Becoming caucasian: Vicissitudes of whiteness in american politics and culture

Abstract

We perceive “race” as a feature of the natural landscape, fixed in the unchanging realities of biology, but racial categories change markedly in response to shifting political, economic, and social circumstances across historical time. In the United States conceptions of “race” function as idioms of power, mediating the conflicting imperatives of a capitalist economy and a porous, democratic political culture: where labor demands generate demographic diversity, “race” is deployed to describe the civic virtues or shortcomings of the many peoples on the American scene. The racialization and reracialization of European immigrants across three periods in U.S. history (1790–1840s; 1840s‐1920s; and 1920s‐1960s) demonstrates the mutability of racial constructions and their political character. The racial languages and logics of Laura Z. Hobson's 1947 novel Gentleman's Agreement demonstrate the instability of “whiteness” as a monolithic category and the unevenness in racial “certainty” as one regime of racial knowledge gives way to the next.