On Whiteness of a Different Color

This piece is so expansive that I don’t know I can review it while still doing the work any justice. As a result, I’ll just write a little about major themes as I see them.

Essentially, Jacobson examines the transformation of “whiteness” from the foundation of the United States to the present and picks the concept apart to show us just how whiteness is formed (and isn’t).

To Jacobson, there were three major phases of whiteness in the United States:

• 1790-1840: Convergence of race and “capacity for self governance”—included all people of European descent (?)

• 1840-1924: Breakdown of the white race into a cacophony of hierarchically divided white races

• 1924-Date of publication: Expansion of whiteness, pulling in those who were divided in the second period.

In addition to Jacobson’s views on this, I’d be willing to go so far as to make the case that “whiteness” began to splinter again twenty years ago, with the othering of peoples from the Middle East and North Africa, although the scale of splintering seems to reach nowhere near the levels that occurred in the second period.

One of Jacobson’s main goals with this text is to urge historians to stop thinking about the late-19th, early-20th century with late-20th century racial terminology. Sure, “white” people existed at the time, but the term is so imprecise as to be meaningless. In those decades, people thought about other “whites” in terms of races like “Italic,” “Iberic,” “Hebrew,” “Slavic,” “Celtic,” “Nordic,” and so on. Categorizing them all in the same group when talking about those decades cause us to miss the point—the coherence of being called “white” really only emerged in the 1930s and 1940s (maybe even the 1950s?). Jacobson shows us how this happened.