The Creation of 'Whiteness'

Question 1

Judy Hefland on whiteness

Online Paper

Answer 1

Whiteness is shaped and maintained by the full array of social institutions–legal, economic, political, educational, religious, and cultural.

The dualism inherent in whiteness is clearly illustrated in the foregoing discussion of immigration policy. There are only two categories that matter–white and non-white. Whiteness is defined by determining who is not white

Question 2

Naturalisation Law 1790

Answer 2

In 1790, the Federal government ruled that the right to become a naturalized citizen was reserved to “free white persons.”

Question 3

How did laws concerning marriage help to maintain and construct a white population?

Answer 3

• 1931 a woman lost her citizenship if she married a man ineligible for citizenship.

Question 4

Henry Lopez on the significance of immigration restriction in the creation of whiteness

Haney Lopez, I. F. (1996). White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.

Answer 4

‘… the categories of White and non-White became tangible when certain persons were granted citizenship and others were excluded. A “white” citizenry took on physical form, in part because of the demographics of migration, but also because of the laws and cases proscribing non-White naturalization and immigration.’

Question 5

Brodkin on how labouring occupations impacted the definition of whiteness

Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race In America, Rutgers University Press (1999)

Answer 5

Brodkin writes that the European immigrants who “took their places as the masses of ‘unskilled’ and residentially ghettoized industrial workers … found that they were being classified as members of specific and inferior European races, and for almost half a century, they were treated as racially not-quite-white.”

Question 6

Did the Irish ‘become’ white in opposition to free blacks? - One thesis with evidence §

Answer 6

• Irish were attracted to the Democratic party in the war years (1860-64) as they were anti-nativist and played the angle that free blacks would threaten the status of Irish workers

EVIDENCE
In 1844, Henry Clay of Virginia gave instructions for the writing of a pamphlet to be used in his campaign for President.

[T]he great aim . . . should be to arouse the [white] laboring classes in the free States against abolition. Depict the consequences to them of immediate abolition; they [emancipated African Americans] being freed would enter into competition with the free labor; with the American, the Irish, the German; reduce his wages; be confounded with him; reduce his moral and social standing. . .”

CONCLUSIONS

• Hefland suggests that Irish become white, as opposed to ‘not white’ was conscious effort to elevate and protect their economic status
• –> Becoming white was partly due to economic concerns

Question 7

Ignatiev and the concept of ‘white men’s work’

Answer 7

“White” workers performed more skilled labor, while non-skilled, hard and dirty work was reserved for non-white workers, including “Hunkies” or “Italians” or other European groups not yet enfolded into whiteness as fully white.

‘White niggers’ were white workers in arduous unskilled job or in subservient positions

To ‘nigger’ was to do hard labour

EVIDENCE

• The famine Irish infrequently achieved rural land ownership.
• Within large cities Irish-American males were skilled workers perhaps half as often as German-Americans, and were unskilled at least twice as often.
• 47 percent of the Irish and only 12 percent of the Germans were unskilled in Boston in 1850
• 3/4 serving women in New York were Irish in the 1850s
• Irish slaves/bound boys in the Civil War

Question 8

How were the Irish seen by those who were, without question, white?

Roediger

Answer 8

• Derogatory insults, not unlike those used against African Americans
• ‘Celtic Race’ seen as far inferior to Nordic, Anglo Saxon
• Census Office saw Irish as distinct from even ‘foreign population’

‘In short, it was by no means clear that the Irish were white’

Question 9

What historical comparison’s can be drawn between African Americans and the Irish?

Answer 9

• Both had fled their homelands, either forced to flee or as result of oppression
• Blacks had fled South for North
• In 1842, 70,000 Irish in Ireland signed an antislavery address and petition, which called on Irish Americans
  to ‘cling by the abolitionists’

Question 10

What socioeconomic comparisons could be drawn between Irish Americans and Blacks?

Answer 10

• Both did the same sorts of unskilled, low-wage, non-white work
• Both lived in the same neighbourhoods (slums)

Question 11

Evidence of black-Irish cooperation

Answer 11

• Socialised together
• Fought together in civil war
• In the 1834 anti-Black, anti-abolitionist New York City riots, Irish militiamen helped to restore order. Indeed, the
  anti-abolition riots of the 1830s generally drew little Irish participation

Question 12

Roediger on the value of whiteness for immigrants

Answer 12

Irish-Americans instead treasured their whiteness

, as entitling them to both political rights and to jobs .

Question 13

Evidence of Irish-Black/Chinese antagonism

Answer 13

• Dennis Kearney, Workingmen’s Party

- Derogatory language ‘go back to Africa’/’down with the Nagurs’ (sic)

Question 14

Roediger on political mobilisation as a means of the Irish becoming white

Answer 14

The success of the Irish m being recognized as white resulted largely from the political power of Irish and other immigrant voter .

Question 15

What was the typical status of a pre-famine Irish immigrant to America

Answer 15

” But hard and usually unskilled wage work was nonetheless the typical experience of the prefamine Irish Catholic immigrant, with the group being far poorer, less skilled and more urban compared with native born
Americans or with other European immigrants”

Question 16

How did the Great Famine bring a new influx of vunerable immigrants to America

Answer 16

-The Great Famine turned these tendencies almost into iron rules.

Between 1845 and 1855, Ireland lost over two million emigrants - a quarter of her population - with famine-associated deaths taking over a million
more.

The evictions of 1849, 1850 and 1851 alone forced a million Irish from their homes.

–> Roughly three in four Catholic Irish famine-era migrants came to the United States, now seeking only survival.

Question 17

The Catholic Church as an institution to protect the status of the Irish

Answer 17

• Most Bishops in the United States were Irish by the 1850s

- Reflected the pro slavery views of its members

Question 18

The Democratic Party as an Institution to protect the status of the Irish

Answer 18

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IMMIGRANT VOTE

• Democratic party created a broad and ‘inclusive’ community of whites
• Irish vote, large enough to be significant, was targeted by Democrats. As a white supremacist party, they argued for the whiteness of the Irish

Evidence:
1830, 1/30 ballots from immigrant
1845, 1/7

NATIVIST/ANTI-IMMIGRATION STANCE
- In 1830s, attempt by Pennsylvania Democrats to disenfranchise blacks by constitutional amendment
- Increasing population of Chinese from late-1840s
-

Question 19

The language of ‘whiteness’ in the Lincoln- Douglas debates of 1858

Answer 19

Douglas argued that American ancestors were ‘not all of English origin’ but were also of Scotch, Irish, German, French, and Norman descent, indeed ‘from every branch of the Caucasian race.’

Question 20

PRIMARY SOURCE: Caleb Cushing, Republican Senator in Massachusetts, on the whiteness of the Irish

Answer 20

‘to an equality with me…the white man, - my blood and race, whether he be a Saxon of England or a Celt of Ireland.’ He added, ‘but I do not admit as my equals either the red man of America, or the yellow man of Asia, or the black man of Africa. ‘

Question 21

How did nativists characterise the celtic ‘race’ of new Irish immigrants as inferior, and what problems did they encounter?

Answer 21

• Long history of Protestant Irish immigration to America. 15 000 leave Ireland in reign of Charles I (D. Smith)
• Difficult to tell them apart from Protestant Celts, or indeed Anglo-Americans
• Focused instead on cultural assimilability

Question 22

Roediger on the idea that Irish Racism was part of a desire to protect their economic status

Answer 22

But to go from the fact that Irish workers really
fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past

• If jobs were important, why stress competition with blacks and not whites?

Question 23

Why did Irish Americans attack blacks?

Answer 23

• Harder for them to retaliate than whites victomised ‘with impunity’ (Kerby Miller)

Question 24

What thoughts or desires did the Irish project onto Blacks, according to Roediger?

Answer 24

The pychological wages of Irish whiteness were sometimes of the sort based on rational, if horribly constrained, choices - HOW CAN ONE KNOW THAT?

Question 25

What, according to, WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye, was the difference between white and non-white?

EVIDENCE
Rollins vs State of Alabama

Answer 25

‘To become Caucasian in the 1920s and after, then, was not simply to be white; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white.’

Jim Rollins accused of miscegenation in 1922 with a woman from Sicily

Because it cannot be proven that the Sicilian is certainly white, cannot be found guilty

–> Sub-categories of whiteness were, argues Frye, a ‘probationary’ whiteness

Question 26

What factors led to the concept of whiteness as colour, as opposed to the separate white races, taking hold in the 1920s?

WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye,

Answer 26

• Passing of quota acts meant reduced traffic from ‘undesirable’ white races and less attention given to the divisions
• Civil Rights movement/anti-Jim crow at mid-century made whiteness into ‘a monolith of privelege’ against blackness. More binary distinctions, different white races were, again, less relevant
• By 1920s-1960s, Irishness not a visual trait but a cultural one.

Question 27

PRIMARY SOURCE: Stoddard, ‘Reforging America’ 1927

Answer 27

• After Johnson Act
  ‘most of the immigrant stock are racially not to distinct for ultimate assimilation’
  ‘so basically like us in blood, culture and outlook that their ultimate assimilation is only a matter of time’

Question 28

How does Peter Kolchin understand Roediger’s argument in ‘The Wages of Whiteness’

Why should this concern historians?

WHITENESS STUDIES: THE NEW HISTORY OF THE RACE IN AMERICA

Answer 28

ARGUMENT:
One of the earliest of the historical whiteness works, The Wages of Whiteness (1991) focuses on how white workers in the antebellum United States came to identify as
white. Roediger’s essential starting point is that because the white working class in the United States emerged in a slaveholding republic, its members came to define
themselves by what they were not: slaves and blacks.

PROBLEM?
Roediger’s argument is that the Irish came to ‘identify’ as black - did they?

It makes sense to argue that the Irish set themselves against blacks to advance their position, but without evidence that the Irish wished to, or consciously did, identify as white, his argument can be no more than conjectural

Question 29

Kolchin’s criticism of Roediger on his discussion of Irish fantasies projected on blacks

WHITENESS STUDIES: THE NEW HISTORY OF THE RACE IN AMERICA

Answer 29

He also provides an intriguing IF HIGHLY SPECULATIVE psychological argument that as the country industrialized, the increasingly controlled and disciplined white population came to view blacks as their former, uninhibited selves, a perception highlighted in the
“acting out” evident in the newly popular blackface and minstrelsy, in which participants could “both display and reject the ‘natural self

EVIDENCE
- Mutilation of black bodies in boston in 1919

Question 30

Overview of WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye,

Answer 30

OVERVIEW
Matthew Frye Jacobson’s overall subject is the same as Roediger’s how people came to “be” white-his subjects are European immigrants to the United States over the long period from 1790 to 1965, and his focus is on how other Ameri- cans perceived those immigrants, not on their self-perception.

STAGES

1)
From the 1790s to the 1840s, in an era of relatively few immigrants, Americans saw people as either white or black.

2)
Between the 1840s and the 1920s, a period of massive foreign immigration and pervasive prejudice against various immigrant groups, there emerged a pattern of “variegated whiteness” in which some groups appeared better-whiter-than others.

3)
Finally, beginning in the 1920s, with immigration
restriction, colour again triumphed as a badge of race, and Americans came to see and celebrate the diversity of-a “Caucasian” race that encompassed diverse nationalities previously deemed racially deficient

STRENGTHS?
- Less speculative as not written from the perspective of those who may have ‘become’ white

Question 31

WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye, criticisms of Roediger

Answer 31

Indeed, he suggests that in focusing too heavily on "class
 and economics," Roediger is overly deterministic and misses "the full complexity of whiteness in its vicissitudes."

Warranted?

In chapter four, Roediger: But to go from the fact that Irish workers really fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past’

Question 32

What does Kolchin see as a problem in the studies of whiteness?

WHITENESS STUDIES: THE NEW HISTORY OF THE RACE IN AMERICA

Answer 32

There can be no doubt, for example, that many antebellum Americans viewed the Irish as a degraded and savage people, but whether they saw lack of whiteness as the key source of this inferior status is dubious

In an argument further developed by Ignatiev, Roediger asserts that “it was by no means clear that the Irish were white.” They present little evidence, however, that most Ameri-cans viewed the Irish as non-white

Indeed, the whiteness studies authors often display a notable lack of precision in asserting the nonwhite status of despised groups. Roediger suggests that Irish whiteness was “by no means clear”; Ignatiev speaks of “strong tendencies . . . to consign the Irish, if not to the black race, then to an intermediate race located between white and black”; Neil Foley, in discussing prejudice against poorwhites in central Texas, proclaims that “not all whites . . . were equally white” and suggests that landlords felt that their tenants “lacked certain qualities of whiteness” Brodkin states that “for almost half a century, [Jews] were treated as racially not- quite- white”

Question 33

PRIMARY SOURCE: Frederick Douglas on Irish immigrants taking black jobs

Answer 33

“Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and colour entitle him to special favour. These white men are becoming houseservants, cooks, stewards, waiters, and flunkies. For
aught I see they adjust themselves to their stations with all proper humility. If they cannot rise to the dignity of white men, they show that they can fall to the degradation of black men.”

Question 34

Ignatiev, How the Irish became white, on how Irish protected their white status

Answer 34

To be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for the Irish to have a competitive advantage over Afro-Americans in the labor market; in order for them to avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found.

Question 35

Demographics of Irish immigration

IGNATIEV

Answer 35

1840 to 1849 there were 1,400,000 immigrants;

from 1850to 1859 the total was 2,700,000. Of these, the Irish formed the largest group, 41.4 percent of the total immigration

Question 36

Ignatiev’s thesis

Answer 36

• looks at how the Irish ‘became white’
• Oppressed race left homeland and began to engage with the system of race heirarchy in America
• ‘To enter the white race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society.’
• To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being
  sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres

‘white skin made them eligible but did not guarantee them admittance’ - AGREES WITH ROEDIGER

Question 37

Eric Arnesen’s criticisms of whiteness studies in WHITENESS AND THE HISTORIANS’ IMAGINATION

Answer 37

‘potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws’

‘differences of nativeness - culture, language and religion, and perceptions of race - though not necessarily whiteness, operated to keep them apart’

‘by manipulating definitions and putting words into historical subjects’ mouths, the Irish became white because historians, not their contemporaries, first made them ‘not white’ before making them ‘white’

to much psychoanalysis by Roediger

Overall, problems make it ‘a problematic category for historical analysis’

Question 38

Ngai on the significance of the 1924 immigration act to the construction of whiteness

The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924

Answer 38

Ngai, Immigration Act 1924

At another level, the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of Euro- pean descent shared a common whiteness that made them distinct from those deemed to be not white

Although nativists commonly referred to southern and eastern Europeans as “undesirable races,” their eligibility to citizenship as “white persons” was never challenged

Question 39

Ngai on the legal construction of whiteness and its significance

Answer 39

• The judicial genealogy of the rules of racial eligibility to citizenship followed a racial logic different from that of the legislative discourse surrounding the quota laws. While the latter emphasised eugenics and the superiority of Nordics, scientific race theory proved inadequate to the classificatory challenge that eligibility to citizenship, and Asiatic exclusion generally, required of the law

Question 40

What was the difference between the legal and ‘common’ constructions of whiteness?

Lopez, Ian H. White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print., p. 4

Answer 40

“’Common knowledge’ rationales, appeal[ing] to popular, widely held conceptions of races and racial divisions”,[7] and “scientific evidence” rationales, which “justified racial divisions by reference to the naturalistic studies of humankind”

Question 41

Re Ah Yup (1878)

Answer 41

Ah Yup, citizen of China, requests to naturalise and become a US citizen

. Is a person of the Mongolian race a “white person” within the meaning of the statute (naturalisation law 1790)
?

Those called white may be found of every shade from the lightest blonde to the most swarthy brunette. But
these words in this country, at least, have undoubtedly acquired a well settled meaning in common popular speech…one would scarcely fail to understand that the party employing the words “white person” would intend a person of the Caucasian race.

RULING

Thus, whatever latitudinarian construction might otherwise have been given to the term “white person,” it is entirely clear that congress intended by this legislation to exclude Mongolians from the right of naturalization. I am, therefore, of the opinion that anative of China, of the Mongolian race, is not a white person within the meaning of the act of congress.

Question 42

In re Najour (1909)

Answer 42

In re Najour, the petitioner’s application for citizenship was granted based on a “scientific evidence” rationale. In his opinion on the case, District Judge Newman argued that the term “free white persons,” “ refers to race, rather than to color, and fair or dark complexion should not be allowed to control, provided the person seeking naturalization comes within the classification of the white or Caucasian race”

Question 43

Thind vs US
The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924

Answer 43

Bhagat Singh Thind, a “high class Hindu,” had argued his eligibility to citizenship as a white person based on his Aryan and Caucasian roots

The government rejected Thind’s claim to whiteness as ridiculous. “In the popular conception,” it stated, “he is an alien to the white race and part of the ‘white man’s burden’

he imposes it.” The Court agreed, stating, “The word [Caucasian] by common usage has acquired a popular meaning, not clearly defined to be sure, but sufficiently so to enable us to say that its popular as distinguished from its scientific application is of appreciation

Question 44

Ozawa vs US

The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924

Answer 44

Ozawa the Supreme Court struggled with the problem of racial classification.

The Court acknowledged that color as an indicator of race was insufficient, given the “overlapping of races and a gradual merging of one into the other, without any
practical line of separation.” Yet, the Court resisted the logical conclusion that no scientific grounds for race existed.

It sidestepped the problem of classification by
simply asserting that white and Caucasian were one and the same, concluding, with circular reasoning, that Japanese cannot be Caucasian because they are not white.

Question 45

Historian Joshua Zeitz in his White Ethnic New York states that….

Answer 45

“whiteness did not equal sameness. Jewish, Italian, and Irish Americans continued to view the world through distinct prisms, and to interpret a range of political,
social, and cultural issues differently from each other. In grafting race so tightly onto ethnicity, historians have lost perspective on the diversity among and between different white urban dwellers in midcentury America.

Question 46

Kevin Kenny ‘Twenty Years of Irish Historiography’

Answer 46

To pose the well-known question of “how the Irish became white” presupposed that the Irish did
become white. But this presupposition introduced an often fatal element of circularity into the argument

Question 47

Bayer, ‘Another look at whiteness’

Answer 47

whiteness is a valuable concept for understanding how groups considered white generally benefited in American society with regard to wage, occupational mobility, and acceptance

The conclusion is that a white racial identity has been overstated but does exist, and ethnicity in the form of cultural patterns, values, and behaviours can still be relevant over generations

Question 48

Ralph Walso Emerson, 20s-30s-

Answer 48

I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson