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

Theodore Allen’s Invention of the White Race and David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness are the most notable works studying whiteness at the turn of the 21st century. Allen’s work studies the relativity of whiteness, tracing how the Irish gain standing in their transformation from Celts to whites upon immigrating to the United States. Like Allen, Roediger is interested in whiteness as framed by questions of labor, and he focuses on the ways that impoverished workers are compensated by white privilege, thus undermining labor alliances outside of whiteness.

Despite Jacobson’s admiration for these texts, he describes three ways that he thinks they are short-sighted: first, neither deals fully with the “vicissitudes” of whiteness, so that neither asks how the categories of whiteness, Caucasian, and Celt interact with each other in the case of the Irish, for example. Second, neither thinks about whiteness against history, broadly conceived, asking how whiteness might be perceived and constructed differently from the 1700s to the 1900s. The third, most important shortcoming is that neither approaches the construction of whiteness outside of issues of class and social labor control.

Jacobson does not want to minimize the context of class and labor surrounding whiteness, but since these two pivotal works have already considered whiteness in this context, he wants to examine other contexts, especially those concerned with national subjectivity.