Barbara Fields’ essay titled “Ideology and Race in American History” seeks to completely delegitimize race’s status in American history as anything other than an ideological construct. Though it is increasingly common (at least in our academic circles) to acknowledge the utterly baseless idea of race and we can discuss it as a social construct, her essay that is only three decades old speaks to a generation that was still grappling with this. Even now, the average person on the street (and the typical Census worker) would have a hard time accepting that race has no scientific basis and is socially constructed, so this essay and the other works we looked at this week are still as relevant as ever.
Reading Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, I was again reminded that race may be imagined but that did not mean it was not a very real part of peoples’ lives. His book is in many ways a continuation of the work that Barbara Fields and others have done. He traces a genealogy of race and the creation of whiteness. Having recently read The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger, I find these two works to be especially interesting because my main exposure to the issues of race typically focused on the experiences of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and others – the “minorities,” in other words. Yet, a close analysis of whiteness has shown me, even more convincingly, how arbitrary race is. Moreover, the obsession with whiteness is really at the root of so much racism – the differentiation that categorize people as white in opposition to others and then place them as superior is necessary to understanding the evolution of race in our society.
Jacobson’s work intervenes in a historiography on whiteness that is dominated primarily by historians of class and race. He acknowledges the deep connections between the two, but as Barbara Fields notes, class has some objective groundings in addition to ideological underpinnings, whereas race has only the latter. Jacobson thus seeks to focus primarily on other politics and cultural roots of racial ideology and whiteness. As he writes, “Since race is a kind of social currency, it seemed most useful to begin with an analysis of its public exchange” (11). Therefore, he uses cultural and social historical methods to build his argument. His analysis of books, films, newspapers, personal correspondence, scientific (or pseudoscientific) journals, court records, and immigration policies is impressive. These sources cannot tell the entire story of how whiteness was constructed, but Jacobson definitely offers many new insights into who was to be included in that very unstable category.
Image from the Montgomery Advertiser, Vol. LXXVII, Issue 21, p. 4.
Jacobson’s work also rests nicely within recent immigration historiography, since he has joined many scholars to call into question the acceptance of “modern notions of ‘ethnicity'” (9). The ethnic paradigm is inadequate because accepting that different immigrants were always part of discrete ethnic groups is to overlook the influence of race in creating whiteness. Thus, Jacobson focuses on groups from different nationalities to show how their own communities were ascribed certain racial identities; he also shows how they often adopted and reified these racial ideas for their own purposes. By looking at various immigrant groups, Jacobson looks at the “fabrication of race” – a subtitle to his introduction that points to how race is something that is both created and false. I appreciate that he notes that even though these different European ethnic groups were differentiated from other whites at times in American history, those “so-called white ethnics” cannot “conveniently dissociate themselves from the historic legacies of white privilege” (12).
His book is divided into three parts. His first chapters discuss the early Republic. Here, his overarching argument damages exceptionalist notions of the United States that view it as a truly democratic nation that merely devolved into a racist, elitist state for a short period of time. On the contrary, American citizenship was always predicated on “whiteness.” An obsession with the ability for self-rule (usually associated with skin color or place of origin) dominated discussions about new immigrants and the existing blacks and Native Americans. Part Two focuses on perceptions of race by highlighting a key year, 1877, and using the experience of Jews to show the how tenuous the label of “whiteness” really was. Section Three discusses the “manufacture of Caucasians” by analyzing racial science in depth. In this section, Jacobson examines the role that empire and the immigration restrictions from the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 had in creating Caucasian whiteness. He argues that the emerging civil rights movement after the first two decades of the twentieth century “hastened the reunification of whiteness or papered over its presumed fault lines” (202). He makes very compelling arguments, but I still feel the need to learn more about the history of race to see how much more there is to the story.
American Isolationism Cartoon, 1921 (Library of Congress)
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