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

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WHITE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR by Matthew Frye Jacobson is an excellent historical summary and deconstruction of the social construct called "the white race." Anthropologists, sociologists, demographers, and historians like Jacobson who study race and ethnicity have suggested over and over that even if race differences exist they are not fixed (the definition of white has changed over time and no consensus has been formed concerning it's constiuent parts). The biological sciences provide no evidence that race exists. Humans with different hair color, skin color, eye color, eye shape, and/or other "race" characteristics straddle all the "race" groups.

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.

"Whiteness of a Different Color" is a marvelous work of modern scholarship. In this excellent work of historiography/history, Jacobson explores the American conception of racial "whiteness" and how it has changed over time. This book won virtually every major scholarly award in 1999, most notably the American Studies Association's Award for the best book dealing with American istory and culture.

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.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes both the direction and focus of historical scholarship. Matthew Jacobson's *Whiteness of a Different Color* is one such work. For nearly a decade now, scholars and readers interested in understanding the history of the racial dynamic in the United States have turned almost exclusively to the history of the working class. David Roediger's *Wages of Whiteness* is clearly the best example of a working-class history of the social construction of race, and, indeed, is far superior to other, similarly-minded works, such as Noel Ignatiev's mixed offering, *How the Irish Became White*.

Jacobson's work, however, shakes up the history of race, and illuminates a broader, shared history of difference, exclusion, and domination in American life. It is, in short, a truly *cultural* history of race in America. In clear and concise prose, Jacobson plots a long narrative history of race that reflects marked demographic, economic, and cultural changes. Building on the work of Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and others, he reveals the roots of the fragmentation of whiteness in the 1840s, and later demonstrates the forces responsible for the reconsolidation of whiteness in the mid-20th Century--for the near-complete assimilation of European immigrants into a singular "white race." There is, of course, much more here than a history of class-formation and race-consciousness, for *Whiteness of a Different Color* looks at this history of race in light of an abundance of sources drawn from every conceivable corner of American culture. Indeed, so powerful is Jacobson's argument, so forceful is his evidence, that one can only wonder why no one has put this all together before.

This is, quite simply, both a book anyone could read, and a book everyone *should* read. It could easily be the foundational text for an ungraduate course in the history of race, and it will likely guide historical thinking on the experience of "assimilation" and "Americanization" for some time.

In *Whiteness of a Different Color,* Matthew Jacobson draws upon congressional legislation and discourse, historical documents and memoirs, and popular culture in an attempt to explain racism's affect on immigration, American domestic and foreign policy, and the self-perceptions of various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Jacobson mentions in the preface that it is his hope to move into the foremost rank of immigration experts with this book, and I think that he accomplished what he set out to do. Eloquently written and thoroughly researched, Jacobson, who is obviously very liberal, argues his points in such a way that any person with common sense would agree with him, given the evidence and excerpts included in the book. Everyone involved in American Studies or American History would be well advised to pick up a copy of this book.

Matthew Frye Jacobson 's Whiteness of a Different Color tells us all how we got in this mess. The book is subtitled European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. "Alchemy" is correct. It means that the "base metal" of Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean and even Western Asian "races" were turned into the "gold" of unadulterated white status. Jacobson explains how "whiteness" was created by colonial elites for the purpose of defending the state from Indian invasions and slave insurrections, and continued by the American republic in order to create a sense of unity in its polyglot European immigrant population. In 1790, United States naturalization law granted citizenship to "free white persons" -- which meant, mostly, those of Anglo-Saxon descent. As the U.S. population became more culturally mixed beginning in the 1840s, with an increase in immigration from non-Anglo Europe, the nation experienced "a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races."

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 I stated in a review of 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 provides a great deal of the formation of whiteness and how it has changed through time. It shows how the construction of a white race came about in America from Anglo Saxons to all Euroepans. It shows how legislation and attitudes about white ethnic groups and Jews have changed through time. It also takes a good look at how whiteness has been transformed by contacts with other races through non-European immigratin, civil rights and America's colonies such as the Phillipeans.

Matt Jabobson has created a sound, brilliantly argued, and above all HISTORICAL work that deals with the multitude of lines that are crossed in all levels of American society in terms of race and ethnicity. His thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis lends more credence to the position that race is a social construction than has previously been posited, and adamantly works through the many possible, and devastating, consequences that emanate from it. Above all, he connects this nuanced discussion directly to the various standards of American citizenship that are so intimately attached to these complex facets of racial standing.

The book was in great condition and was delivered quickly! Pleasure doing business with you!

On page 259 of "Whiteness of A different Color" is a quote attributed to Slovenian writer Louis Adamic, written sometime in 1938:

". . . Slovenians don't think much of the Croatians and vice versa. Many of the Czechs don't like the Slovaks. Few Germans think anything of the Slavs. Most of the non-Jewish groups are more or less anti-Semitic. The Jews scorn the Hunkies, but have this in common with them: they both stick up their noses at the Negro."

The "Alchemy" by which mutually antagonistic European ethnic groups such as those mentioned above became one seamless homogeneous Caucasian Race in the USA is the major theme of Jacobson' book.

Those readers able to work their way through Jacobson's ornamental prose thickets will face some potent and uncomfortable facts and interpretations as they travel on a historical-sociological-cultural journey from the founding of the Republic up to the 1960's black protests. He is to be commended for having the will to sift through a mountain of primary source documents and present his results, offensive as they may be, to the lay public. Many of his assertions, such as the reasons for the economic successes of European immigrant groups, will challenge some long held beliefs.

My main criticism of the book is that the writing lacks precision and clarity. Too often the reader is confronted with some string of words that simply don't make sense, forcing the reader to halt and attempt an instant rewrite, guessing as to the author's intent. It seems that Jacobson's highest priority has been to impress his academic colleagues with his writing flair, his novel syntactical constructions, rather than with conveying facts and ideas precisely to the lay reader. Is precision improved when words normally considered to be nouns are here used as verbs and vice versa? Is clarity improved by decorating the text with an abundance of adjectives? Perhaps in his next book Professor Jacobson will change his writing style so as to elevate precision and clarity to a priority above that of elegance and ornamentation.

In spite of these criticisms and others, such as excess attention to period novels and movies, I recommend Jacobson's book to those interested in the social dynamics that motivated immigrants from antagonistic European nations to unite over time and form a White Supremacist Republic. For a book on a similar if more limited topic, written in a more reader friendly style, I recommend Noel Ignatiev's "How the Irish Became White".

This book is misleading.

According to Cavalli-Sforza's research, the genetic distance between Anglo-Saxons and the Irish is less than 1. They are extremely closely related. Both northern Celtic and Germanic tribes had been closely related for a very long time. Contrast this relatedness, for example, to people who are not related. The genetic distance separating the English from the Japanese is 59. The genetic distance of the English from Sub-Saharan blacks is 109.

I think you get the picture.