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

“The vicissitudes of race represent glacial, nonlinear cultural movements. Nonetheless, the history of whiteness in the United States is divisible into three great epochs.”

Jacobson takes a historical approach to whiteness, defining three epochs. This historical approach differs from the approaches of whiteness studies scholars who had determined the field prior to the publication of Whiteness of a Different Color, such as Theodore Allen and David Roediger, who approach whiteness in relation to labor.

“The European immigrants’ experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where Europeanness—that is to say, whiteness—was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to.”

Jacobson introduces his theory of whiteness as a form of property, enabling one to own other humans as property as it also protects one from ever becoming human property. Naturalization as white, then, conveyed more than just citizenship; it conveyed privileges that other races, even when naturalized, did not fully possess.

“As scholars like Leon Higginbotham, Jr., have suggested, in practice the idea of citizenship had become thoroughly entwined with the idea of ‘whiteness’ (and maleness) because what a citizen really was, at bottom, was someone who could help put down a slave rebellion or participate in Indian wars.”

This theory of early whiteness as defined by the 1790 naturalization legislation revolves around violence as well as gender, which Jacobson includes only as a parenthetical here. Jacobson’s analysis of whiteness generally assumes maleness, paying little attention to the ways women were excluded both implicitly and explicitly from citizenship. Though gender is not his focus, his analysis often assumes a collapse of maleness and whiteness.