The World of Whiteness

Abstract

20 Historically Speaking · September/October 2007 The World of Whiteness Hasia R. Diner Those wishing to identify the most significant trends in the writingof American historyin the 1990s will righdy name that moment in intellectual time as the era when the concept of "whiteness" came, saw, and conquered. They might even be justified in labeling this the "whiteness era." That decade launched some of die most important books in the field, some of which by the early 21st century have already been canonized with the adjective "classic," particularly David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: RaceandtheMakingof theAmerican Working Class (1991) and Matthew FryeJacobson's, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), falling approximately at the beginning and the end of the ten years in which this theme blazed to prominence among scholars of American history. In between these two broad-brush works, which spanned nearly the entirety of American history, smaller studies appeared. Noel Ignatiev offered his take on How the Irish Became White (1995), while Karen Brodkin followed up in 2000 with her statement on the same process, but different group, in How theJews Became White Folks. These books, which made as their subject the process bywhich Europeanimmigrants to theUnited States and their children achieved the status of white people, represented merely the best known, most broadly read, and widely discussed of the genre. Numerous other books and an even greater compendium of articles included in their tides and in their subject matter the concepts "whiteness" and "whitening." So, too, conference papers and symposia paidhomage to thebirth andtriumph of these linked concepts. Within a fewyears of the first emergence in book form of the concept of whiteness as a historical process, the term began to appear in coundess works, published and unpublished, written and oral. Scholars used whiteness as away to explain a vast and complicated phenomenon, which involved simultaneously how European immigrants suffered the stigma of being considered by the larger American public as somehow akin to or like black people, and how those immigrants came to learn America's racial rules and donned the trappings of whiteness by participatingactivelyin anti-black behavior and rhetoric. The use of the terms and concepts associated withwhiteness studies became an academicvogue of the last years of the 20th century. Their invocation indeed has become as standard as the employment of such now familiar terms as "invention," "construction ," and the "making of," intellectual constructs popularintheperiodbefore the emergence of theliterature onwhiteness. In the early 21st century asserting that someone or some group "became white" amounts to offering an explanation. To say that the concept of whiteness became standard parlance inAmerican historical discourse in The Ignorant Vote - Honors are easy," cover of Harper's Weekly, December 9, 1876. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ6257340 ]. the 1990s and beyond does not mean that it conveyed the same meaning to all who used it. Historians used the terms of whiteness studies differentiy, and focused on different aspects of the process. They did not necessarily concur on when and how the European immigrants and their children became white. They differed among themselves as to whether becoming white involved the deliberate actions of the immigrantswho clamored to exchange dieir less prestigious non-white status for the more entided one of white, or if whitening flowed direcdy from the larger society, which decided when and where and upon which of the Europeans to bestow the privileges of whiteness. Yet scholars have all taken as given a few basic points, both conceptual and empirical. They all work from an understanding that, first, white people have race, too. To refer to race does not exclude from consideration those with pale skin. Race, these scholars have importandy admonished others, should not ipsofacto be elided with the experience of those who had black skin, brown skin, or any other of the "darker" colors. To understand the history of theAmericanpeople requires takinginto consideration how women and men, defined by the law—and by themselves—as white, understood the meaning of their race position. Second, the scholarswho pioneered the concept of whiteness and those who have expanded it have all worked on the assumption...