Caucasians are Made and Not Born: How European Immigrants Became White People (1999)

Caucasians are Made and Not Born: How European Immigrants Became White People David A. Gerber (bio) Matthew Frye Jacobson. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. x + 280 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Rooted in the shared understanding that whiteness, like blackness, is not a natural but rather a constructed source of human differentiation, studies of the formation of white racial identity seem to be everywhere today, not only in history, but throughout the behavioral sciences and humanities. 1 Fused to post-structuralist language and deconstructive purpose as they frequently are in highly visible literary studies, it is easy to gain the impression that this is a wholly new intellectual project, created, for example, by the post-colonial critics. Within American historiography, however, the present proliferation of whiteness studies is not so much a new phenomenon, even when—as in Matthew Frye Jacobson’s impressive study—it is guided to a significant extent by some of the languages and purposes of late-twentieth-century thought, as the culmination of decades of response to questions about the origins of white racism that began to be posed especially insistently in the 1960s. The language of social construction was absent at the time, but the understandings of race as a constructed category were the same. Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black (1968), which modestly stated its purpose as the examination of “white attitudes to the Negro,” was actually a profound examination of the psychological and intellectual constructions of whiteness that accompanied the English colonists efforts to make sense of their interactions with enslaved Africans and Native Americans, as they formed their own identity as settlers in the New World. Jordan used historical literary, legal, and scholarly texts as the basis for his inquiry, leaving open the question of whether artifacts of literate culture could speak to the mentalities of the majority. The outlines of a contrasting, materialist position had actually been laid out years before by W.E.B. Du Bois, whose Black Reconstruction in America (1935) speculated on the racial basis of the attachment of the white working class to a social system that often seemed bent on its exploitation. Largely [End Page 437] neglected until the 1960s in mainstream American scholarship, DuBois’ Marxian-inspired analysis was picked up again in such works as Edmund Morgan’s American Freedom, American Slavery (1975), which investigated the place of daily contests for power and material resources in formulating his understanding of the ways in which the lower orders of English colonists in Virginia came to define their interests and identities against those of Africans and Native Americans. These differences in understanding and method in the now decades-old work of Morgan and Jordan are not insignificant for understanding how Whiteness of a Different Color fits into the historical literature of white racialization. Early on, Jacobson provides a critique of the materialist formulation of the problem laid out in the work of the labor historians David Roediger and Theodore Allen, who have been working along the same conceptual lines as Du Bois and Morgan in their studies of the role of race in the consolidation of an ethnoculturally diverse white working class. 2 For Jacobson, the problems with the whiteness studies inspired by labor historians is that while, from their class perspective, they succeed in relativizing race, revealing it not as biological fact but as social fabrication, they reify white, as if it were one stable identity throughout time. Moreover, to his mind, they fail to reveal the full package of social assets, beyond the limitation of racial minority political and economic competition, that has accrued to those able to claim membership in the exclusive, if growing, club that has been the white race. Jacobson himself succeeds grandly in addressing the first of these criticisms, but less well in coming to terms with the other. Whiteness of A Different Color is a study of the discourse of whiteness in its relationship to European immigration throughout a broad sweep of American national history, from the Naturalization Law of 1789, which promised citizenship rights only to “free white persons,” to the dawning of the civil...