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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 re-racialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history 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.… (more)
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Jacobson identifies capitalism and republicanism as the two forces that shaped whiteness in the United States (pg. 13). According to Jacobson, while the Revolutionary generation tied race to republicanism on the grounds that only free people could fully participate in democracy, the tie between the two grew stronger through the nineteenth century (pg. 30). The eventual “fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct white races (now in the plural) was theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism, and myriad other venues of popular culture” (pg. 41). Jacobson writes of one particular example, “Racialism thus provided a powerful frame for interpreting and explaining Irish immigrant behaviors of all sorts, and for rearticulating at every turn the unbridgeable chasm separating narratives (Anglo-Saxons) from immigrants (Celts)” (pg. 48). Later, nativism and “the exclusionary logic of the 1924 [immigration] legislation represented not a new deployment of race in American political culture, but merely a new refinement of how the races were to be defined for the purposes of discussing good citizenship” (pg. 87). Like the immigration legislation, legal rulings played a key role in shaping whiteness.
Jacobson writes, “To become ‘Caucasian’ in the 1920s and after…was not simply to be ‘white’…; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white. ‘Caucasian’ identity represents a whiteness discovered and apprehended by that regime of knowledge whose cultural authority is greatest” (pg. 95). Following World War II, culture dominated notions of race rather than biology, with a focus on how races related to one another (pg. 98). In the realm of popular discussions of race, Jacobson writes, “In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme ‘What to Do with Hitler after the War’ by submitting the single sentence, ‘Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America” (pg. 112). Further, Jacobson writes of Harper’s, “Race seems among the organizing principles of the worldview at once demonstrated and reinforced by the magazine’s format” (pg. 161). Most stories discussed the white races in terms familiar to their audience, spreading the ideology of a hierarchy of whites. This, however, changed with the expansionism of the late nineteenth century.
Jacobson writes, “Continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its component – ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ – parts” (pg. 204). By the time of the early Civil Rights Era, “the emergent race politics of the 1930s and after dramatically heightened the salience of ‘Caucasian’ identity by imploring whites to dwell upon their whiteness and to work toward the eradication of its unjust privileges” (pg. 248). Jacobson concludes, “If race as a conceptual category is indeed a theory of history, then race as a perceptual category embodies that history in all its complexity and contradiction” (pg. 142).