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

Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race is a historical analysis published by Harvard University Press in 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color was the 1999 joint winner of the Ralph J. Bunche award from the American Political Science Association. The book examines the evolution of racial categorization and identity in the United States, particularly focusing on how various European immigrant groups, initially perceived as distinct “races,” gradually assimilated into the broader category of “white” Americans. The book’s themes include Shifting Constructions in Whiteness, Property-in-Whiteness, and The Construction of the White/Black Binary.

Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies & History and Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on race from 1790-present with a focus on immigration, migration, citizenship, civil rights, and imperialism. In addition to Whiteness of a Different Color, he is the author of six academic monographs: Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era (2023); Odetta’s One Grain of Sand (2019); The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present (2018); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He also co-authored with Gaspar Gonzalez What Have they Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (2006).

This study guide refers to the first Harvard UP paperback edition, published in 1999.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism and refer to outdated racialized terms. These are mostly rendered in quotation marks, but at times, quotation marks are omitted for the sake of clarity. Other race-related terms are sometimes written using undermining quotes to emphasize their status as social constructions.

Summary

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race examines the shifting nature of race in the United States and, specifically, whiteness as a racialized category. As part of the field of whiteness studies, Whiteness of a Different Color investigates the ways that whiteness is politically, legally, and socially constructed. Though whiteness—and race, more generally—is not biologically based and thus not “natural,” it nonetheless has profound material consequences for all humans, white or not.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I examines the history of whiteness, immigration, and citizenship during three eras in the United States. This first era, 1790-1840, begins with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which established that only “free white persons” could be naturalized, thus determining that only immigrants deemed white could apply for citizenship. The second period, 1840-1924, begins with a consideration of the influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s as a result of the Great Famine and concludes with the Johnson Act of 1924, which limited the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, who were considered lesser races. Jacobson examines the ways that the Irish, colonized by the British and approached as “savages,” posed challenges to the definition of whiteness but were nonetheless politically included as white upon immigration to the United States. The final historical period examined is 1924-1965, which considers the ways whiteness functions within the civil rights movement, becoming further consolidated as white supremacy was foregrounded in anti-racist activism.

Part II moves away from the consideration of historical shifts over spans of time to focus on the conceptions and perceptions of Jewishness as both white and other in 1877. Part III examines what Jacobson identifies as three factors in the consolidation of whiteness under the rubric of the scientific category of Caucasian: imperialism, nativism within the judicial system, and the civil rights movement.

Whiteness of a Different Color is grounded in tracing the ramifications of a prerequisite whiteness that is nonetheless left undefined in the 1790 Naturalization Act. Whiteness was left open to interpretation, and its definition has shifted throughout American history. In the 19th century, scientific definitions of the “Caucasian race” were employed to authorize whiteness and resulted in a range of population groups that had not been considered fully white before being included under the rubric of Caucasian. This changed the identities of those included, not only in the privileges that were afforded in whiteness but also in the cultural losses that came with being identified as white: long-standing cultural differences among populations were absorbed by whiteness, so that “white people” were homogenized and unique cultures consumed within this larger group identity.

At the same time, whiteness is tantamount to privilege and carries with it what Jacobson calls “property-in-whiteness” (237). While enslavers in the United States were not exclusively white, with some enslavers being Indigenous and even African American, the vast majority were white, and the enslaved were almost exclusively Black. Thus, whiteness enabled not only the legal and political possession of citizenship but also the “possession” of oneself, as it also enabled the possession of Black people as property. At its core, whiteness is constructed as the antithesis to Blackness, with whites holding property and Black people being property. In 1870, Black Americans were made eligible for citizenship, but immigrant petitioners seeking naturalization at this time did so only through cases arguing their whiteness. In this way, a range of European people perceived as non-white could distance themselves from Black Americans and seek “property-in-whiteness,” using this unjust system to their advantage.

The ethnic revival of the 1970s was led by white people of ancestry that had been considered only liminally white until the mid-20th century. Those leading this revival argued that whiteness was imposed on “ethnic whites” who had not been in the United States during slavery or Indigenous displacement. The ethnic revival foregrounds the differences within supposedly homogenous white experience, highlighting the ways that ethnic whites are perceived as white and experience many white privileges but do not feel white and also often resist a whiteness that largely destroyed their cultures. Jacobson emphasizes, however, the privileges that ethnic whites gain in their inclusion in whiteness that other non-white racialized groups do not share.

The ethnic revival nonetheless highlights how whiteness is systemic and not a personal choice. Despite the systemic power of whiteness, many whites themselves have tried to lobby against whiteness’s inherent violence. The Communist Party of the early 20th century held radically anti-racist policies that refused what it called “white chauvinism.” The civil rights movement, too, in its advocacy for Black rights and racial justice, revolved around a resistance to systemic racism, which depends on whiteness. This Black-led movement called on whites to become aware of whiteness, employ these privileges in service of anti-racist work, and refuse these privileges, so that whiteness can begin to be dismantled.