had suffered for centuries under the Anglo-Saxons, and much of their identity had been formed in resistance to Anglo-Saxon conquest. While the Irish were often presented as “savage” by commentators, the Irish themselves were adamant about their difference from the British and did not seek assimilation.
Jacobson examines three violent events in this period: the 1863 predominantly Irish New York City draft riots, the 1891 lynching of 11 Italian prisoners in New Orleans, and the 1915 lynching of Jewish Leo Frank in Atlanta.
The New York City draft riots occurred in the wake of the 1863 Conscription Act, which established the first national draft system and required registration from all male citizens and also immigrants applying for citizenship who were between the ages of 20 and 45. While the riots centered on the question of citizenship as well as class and assumed oppositions between Irish and African Americans, coverage of the riots consistently described the “savage” nature of the Irish. The riots hinged simultaneously on Irish immigrants’ claims of their uniqueness as well as whiteness, even as they protested being compelled to fight when African Americans were not being conscripted.
In 1891 in New Orleans, 11 Italians were killed who had been accused of conspiring to kill the chief of police. The verdict of the trial, in which the Italians were exonerated, was believed to have been secured by the Italian mafia and accusations of “innate criminality” in all Italians circulated, ironically enabling the illegal lynchings of the Italian prisoners. Many of the prisoners had been rounded up simply because they were Italian, and coverage of the lynchings by the press, such as that of the New York Times, was almost unequivocally positive.
The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank occurred after he was accused of killing a 14-year-old girl working at his factory in Atlanta. He was accused of the murder by an African American who worked in the factory, with both Blackness and Jewishness pitted against one another. Frank was lynched after his sentence was commuted by the governor.
Within these three moments of violence, American nativism is shown to be a response to the “over-inclusivity of the category ‘white persons’” (68), with a fundamental revision of whiteness occurring between 1840 to 1920. While today’s scholars generally refer to Eastern and Southern Europeans as ethnic groups, they were referred to as separate races in the 19th century.
While the 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to free white persons, in 1870, “persons of the African race or of African descent” were also granted citizenship, a deliberate exclusion of Asians.
There were deep concerns over immigrants taking over Northern and Western European whiteness, too, and one of the most popular books regarding this immigration was Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, first published in 1916 but reaching its peak popularity in the 1920s. Grant argued that whiteness was fragile and thus could not accommodate race mixing. Grant also sketched out a hierarchy of European races, from Nordic to Alpine to Mediterranean, and approaches to European immigration came to revolve around immigrants not as laborers but as reproductive beings. The Johnson Act was passed in 1924, which restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. Jacobson stresses that the eugenic ideology that helped to create the Johnson Act, however, was not the result of fringe politics but was very mainstream. The Johnson Act did not present a new hierarchy of whitenesses, but, instead, was a formalization of understandings of these whitenesses that had been developing since the 1840s.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Becoming Caucasians, 1924-1965”
While Anglo-Saxon exclusivity reigned from the 1840s to the 1920s, “Caucasian unity” gradually replaced this exclusivity from the 1920s forward. The Johnson Act was passed in 1924 and marks the height of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it also enabled a “redrawing of racial lines” (93) that simultaneously marks the rise of monolithic whiteness.
The relationship between Caucasian and white may seem insubstantial, but Caucasian carries scientific authority that allows for the cohesiveness of whiteness. The idea of a Caucasian race “represents whiteness ratcheted up to a new epistemological realm of certainty” (94).
The idea of a broad Caucasian race was even popular within eugenic circles that had been committed to maintaining distinctions between Nordic/Anglos and non-Nordic/Anglos. In the sciences the approach to race went through two important changes between 1924 and the post-WWII era. First, environment was deemed more important than biology in the determination of social behavior of races, and race relations became a field of study that eclipsed “characterology” in racial studies. Biological understandings gave way to cultural understandings, so that “race” was often replaced with “ethnicity,” a school of thought that Franz Boas founded. Ashley Montagu was an anthropologist whose Race: Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (1942) helped to remove any biological grounding for race. This thinking culminated in UNESCO’s The Race Concept (1950), which argued that the “three great races (Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid)” (102) do not follow lines of intelligence or superiority. Yet as the former differences that had been seen as racial within whiteness disappeared, these three “great” categories were increasingly assumed to be divided racially. Anti-racist work of this period was ironically “founded upon the very epistemology of race that it sought to dismantle” (103). This enabled “probationary whites” to become fully entrenched within the Caucasian race. Thus, there was a simultaneous denial of races within the category of Caucasian as there was an insistence on race across these broader geographical categories.
While there was a move away from race relations, these metamorphosed to racialized relations. Populations were racialized, which created lines of proximity and distance. While some categories of difference melted away, the maintenance of others helped to enable this melting. Thus, anthropologists could now point to the racial difference of the Irish as ridiculous while maintaining distinct and broad categories of racial difference, as reflected in anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s pamphlet and corresponding exhibit “Races of Mankind,” which showed the children of Adam and Eve as comprising “the three” races. In fact, previous racial differences among whites came to seem so inconsequential that whiteness gradually became the absence of race.
African Americans were called on to fight Hitler, which changed the racial landscape in the United States. Many of the industries of war mobilized against the Nazis refused to hire anyone outside the Caucasian race. By the 1950s discussions of race had abandoned white eugenics, and the immigration question had been discarded, with the “Negro question” foregrounded. In the film Imitation of Life, then, Annie Johnson describes God as having made some people white and some people Black, with this contrast and binary opposition taking over concerns regarding what were now only “ethnicities.”
In addition to Imitation of Life, Jacobson analyzes a range of film and literature, focusing on the films The Jazz Singer and Gentleman’s Agreement.
The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first talkie and is the story of a Jewish man who, instead of becoming a cantor, becomes a jazz singer. Jacobson is interested in the film’s use of blackface, whereby the character Jackie Rabinowitz becomes Jack Robin. Jacobson argues that Jewishness, as defined as race, is erased by the whiteness that is achieved through Rabinowitz’s blackface routine as a jazz singer, which “whitens” him in marking him as not Black. Jacobson theorizes that the declining popularity in the 1930s of blackface minstrel shows may signify European immigrants’ decreasing need for such a “whitener” that establishes the binary of white and Black, erasing Jewishness as anything other than white.
Laura Z. Hobson’s novel Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) deals with Jewishness differently. The novel hinges on the idea of interchangeability: Hobson argues that there is no difference between Gentiles and Jews. This, then, presents the assumption of justice being based in “sameness.” For Jacobson, Hobson is important because of what she shares with other liberals, which is this erasure of difference between Jew and Caucasian, so that Jew becomes Caucasian, by way of an unquestioned “white-over-nonwhite dynamic” in which Caucasian was constructed in opposition to “Negro.” American citizenship, Jacobson argues, has always depended on such a foundational contrast.
Part 1 Analysis
Part I traces three pivotal stages in The Shifting Construction of Whiteness: 1790-1840, 1840-1924, and 1924-1965. Jacobson situates these stages in relation to capitalism (specifically, its demand for cheap labor) and republicanism (specifically, its demand for “responsible citizenship”), focusing on republicanism. Jacobson’s categorization of these historical stages hinges on three specific moments that are turning points in the construction of whiteness: the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Irish Great Famine of the 1840s, and the Johnson Act of 1924.
With the Naturalization Act of 1790 dictating that only “free white” immigrants could be naturalized as citizens, naturalization became explicitly white. Whiteness mapped on, though not perfectly, to the earlier category of Christian. Some scholars have argued that whiteness was the demographic that could be called on to oppose slave rebellions or Native American resistance, so that whiteness was a category formed out of voluntary physical opposition in 1790. While whiteness as prerequisite to citizenship determined the “national subjectivity,” 19th-century science quickly lent racial categorization authority in its categorizations of race based on various physical calibrations and its corresponding hierarchical rankings of biologically based racial groups. The move from religious categorization (Christian/not Christian) to secular, racial categorization (white/not white) is a shift that makes American national subjectivity white in the wake of the American Revolution but is also a shift that turns away from a focus on the divine (Christian) to a focus on the human, arguably replacing the divine with the human as exclusively white. The construction of whiteness, then, reflects a movement away from those who believe in a Christian divinity to a construction that places divinity within whiteness itself (not those who believe in a certain divinity but those who embody a certain divinity).
Jacobson insists that, from the vantage point of the 21st century, this definition of citizenship as restricted to “free whites” appears very restrictive, but he emphasizes that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Naturalization Act was considered very inclusive. The notion of whiteness was ambiguous enough that it opened up potential membership for groups of people who had been colonized and not considered fully white and human. This allowed them to claim Property-in-Whiteness and granted them some of the political and economic privileges that came with being white in the United States. This became explicit in the 1840s when the Great Famine hit Ireland, and, out of desperation, there was a huge wave of Irish immigration to the United States. The British had colonized the Irish and considered them “savages.” Much of the rhetoric that British colonists used in relation to Indigenous people had its precedent in rhetoric that had been used in the colonization of the Irish: Both the Irish and Indigenous people were “wild” and “savage.” While the Irish and Indigenous people were treated similarly in their subjugation, colonization, and treatment as savages by the British within their own lands, the huge influx of Irish immigrants to the United States in the 1840s challenged the theoretical inclusiveness of whiteness: Although the Irish were “savages” in Ireland, upon arrival to the United States, there was a need to gather their numbers into the fold of whiteness for political purposes.
The Irish, more so than the German immigrants who also came to the United States in large numbers in the mid-19th , did not seek assimilation into Anglo-Saxon culture. Their identity as Irish had largely been created in their resistance to Anglo-Saxon colonization, and they continued to be portrayed as savages by mainstream commentators and culture, a portrayal that they did not entirely resist, either. At the same time, while mainstream Anglo-Saxon culture insisted on the social subjugation of the Irish, they politically counted as white. This conferred privilege though the Irish also felt that it conferred burdens on them: They were expected to fight for the nation though they were not treated as full citizens socially. Though Jacobson does not place the Irish refusal to join US military ranks in relation to other scholars’ arguments that the Naturalization Act of 1790 was organized around the demographic that could effectively be called on for both military offensive and defensive labor regarding Indigenous and enslaved resistance, this refusal and riot once again demonstrate that the Irish do not feel themselves to be white. Their political whiteness (citizenship) was in tension with their felt experience of Irishness (non-citizenship) in the United States.
In addition to the Irish there were large waves of German immigrants in the mid-1800s, and both were designated as different “racial types” that were subordinate to Anglo-Saxons. Concerns about the reproduction of the Irish in particular metamorphosed to concerns about southern and eastern European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th , culminating in the 1924 Johnson Act, which radically reduced the numbers of immigrants coming to the United States from these areas. The shift had focused away from the Irish to newer populations of European immigrants.
Ironically, almost immediately after the Johnson Act came a shift in categorization that relied on the notion of the Caucasian race, a scientific categorization that was linked to the other two scientific racial categories of “Negroid” and “Mongoloid.” This emphasis on three races thus demanded the consolidation of the wide range of white races into one, solid Caucasian race. These three “great races” thus reified race, a reification that was problematically assumed in anti-racist work of the civil rights era.
Jacobson examines how whitenesses become whiteness in various films, with particular focus on the film The Jazz Singer and its exploration of Jewishness in the immediate post-Johnson Act era. His analysis of blackface in The Jazz Singer theorizes that blackface and the minstrel genre of which it was a part became less popular as liminal whites, such as Jews and Irish, no longer required “blacking up” to prove their whiteness. Blackface, then, signifies both the binary opposition of whiteness and Blackness and, in doing so, “whitens” those who may not initially be considered white “enough.” Crucially, then, it is by way of being not Black that one who is only marginally white becomes fully white, emphasizing The Construction of the White/Black Binary. Once the categorization of Caucasian consumes these differences, however, blackface is no longer a means by which whiteness can be attained and becomes much less popular, Jacobson argues.
