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

In other words, people who came from Poland, Germany, Italy, and Greece, as well as Jews from many nations, all became, by virtue of the "melting pot" ethic, "Caucasian" whites. But, as the graphically racist cartoons reproduced in the book show, the creation of whiteness was--and is--by no means an easy, continuous process. Jacobson details the political assault on white racism that culminated in the civil rights movement and cites the contemporary "revival and denial of white privilege" in the United States. Although he expresses doubt that a dismissal of white privilege will happen anytime soon, he does hope that in "recognizing the historical fabrication, the changeability, and the contingencies of whiteness, we might begin to look in a new way upon race, the power relations it generates, and the social havoc it wreaks." --Eugene Holley Jr.

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America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counterhistory of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation--race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration--are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

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.


Contemporary scholarship at its finest.   May 2, 2000
22 out of 26 found this review helpful

"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.


A truly remarkable achievement!   March 10, 1999
21 out of 26 found this review helpful

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.


Are "white" Americans "passing" as white?   November 24, 2003
Blanco1927 (United States)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful

Matthew Frye Jacobson 's Whiteness of a Different Color tells us all how we got into 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 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.Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule


An excellent piece of scholarly work   August 20, 1999
14 out of 19 found this review helpful

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.