The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940

Abstract

The early twentieth century was a particularly labile period for ideologies of race in the United States. The century began with Italians, Greeks, Jews, Slavs, and Irish streaming in from Europe, many hoping to win a place at the American table. White supremacists thundered against “race suicide” and praised the virtues of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic blood, while African Americans remained out of sight in the black belt. Within decades millions of immigrants had passed safely into whiteness and were drawing a stark color line in northern cities against black migrants from the South. By midcentury the racial landscape was mostly binary: black and white, determined by skin color. While the outlines of this narrative have already been sketched, Matthew Pratt Guterl's spirited study provides some intriguing texture. He focuses on New York City as an incubator of race consciousness. Racial difference was construed differently around the country, he allows, but Manhattan's ascendance as a center of global capital, media, and anticolonialist movements made it a particularly important site. The Great War, the Great Migration, the postwar Red Scare, and race riots served as historical engines driving the process by which a messy racial taxonomy became consolidated into the biracial dyad.