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

Chapter 6 opens with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which the narrator initially perceives the line manager of the ship, Dirk Peters, who is Indigenous, as a “savage.” After contact with sub-Saharan Africans, however, Pym’s perception of Peters changes to one in which he sees himself and Peters as the only “white men” around.

Jacobson then moves into a broader discussion of the role of imperialism, which both cultivated a collective group of white men at the same time that whiteness was fractured into a hierarchy of whitenesses. As evidenced by Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, this whiteness is consolidated into resistance to Blackness. Thus, while imperial conquests from 1840 until the early 20th century were done under the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, they increasingly depended on a homogenized whiteness that included different European ethnic groups.

Trans-Pacific imperialism was heralded by many immigrant journals in the context of expansion by way of territories, such as Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa at the turn of the 20th century. Often it was not imperialism itself but anti-imperialism that depended on racist ideology. Some of the most explicit domestic anti-Black racists, such as Ben Tillman of South Carolina, were insistently anti-imperialist not out of respect for others, but out of a desire not to be tainted by contact.