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

Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson

Year of Publication: 1998

Thesis:

Argues that whiteness was negotiated through social relations against a white-over-black continuum in which European immigrants were successfully able to consolidate and code themselves as white. Importantly, Jacobsen points how inclusion was as important as exclusion, and how "race" and "color" are two separate but often conflated phenomena. He marks three major historical phases in which whiteness was established: the Naturalization Act of 1790, mass European immigration in 1840, and reconsolidation in the 1920s (followed by 1965 Immigation Act, which offered preference to relatives of previous immigrants).

Time: 1790-1965

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Note on Usage

Introduction: The Fabrication of Race

- Discussion over arbitrariness of race (ex: under which category do Jews go / what is a Caucasian)

- Race developed through court system (ex: Rollins vs. Alabama - no miscegenation b/c Sicilian woman had not been proven to be white)

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF WHITENESS

1. "Free White Persons" in the Republic, 1790-1840

- Irish anti-Native American rhetoric

- Parallel anti-Black groups even though "non-Nordic" groups discriminated against

- Discusses Theodore Allen's Invention of the White Race & Roediger's Wages of Whiteness

2. Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840-1924

- The 1790 Immigration Act paved the way for Chinese Exclusion and Japanese Internment

- During Draft Riots, Irish also policed miscegenation borders and went after other non-whites and whites racially mixing

- Normalizing of Italians as criminals enabled a mass lynching.

- Discusses Leo Frank lynching (Jewish man who owned a factory & a white woman was found dead in the basement)

3. Becoming Caucasian, 1924-1965

HISTORY, RACE, PERCEPTION

4. 1877: The Instability of Race

5. Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews

THE MANUFACTURE OF CAUCASIANS

6. The Crucible of Empire

7. Naturalization and the Courts

8. The Dawning Civil Rights Era

Epilogue: Ethnic Revival and the Denial of White Privilege

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Type:

Cultural

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

importation

Themes:

Critiques:

Quotes:

Notes: It seems like race between the 1840s-1920s was fluid for people with European backgrounds; the construction of whiteness is all against that background.

Whiteness seems to be about pure blood, access to power, and "fitness for self-government"