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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 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Manufacture of Caucasians”
Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Crucible of Empire”
Chapter 6 opens with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which the narrator initially perceives the line manager of the ship, Dirk Peters, who is Indigenous, as a “savage.” After contact with sub-Saharan Africans, however, Pym’s perception of Peters changes to one in which he sees himself and Peters as the only “white men” around.
Jacobson then moves into a broader discussion of the role of imperialism, which both cultivated a collective group of white men at the same time that whiteness was fractured into a hierarchy of whitenesses. As evidenced by Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, this whiteness is consolidated into resistance to Blackness. Thus, while imperial conquests from 1840 until the early 20th century were done under the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, they increasingly depended on a homogenized whiteness that included different European ethnic groups.
Trans-Pacific imperialism was heralded by many immigrant journals in the context of expansion by way of territories, such as Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa at the turn of the 20th century. Often it was not imperialism itself but anti-imperialism that depended on racist ideology. Some of the most explicit domestic anti-Black racists, such as Ben Tillman of South Carolina, were insistently anti-imperialist not out of respect for others, but out of a desire not to be tainted by contact. Those who espoused imperialism in the name of whiteness, however, referred to a historiography of imperialism that justified this expansion and displacement of non-white races, referring not only to violence but also to lands secured by way of treaty as symptomatic of the civilized status of white legalities. William McKinley referred to imperialism as a “benevolent assimilation,” an approach to difference that was repeated with immigrants, who were also expected to assimilate.
Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the end of the frontier in 1896, as westward expansion and displacement of Indigenous people had occurred coast to coast, and there was concern that the continent had been claimed by way of “lesser” Europeans. Eugenic thinking, largely addressing these non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans, reflected the fear of “superior” whites that the continent had been conquered, only for the nation now to be taken over by immigrants. At the same time, however, white imperialism depended on the homogenization of these European immigrants, assimilating them into a constructed whiteness that erased their distinctive cultures as it also conferred privilege.
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “Naturalization and the Courts”
The courts themselves insisted on the relation between race and fitness for citizenship. Harkening back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, whiteness, if one was not Black, continued to be a prerequisite for citizenship. Whiteness was not just tied to citizenship, however, but also to property: Whiteness had long determined who could hold property and who was forced to be property. The notion of property also propelled European expansion into lands that were not legally possessed by Indigenous people.
Possession, property, and self-possession all converge in the privileges of whiteness. After the 1870s non-Europeans started petitioning the court for the privileges of whiteness, and these petitions from Chinese, Indian, Syrian, and Armenian immigrants enabled non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans to gain and maintain their whiteness.
The legal understanding of race was constantly shifting between scientific definitions of race and common, vernacular understandings of race. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act revolved around the status of freedom and whiteness, the geographic and scientific categorization of Caucasian (as determined by the Caucasus mountains) could be trumped by more common understandings of whiteness. Thus, while dark-skinned Southern Indians might be considered Caucasian, they were generally not considered white.
Three petitions for citizenship are highlighted in this chapter. The case of In re Halladjian (1909) revolved around four Armenian immigrants. Here, the court arrived at a definition of whiteness that included Armenians. This case is important because its definition of whiteness influenced early 20th-century legal epistemologies of race. While the United States’s argument in this case was that whiteness was synonymous with European origins, the court did not agree and insisted that geographic origin was not a reliable indicator of whiteness, stating that races were described as Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, or Celtic, for example, and not Austrian, Swiss, or Italian. The court, as was typical, also referred to scientific classifications that included Armenians as Caucasian as well as general perceptions of Armenians as white. While the ruling was liberal in its inclusion of Armenians as white, it looked back on the 1790 Naturalization Act as one in which colonial uses of whiteness were conceived within a system in which “white” designated anyone not of African or Indigenous descent. Along these same lines, the court invoked segregation laws that considered whiteness in opposition to Blackness, so that anyone not legally Black was considered legally white.
Two other cases in which whiteness is petitioned for are crucial: the petitions of Takao Ozawa (1922), an immigrant from Japan, and Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), an immigrant from India. Ozawa’s case insisted that legal whiteness did not necessarily exclude the Japanese, arguing that the extension of citizenship to African-descended Americans was inclusive, rather than excusive at the same time that it insisted that the Chinese Exclusion Act was exclusive to the Chinese, never mentioning the Japanese. Referring to Halladjian, Ozawa’s counsel argued that the 1790 definition of the term white simply referred to those who were not African or Indigenous. The court ultimately decided that whiteness was determined by 1790 understandings of whiteness, which the court defined now as those considered Caucasian. This original definition of whiteness created a condition in which some are clearly not eligible and some clearly are, with those liminal cases being decided as they arose. Finally, though, the court ruled that while the Japanese may be visibly white, they are clearly not Caucasian, thus denying the petition.
Thind, who had been granted citizenship by a district court in Oregon, was sued by the United States regarding his status as white Hindu. Here the court denied the categorization of Caucasian as valid in the determination of whiteness and, instead, relied on common perceptions that denied whiteness to Hindus, so that, contrary to Ozawa, Caucasian status was now not tantamount to whiteness.
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Dawning Civil Rights Era”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was touted as a government program aimed at those who did not benefit from earlier socioeconomic growth, stating that there should be “no forgotten men and no forgotten races” (246). Yet much of the New Deal forgot African Americans. In addition, it also “forgot,” in a different way, formerly “problematic” Finns, Hebrews, Slavs, and other so-called “lesser” whites because by 1950, these groups had been homogenized into whiteness. This involuntary loss of ethnic particularity was the price for admission into whiteness. Racial politics by mid-20th century no longer approached Europeans as separate races: Civil rights activism depended on whiteness as a monolithic category. Race politics from the 1930s on, in foregrounding white privilege, arguably entrenched white privilege by drawing attention to its monolithic, cultivated character that, in fact, denied the plurality of white ethnic groups.
The Communist Party USA, for example, in its attention to and advocacy in alliance with Black people, adamantly insisted on a refusal of what it called “white chauvinism.” For many immigrants considered liminally white, however, this was a foreign way of thinking for them, as they were still tied to their own distinct culture and heritage that was not culturally white: Poles, Italians, Irish, and other Europeans were told that they were now white and that such an identity that seemed foreign to them must be accepted if they were to resist racist discrimination against Black people. The Communist Party USA was radical in its explicit refusal of white supremacy, exemplified in the in-party trial of several Finnish members who had stood by while Black people attempted to attend a party at the Finnish Club in Harlem only to be harassed. August Yokinen was the only Finnish member involved in the incident who did not immediately apologize, and he was tried by the Communist Party USA. Yet Yokinen himself, as a Finnish immigrant, was not fully considered culturally white despite his legal privileges. Nonetheless, the Communist Party USA insisted on attention to white chauvinism and supremacy, even when this supremacy was not fully understood or experienced by those who had recently become white.
The most radical anti-Black resistance, then, actually insisted on reduction of a range of white cultural identities to the monolithic white identity. Moreover, this was an identity imposed on European immigrants; there were no other legal identities under which these immigrants qualified. At the same time, those who were not considered white or Black and fell outside the binary seemingly disappeared in political conversation. The binary consolidated whiteness as both lack and privilege precisely because it erased unique cultures in favor of homogenization in service of violent anti-Blackness.
Another approach to anti-Black racism was espoused in Common Ground, the publication of The Common Council for American Unity, influenced by the work of Slovenian American Louis Adamic, who insisted on attention to differences among European Americans. For Adamic, the barrier to meaningful and full civil life for European immigrants in the United States was Anglo-Saxon bigotry, and this same bigotry created anti-Black prejudice. Thus, the solution was to resist this specifically Anglo-Saxon identity.
Non-Communist liberalism did not attempt to cultivate kinship but coalition with Black people, constantly stressing and even fetishizing whiteness and Blackness as aesthetic qualities in its protest.
Carey McWilliams was another intellectual who paid careful attention to differences among European Americans, though these differences were almost completely absorbed by mid-century. Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma (1944) helped to finalize this shift to a binary of white/Black. In the middle of the 20th century were also intellectuals, such as Ashley Montagu, Brewton Barry, and George Schuyler, insisting on the deconstruction of race as having no grounding in biology, a critique that disappeared for 50 years until the turn of the 21st century.
Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal (1947), however, does explore racial relations through such a deconstruction of race, revolving around the main presumed-to-be-white character discovering through archival genealogical work that he has an African ancestor. For Lewis, race is deconstructed, however, not through the revelation of the constructedness of its categories but, instead, through the revelation that many white people may be Black according to their own racial definitions.
Part 3 Analysis
Part 3 explores why the hierarchical structure of white races metamorphosed into the idea of a unified and singular white, and specifically Caucasian, race, emphasizing The Construction of the White/Black Binary. Jacobson argues that this was not inevitable, and Chapters 6-8 explore why this happened, focusing on the roles of imperialism, nativist courts, and the civil rights movement.
Jacobson revisits the beginning of the book to understand this reforging” of whiteness by way of the category of Caucasian. While American imperialism was propelled under the rubric of Anglo-Saxonism, the Naturalization Act of 1790 determined citizenship by way of a broader whiteness that ultimately gained scientific authority in the 19th century through the category of Caucasian.
While hierarchies of European peoples, considered actual races, developed from the 1840s to the 1920s, both the 1790 Naturalization Act, in its proclamation of a generic whiteness and imperialism provided support for a homogenization of these many white races. More specifically, imperialism’s insistent rhetoric of savagery created a cohesive whiteness even as nativism created rubrics of hierarchy within whiteness. Frederick Jackson Turner’s proclamation of the end of the frontier at the turn of the 19th century articulates nativist anxieties about the marginally white immigrants who were often on the front lines of dangerous expansion (and Indigenous displacement) westward. While Turner proclaims this expansion from coast to coast a victory, Jacobson foregrounds the ways that marginally white immigrants were socially displaced in their very participation in this white expansion, as nativists were concerned that they would now “take over” the nation. These liminal whites faced social displacement from nativists in their geographical placement on the land, yet ultimately whiteness, as it was determined in 1790, cohered in resistance to Indigenous people in this expansion.
The courts heard various petitions for naturalization that were grounded in who could claim whiteness. The judicial branch was constantly shifting in its determination of whiteness, sometimes relying on “common sense” perceptions of whiteness and other times relying on scientific definitions of the Caucasian race. More important, the courts repeatedly relied on Post-Reconstruction Jim Crow legislation grounded in a Black/white binary in their determinations of whiteness, so that the question of whether someone was considered Black became part of determining whether they were white. The legal system repeatedly invoked Jim Crow segregation laws in rulings that were considered liberal in their “inclusive” interpretations of whiteness.
Not only does this point to the legally fluid definition of whiteness, going back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, as well as whiteness’s continuing opposition to Blackness, but Jacobson also pays attention to the petitioners themselves, from Homer Plessy to Bhagat Singh Thind. All these petitioners share the claim that they should be included in the category white as the basis of their petition. All of these cases sought, for the petitioners, the privileges of “property-in-whiteness” (237), a power that was maintained by the courts and that the petitioners wanted to gain by inclusion within whiteness. Petitioners sought, rather than challenged, the privileges of Property-in-Whiteness.
Civil rights activism of the mid-20th century advocated against the binary of white and Black that the courts had relied on in their “progressive” citizenship rulings. Yet this activism also helped to solidify the binary of whiteness and Blackness. While nativism had yielded power to liminal whites, the “powerful counter logic of white-over-Black, of color/not-color, mitigated for [liminal] non-Anglo-Saxons the effects of narrowly conceived Anglo-Saxon supremacism” (201). Thus, anti-Black racism propelled immigrants who were on the margins of whiteness into full-fledged white status as part of the articulation of the white/Black binary that it then called on to be dismantled.
Liberal race-based coalition politics thus served to entrench the homogenization of whiteness in the name of anti-racism. Non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrants—not African Americans—were the first group of people to benefit from the civil rights movement, at least in terms of legal protections, in an environment in which they received Property-in-Whiteness. This is crucial to consider if liberal coalition politics created out of the Black civil rights movement is the dominant model for activism today.
