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.
Themes
Shifting Constructions of Whiteness
Whiteness is not biological but, instead, a constructed social category that gains authority in its racialization. This racialization is fluid, constantly shifting its definition, and open to different legal and political interpretations.
While whiteness is explicitly cited as a condition for naturalization and, thus, citizenship in the 1790 Citizenship Act, it was not actually defined in this act. While this prerequisite whiteness appears extremely exclusive today, Jacobson draws attention to what was experienced as its inclusivity at the time of the act’s passage and through the early 20th century: This condition of whiteness did not require that immigrants be Anglo-Saxon or British and thus allowed for a wide variety of legal interpretations of just what whiteness was. This set the stage for 175 years of shifting definitions of whiteness that Jacobson explores.
While the 1790 Naturalization Act only cited a generic whiteness, in the 19th century, scientists argued that there were distinct white racial groups across whiteness. By the mid-19th century, science shifted from mere categorization of racial groups to an explicit hierarchization of them. While current understandings of the scientific investment in race have focused on “scientific racism,” which hierarchized by way of false racializations that society continues to recognize, the hierarchies of distinct white races were also considered scientifically authoritative and biologically based: What we now think of as ethnicity was considered race.
European immigrants had distinct cultural identities and did not consider themselves white. Yet upon arrival their naturalization and citizenship depended on their categorization as white. This construction of whiteness was all-consuming of these cultural differences and identities and homogenized them into a generic white identity that was grounded in white supremacy. Immigrants did not choose to have their identify metamorphose from Irish to white, for example, but such a metamorphosis was a prerequisite to the national identity and citizenship—that they did seek. The “melting pot” of the United States, then, was one into which all European groups were thrown, so that everyone came out with a white identity.
While whiteness conveyed privileges that included citizenship but went well beyond citizenship, whiteness also created losses for these immigrants of their cultures and heritages. These changes in cultural identities occurred quickly and were sometimes diligently resisted. The cultural identity of the Irish, for example, was largely grounded in their resistance to the colonization of the British, who saw them as an inferior race, and the Irish did not desire to become amalgamated into a whiteness that was initially grounded in Anglo-Saxonism and thus clung more doggedly to their cultural identity than other groups who had not resisted the British to the same extent.
By the 20th century, the scientific category of Caucasian became an important rubric for the categorization of immigrants petitioning for naturalization based on their whiteness, though the courts sometimes cited this scientific classification grounded in supposed geographic origin of a population (based on the Caucasus Mountain range), and other times dismissed it in favor of “common sense” perceptions of whiteness.
Property-in-Whiteness
Whiteness is a modern social category that is constructed—legally, politically, and socially—rather than natural. While the parameters of who counts as white are constantly shifting, whiteness was cultivated within and facilitated 19th-century and 20th-century imperialism while domestically, it justified the displacement of Indigenous people and the enslavement of people of African descent.
Jacobson terms the political and economic power whiteness confers as “property-in-whiteness”: Whiteness allows for literal self-possession and, thus, immunity from enslavement. It also, in turn, enables enslaving. Up until 1865, to be white is to potentially be an enslaver but never be a slave. Even an indentured white person was self-possessed not only politically via citizenship but also in their ownership of themselves. Legal and political power is imbued in whiteness, even as whiteness robs immigrants and even nativists of unique cultural identities.
Though whiteness initially enabled citizenship, it came to supersede citizenship. In 1870, people of African descent became citizens, but there was no property-in-Blackness simultaneously conveyed with their citizenship. While citizenship could be obtained by either designation as Black or white, Jacobson shows that petitions by immigrants before the courts for citizenship were exclusively petitions for whiteness and sought admission into whiteness not only for the citizenship that it conveyed, but also for this property-in-whiteness. Because Blackness might have enabled citizenship but there was no property-in-Blackness, petitioners never argued for consideration as Black. The petition of Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), for example, was denied because Thind was dark-skinned and did not appear to be white but, instead, Black—even though he was, from a scientific perspective, Caucasian. Theoretically, then, Thind could have been naturalized by way of Blackness since visual perceptions based on skin color determined the court’s ruling in his petition. Yet Blackness conveyed with it such precarity that it was better not to be a citizen at all than to exist as a Black citizen. Thind’s petition illuminates that citizenship is how whiteness can be claimed rather than the other way around.
The Construction of the White/Black Binary
Jacobson primarily explores cultural differences that were largely subsumed within a whiteness that “melted down” various European races—considered superior to Blackness but inferior to Anglo-Saxons—starting with the Irish in the 19th century and, in the 20th century, Southern and Eastern Europeans. Grounded in whiteness studies, Whiteness of a Different Color pays attention to the ways that people we now consider simply white were made into white people.
At the same time, Jacobson acknowledges the work of scholars who have argued that the category of whiteness was formed in opposition, within a martial context, to Indigenous and enslaved resistance. As Jacobson points out, many scholars have shown how “white” simply signified the demographic that was neither Indigenous nor African American, which could be called on to fight against enslaved rebellions and in wars against Indigenous peoples.
By 1790 the earlier, 17th-century alliances that had existed between Blacks and whites, sometimes in opposition to Indigenous people, had been thwarted by legislation in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1676-77). In this inter-racial rebellion white and Black laborers burned down the capital of Virginia in opposition to policies that limited those wanting to move westward as well as the displacement of Indigenous people. Whiteness was explicitly constructed as a privilege, regardless of class, in response to this insurrection, a way to squelch interracial power so that the wealthy British American population could maintain its power by way of a clearly marked group that was forever available to them for enslavement. This was a watershed moment in the construction of both Blackness and whiteness in the colonies.
Whiteness, then, is a form of military allegiance to the United States, as it is also formed in opposition to interracial alliances. Whiteness would not exist without Blackness, which is also a constructed category that is not biologically based but reflects the opposite of power-in-whiteness: precarity-in-Blackness.
Whiteness is thus grounded, most essentially, in this opposition to those who have been made Black and who exist unequivocally outside of whiteness. White and Black exist in opposition to one another, ironically out of fear that Black and white might exist in cooperation with one another. This understanding of Black/white relations is fundamental to many scholars’ understandings of whiteness as grounded in class relations as much as in race relations.
