Whiteness of a Different Color
Historiographical Review (Whiteness of a Different Color)
Throughout U.S. history race has proven time and time again to be a focal point of many countries’ issues and conversations. As time has changed so have the definitions of who is white. In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobsen argues that the idea of race and whiteness has changed rapidly in U.S. history because of the strength it holds to serve as tool of power. In short Jacobsen’s argument is that race is a social construct and not a biological fact, Jacobsen shows how this premise is applied to the Irish throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Essentially the label as a social construct could and was both applied and even denied when needed to serve political purpose.
When it comes to non-whites Jacobsen brings into play the prominent ideologies of people in power such as Thomas Jefferson during the antebellum era, “in reason [blacks] are much inferior… in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (Jacobsen, 29). This ideology was also very prominent in science at the time but none more outspoken that Josiah Nott who’s attempts to scientifically prove the superiority of Caucasian people by the “intellectual endowments” Crania Americana [whites] had attained. Nott goes on to elaborate on the peoples of east Africa as, “presenting physical characters more or less hideous; and, almost without exception, not merely in a barbarous, but superlatively savage state. All attempts toward humanizing them have failed.” In short Nott pushes his theory of polygenesis to prove that people do not come from one ancestral line instead many and therefore other lines are inferior. Jacobsen elaborates on the bogus science used to further differentiate whiteness by bringing in these ideologies many of these ideas were framed by the law of 1790 which allowed whites to emigrate to the states but for those considered favorable white certain
Throughout U.S. history race has proven time and time again to be a focal point of many countries’ issues and conversations. As time has changed so have the definitions of who is white. In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobsen argues that the idea of race and whiteness has changed rapidly in U.S. history because of the strength it holds to serve as tool of power. In short Jacobsen’s argument is that race is a social construct and not a biological fact, Jacobsen shows how this premise is applied to the Irish throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Essentially the label as a social construct could and was both applied and even denied when needed to serve political purpose.
When it comes to non-whites Jacobsen brings into play the prominent ideologies of people in power such as Thomas Jefferson during the antebellum era, “in reason [blacks] are much inferior… in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (Jacobsen, 29). This ideology was also very prominent in science at the time but none more outspoken that Josiah Nott who’s attempts to scientifically prove the superiority of Caucasian people by the “intellectual endowments” Crania Americana [whites] had attained. Nott goes on to elaborate on the peoples of east Africa as, “presenting physical characters more or less hideous; and, almost without exception, not merely in a barbarous, but superlatively savage state. All attempts toward humanizing them have failed.” In short Nott pushes his theory of polygenesis to prove that people do not come from one ancestral line instead many and therefore other lines are inferior. Jacobsen elaborates on the bogus science used to further differentiate whiteness by bringing in these ideologies many of these ideas were framed by the law of 1790 which allowed whites to emigrate to the states but for those considered favorable white certain