Whiteness of a different color
Subtitle: European immigrants and the alchemy of race
By: Matthew Frye Jacobson.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
Subjects: European Americans -- Race identity; Whites -- Race identity -- United States; Immigrants -- United States -- History; Racism -- United States -- History; United States -- Race relations
Description: America's racial odyssey is the subject of this 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-323) and index.