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

In other words, people who came from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Jews from Russia and other Slavic nations all became, by virtue of the "melting pot" ethic, "Caucasian" whites. But, the creation of whiteness was - and still is - by no means an easy, continuous process. The Celtic, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean "races" were abolished in favor of the myth of one homogenous "white" race (with the adoption of the "scientific" term "Caucasian" providing a new legitimacy to the honorific "racial" term "white."

Jacobson contends that traditional historians have deliberately dismissed the "racial" distinctions of the 19th century and before as "misuses" of the word "race." Of course they didn't mean that Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Nordics, etc. were separate races; they just didn't know what they were saying. This is a courtesy not given to mulattoes. Jacobson, however, shows that there was no "misuse." "Patterns in literary, legal, political and graphic evidence" show that the perception of race was very different from the standard rhetoric promoted in today's U.S. I have a sense of deja vu here. As stated in Lawrence R. Tenzer's The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War, mainstream historians' inability to acknowledge the fact that 19th century Northern "whites" saw predominately European slaves as "white," makes them deliberately blind to the role "white slavery" played as a cause of the Civil War. Few historians wish to deal with the fact that, while "white" privilege in various forms has been a constant in American political culture since colonial times, whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a series of historical vicissitudes.

Jacobson divides the history of whiteness in the United States into three great epochs:

The nation's first naturalization law in 1790 (limited naturalized citizenship to "free white persons") demonstrates the republican convergence of race and "fitness for self-government"; the law's wording denotes an unconflicted view of the presumed character and unambiguous boundaries of whiteness.

Fifty years later, however, beginning with the massive influx of highly undesirable but nonetheless "white" persons from Ireland, whiteness was subject to new interpretations. The period of mass European immigration, from the 1840s to the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races. Vigorous debate ensued over which of these was truly "fit for self-government" in the old Anglo- Saxon sense.

Finally, in the 1920s and after, partly because the crisis of over-inclusive whiteness had been solved by restrictive legislation and partly in response to a new racial alchemy generated by African-American migrations to the North and West, whiteness was reconsolidated: the late nineteenth century's probationary white groups were now remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian race - an earlier era's Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Iberics, and Saracens, among others, had become Caucasians so familiar to our own visual economy and racial lexicon.

Jacobson uses a variety of written sources to make his case --that "non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants and their children were perhaps the first beneficiaries of the modern civil rights movement." He has compiled evidence from many historical legal cases involving various individuals who attempted to establish evidence of "whiteness" in order to obtain U.S. citizenship or some other perq reserved for the "native white race." He points out that the legal evidence is conflicted. Are Armenians white or aren't they? How can Japanese with a white skin be nonwhite and Italians with a dark skin be white in one set of court proceedings and the reverse found in different courts on different days?

Jacobson includes information from literature, news journals, and other written sources to illustrate that authors as diverse as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad and Mr. Hearst of newspaper fame all offered an opinion about race at one time or another, and that while everyone started out assuming they knew what it meant to be white, most soon discovered the operational definition was another matter. There is not now nor ever has been a consensus on what it means to be white.

I enjoyed Jacobson's book very much and I think it is an excellent qualitative analysis. However, I have a few concerns: 1) Race is a contentious topic, but mixed race is even more troublesome. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau identified more than 60 race groups in the U.S.; While Jacobson alludes to this issue, he might have discussed it a bit more as it supports his idea that race is a nebulous notion; 2) In discussing the acquisition of civil rights, Jacobson makes the mistake many men make--Black men had the vote and basic rights many years before women of any color; 3) Jacobson begins his history with 1790 and assumes (as did many) that the so-called Anglo-Saxons were a monolithic group--they were not. The early settlers were a diverse lot from many nations and included landed gentry, endentured servents, and prisoners who worked side by side with slaves in Georgia and other colonial penal colonies until the Revolution. I have read that Jews funded the Revolotion, Poles and French trained the military (a highway in VA is named for general Pulaski); and that the first person to die in the Revolution was a free Black man named Crispus Attucks. 4) Jacobson starts the civil rights movement with the acceptance of "non-white" immigrants to "white" privilege, but evidence suggests that the U.S. Revolution was about the rights of the property owners or Aristocracy. Not until Andrew Jackson did the "common" man get the vote. Black men got the vote 30 years later and women got the vote in the 1920s although many rights were not accorded them until recently. The history of the U.S. is the history of the Civil Rights Movement for all human beings and as Americans we should be grateful for our rights.

In the 19th century, "whitness" was reserved for Anglo-Saxons, and descendants of immigrants from the British Isles. Slowly, the concept of whiteness evolved to include Northern Europeans and Scandanavians, then other white gentiles, then Jews. Jacobson traces two major influences for this change -- assimilation into the American mainstream and the need to rectuit other "whites" to help polarize the nation between white and black. The previous was common in northern industrial centers and large cities, while the latter was especially prevalent in the Jim Crowe south.

This is a modern study because it takes unconventional themes such as the arbitrary construction of "whiteness" and explores it, as opposed to the more traditional form of research, which would include choosing an historical event and studying the facts. "Whiteness of a Different Color" is about people's conceptions, and misconceptions, rather than specific facts. Reflecting on that subject, I wonder if that isn't what's most important.