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Temple University Press

Chapter Title: The End of the Great White Male
Chapter Author(s):

JOHN R. GRAHAM

Book Title: Critical White Studies
Book Editor(s): Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic
Published by: Temple University Press. (1997)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bw1kc5.5

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Part I
How Whites See Themselves

If any theme is characteristic of contemporary thought in the social sciences

and in cultural studies, it is “perspectivalism”-the idea that one’s view-

point matters. Indeed, every chapter in this book can be seen as an effort to

analyze, defend, criticize, celebrate, or examine one perspective or another

about race and whiteness. Some even question, not how, but do whites see

themselves? Upon looking into and beyond the mirror, whites have found

their whiteness both opaque and transparent. Most whites have not thought

much about their race. Few, upon being asked to identify themselves by at-

tributes, would name whiteness among their primary characteristics.

Part I offers a variety of ways whites, and some nonwhites, see the white

race, ranging from biological and social-construction theory, to economic

determinism and advantage and disadvantage, to innocence (feigned or

real). Later parts deal with how whites see other races (Part II), how earlier

periods saw whites and whiteness (Part III), the role of language and color

imagery (Part V), and white consciousness and white power (Part X). As

the reader will soon notice, these sections overlap thematically to some ex-

tent. The reason is simple: Race seems to be, to a large extent, relational.

Whiteness, acknowledged or not, has been a norm against which other

races are judged. One cannot get clear about whiteness without also gain-

ing a sense of what it means to be nonwhite-and vice versa.

The examinations of whiteness presented in this book may open a way for

whites to talk about race and racial problems acceptably and nondefensively.

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1
The End of the Great White Male

JOHN R. GRAHAM

After more than two centuries of running the nation,
American white men are being threatened with loss of power.

Five centuries ago, the foundations of the world were shaken. So-called
immutable truths toppled forever as man was replaced by the sun as the center of our uni-
verse. Equally wrenching is the current shattering of white males’ world view, in which
they long have seen themselves as the central characters on society’s stage. All around are
the effects of a revolution that is both painfully distressing and totally confusing to what
well may become known as the last of the great white males.

As the turmoil continues, white males are the inevitable scapegoats-and their difficul-
ties only are beginning. The illustrations are everywhere. Even though rumblings have
been heard for more than a decade now, the Earth really shook when the national United
Way organization was disrupted in 1992. The white male who built and ran the powerful
agency for two decades was knocked out of his seat of power and replaced by an Asian
woman. To focus on the fact that she is Asian and female is to miss the point. She happens
to know the current rules of the game: You don’t turn the business into a private sandbox.
Limos and other self-serving luxuries aren’t part of the bargain today, a lesson that has
been lost on white males, many of whom continue to believe that they possess a divine

right to the perks of power.
The cracks in the Earth’s surface widened as the quakes have come fast and furious with the

deposing of great white males throughout Fortune 500 firms. The great white males feel

threatened and somewhat confused about why it is happening. Until now, the great white male
had considered it no one’s business what he takes out of the company, the way he conducts
business, how much he is paid, or even how he treats his subordinates, particularly women.

Throughout the last several hundred years, the great white male has lived by the strict
code of the old-boy network. The dismissal of corporate leaders symbolizes the replace-
ment of the old-boy network by quite a different code of behavior-competence. Who you

know is giving way to what you know, a sure sign that Americans finally have entered the

information age full tilt.
Several other threats plague the great white male. One of them is sheer numbers.

The Huns once again are invading, but this time they come masked as Hispanics,

Asians, and, yes, women. Even though Americans are told in a dozen ways that His-
panics are the fastest growing segment of U.S. society, the great white male mentality

can not accept change, just as many refused to acknowledge that the sun was the cen-

USA TODAY, November 26, 1993. Originally published in USA Today. Reprinted by permission.

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4 John R. Graham

ter of our universe. Meanwhile, sheer energy, drive, and education soon will give
Asians the upper hand in American business. Although they may be today’s small
merchants, they will emerge as tomorrow’s leaders in manufacturing, education, and
finance. The great white male is no match for the Asian drive and work ethic. At one
point, the Wall Street Journal noted that American business is not running as fast as
it did in the past. The great white males are having a difficult time keeping up with the
emerging minorities.

The major threat to the great white male, however, clearly is women. He honestly be-
lieves there is a conspiracy afoot and that females are the enemy, working feverishly to
take control of everything. Like most other conspiracy theories, the conclusion does not re-
flect the facts. What actually is happening is totally different, since the great white male is
doing everything possible to hand over the jobs and to transfer the power of business and
politics to women. The number of females elected to the u.s. Senate and House in 1992 af-
firms the direction.

The most intense drama in the world of politics was presented on TV for everyone to
see. This watershed event was the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation
hearings that were brought to the public’s attention by the Senate, the last bastion of the
great white male. No single subject drives the great white male into an irrational frenzy
faster than Anita Hill. The debate continues long after Thomas has taken his seat on the
Court. The attempts to discredit Hill and resurrect Thomas’ reputation continue unabated.
More than a desire to arrive at the facts, it would appear that this may well be the last ef-
fort to help the American male become whole again.

Why was it that the great white males of the Senate Judiciary Committee found it so
easy to sympathize with Thomas? Or, to state it more accurately, why did they find it so
hard to side with Hill? Had they found her truthful, they would be presiding over their
own demise. Many women seem to understand easily what white males have difficulty
grasping. When it was over and all the votes had been tallied, Thomas lost (even though
he was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice) and Hill won.

It is no accident that hundreds of women have burst upon the political scene following
the confirmation hearings. Nor is it a quirk of fate that the great white males in the halls
of Congress are dropping like flies. The number who chose to retire at the end of 1992 was
the highest in history. Although they expressed disdain for politics as the main reason for
leaving office on their own, they saw that their world had changed.

It is fascinating that the great white male always expects to be taken care of by his co-
conspirators-the other great white males. While growing up, every boy learned the first
lesson of manhood: “Take care of your friends and they will take care of you.” Later, go-
ing to college, it was given a socially acceptable description of “male bonding.”

In many important ways, women are different from the great white males of the past.
Women seem to harbor the strange notion that hard work, knowledge, competence, and
persistence are the proper ingredients for success. On the other hand, the traditional great
white male scoffs at such nonsense. “Who you know is all that counts,” he repeats confi-
dently. The lairs of maledom down through the decades-everywhere from the poker
party to the private club-attest to belief in the proposition.

The corollary is that the great white male harbors the illusion that, once he rises to the
top, he has a right to all the goodies he can get and that he has to answer to no one. It re-
ally doesn’t make any difference how the goodies are obtained. Wasn’t that the lesson men
learned when they were elected to the House of Representatives-to the victors belong the

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The End of the Great White Male 5

spoils? This applied even to accepting cash bribes or propositioning a woman in the office-
or elsewhere.

Those who are threatening the great white male-women, Hispanics, and Asians-hold
a totally different view of the world, as different from that of the great white male as the
change which occurred 500 years ago. The code of competence holds that the farther one
rises, the greater the responsibility-a truly remarkable idea! Where you park your car or
the location of your office in reference to the power brokers is inconsequential in terms of
defining your worth, status, or importance when it comes to the business of business or the
business of politics. In effect, American society finally may be arriving at the point where
it’s what you know, not who you know, that counts.

Extinction Ahead?

What about the future? Will the great white male become extinct? Will
he no longer be seated in the offices of the corporation, at the head of the table? Will he be
only a memory in the halls of political power? What about the u.s. presidency? These
questions are far more pertinent than even in the recent past. It is no accident so many jokes
about Hillary Clinton are making the rounds today. One way or another, they all point in
one direction and make one point as they portray “The President of the United States and
Mr. Clinton.” However, Americans shouldn’t be surprised that the stories bring only un-
comfortable laughter. Something happened when Bill and Hillary moved to 1600 Penn-
sylvania Ave. that is very different from the days of Ronnie and Nancy or Babs and George.

Many are having difficulty accepting that Hillary Clinton is comfortable with herself, a
situation that makes great white males (and others) uneasy. The critics were quick to com-
plain that she wasn’t elected to office when her husband appointed her to head the power-
ful commission on health care. Yet few thought it unseemly that a James Baker or Sherman
Adams should exert such inordinate influence without benefit of election. Why is Hillary
Clinton so different?-simply because she is a woman who has dared to enter the male lair.

What abou t the future of the great white male? Whether he is destined for a final resting
place in the museums of the land remains to be seen. There will be pitiful efforts to restore
his feathers, to prop up his prowess and power. Nevertheless, the great white male’s day has
passed, along with his unlimited, unilateral power and influence. Even as noble a figure as
Lee Iacocca is in danger of finding himself sadly irrelevant, somehow out of step with the
times. From now on, the great white male will be one of many. He no longer will be able to
say, “It’s lonely at the top.” Whether it takes another 500 years for the next total upheaval
in the intellectual history of society remains to be seen. In the meantime, it will be inter-
esting to watch how the great white males take to their changing circumstances.

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C O N C L U S I O N

Thirteen Ways of Lookmg at Whiteness

Scholars of African hmerican literature have done as much as anyone to

revitalize the study of the humanities in the late tsxentieth century, but

there remains important ground to be turned in the history, literature,

and rhetoric of American race relations. The relative absence of white

tests in the discussion of racial discourse has allowed scholar and

teacher alike to rely on black texts to shoulder the burden of race theory

and race history; if a twentieth-century Lvhite test makes it into a “liter-

ature of race” classroom, it is all too often a mere caricature, a Gone with
the W%d or, worse, Thomas Dixon’s Thr C / u m m n . T h s is both unfortu-
nate and incomplete in much the same way that caricaturing black writ-

ing or thinking was incomplete two or three decades ago. African Xmer-

ican studies have long since destabilized notions of racial identity held

I?P/IEJ~P~ groups; this book hopes to challenge the stubborn idea of mono-
lithic racial identity, in this case “whiteness,” ~ . ‘ i f h i ~ z a particular group.

“We can agree that the notion of a unitary black man is as imaginary

(and as real) as Tallace Stevens’s blackbirds are; and yet to be a black

man in twentieth-century America is to be heir to a set of anxieties: be-
ginning with what it m a n s to be a black man,” writes Henry Louis Gates
Jr. in Thirteen Lf%.s oJ’Looki/g ut a BLuck i l h . “All of the protagonists of
this book confront the ‘burden of representation: the homely notion
that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race

or honor it. . . . Each, in his own way, rages against the dread require-
ment t o represent; against the demands of ‘authenticity’ ” (xvii).

The same can be said of the white authors dmussed in this book. All

four were white, but all four shuddered under the burden of the corro-

sive racial and gender discourse of their day; their ambivalences prove

that this discourse also damaged members of the “majority” culture,

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even, strangely enough, those who c o m p ~ l s i ~ e l r perpetuated it. “The

paradigm of racc is the antithesis of freedom,” John Edgar \Tideman

writes.

It locks white people in a morally and ethically indefensible posi-

tion they must preserve by force. Fosters a myth of superiority

they must act out: dictates to them h o r n they should love and

hate. Since it sanctions and reinforces the idea that some people

are born better than others, deserve more than others, have an in-

nate right, even duty, to seize from others what they want, the par-

adigm of race is destructive to a n p n e not white, and ultimately

also self-destructive for whites. A racist disposition towards non-
whites, because it hardens the heart and rationalizes extremes of

selfishness and brutality, inevitably reappears in the way whites re-

gard and treat other whites. The pervasive ~ i o l e n c e in our soci-

ety-from domestic abuse to economic exploitation to capital

punishment to punitive expeditionary wars-is rooted in the par-

adigm of race. (xxv)

Carefully scrutinizing these texts, we can also tear apart the notion

that even writers from the same race, time, and region necessarily con-

structed race-their own or that of others-the same way. Looking for

the contra&ctory, disjointed, even subversive shades u~zthh “whiteness”

-looking, for example, at the difference gender and sexuality make in

the way individual writers see race-also helps keep us vigilant about

psychological as well as historical and regional specificity Just as hfissis-

sippi has everything and nothing in common with South Carolina, just

as Richard Wright has everything and nothing in common with Zora

Neale Hurston, so does William Alexander Percy have everything and

nothing in common with Carson McCullers. As with black texts, once

white texts are relieved of the need to fall into line, to be conceived of as
monochromatic and uniform, we can more easily understand the con-

tradictions and nuances of color that exist within them. It is interesting

to note, for example, that Smith and hlcCullers seemed so much more

willing to esplore the psychosexual fault lines in their own minds and

communities than Cash and Percy, who were otherwise so astute in their

observation and analysis. Perhaps the two men were no less aware of

these fault lines; perhaps they merely felt incapable of finding the

courage or the language to express them. The construction of Southern

masculinity has never allowed for frank discussion of emotion and sex-
uality, and when that discussion involves sexual ambiguity or lifelong

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impotence, it can only be forced underground. “‘Vl’hite” texts-and the

authors who write them-are as idiosyncratic and rhetorically variable

one from the other as they are from “black texts; indeed, Smith has

more in common rhetorically with Richard Wright than she does with

McCullers, who was of the same race, class, home state, and (at least in

part) sexual preference.

Beyond dismantling the idea of a monolithic “white” voice, taldng

the next theoretical step-proving that “race” itself is merely a mirage

constructed idiosyncraticall!- in the minds of each thinker-is a rela-

tively easy mom. “Race only becomes ‘real’ as a social force when indi-

viduals or groups beha\-e toward each other in ways which cithcr rcflcct

or perpetuate the hegemonic ideology of subordination and the pat-

terns of inequality of daily lifc,” writes the historian Manning Marable in
Bqond Black and K’hite.

To move into the future will require that ve bury the racial barri-

ers of the past, for good. T h e essential point of departure is the

deconstruction of the idea of “whiteness,” the ideology of white

power, privilege and elitism which remains heavily embedded

within the dominant culture, social institutions and economic

arrangements of the society. But we must d o more than critique

the white pillars of race, gender and class domination. We must re-

think and restructure the central social categories of collective

struggle by which we conceive and understand our own political

reality. We must redefine “blackness” and other traditional racial

categories to be more inclusive of contemporary ethnic realities.

To be truly liberating, a social theory must reflect the actual prob-

lems of a historical conjuncture with a cornmitmcnt to rigor and

scholastic truth. (199 -200)

Applying this thinking to “whiteness” helps move us in the same di-

rection. If African American literary, historical, and legal studies have

smashed the lens through which race has been viewed in this country

for centuries, the study of white texts using these new reading tech-

niques can help us take the nest step. We are now aware that there are

multiple voices in our communities; we must now acknowledge that

there are, as it were, multiple voices in our own heads. Shelley Fisher

Fishkin posits that Huck learned to speak from Jim; following Toni

Morrison, we now can begin to explore how all American literature, and

Southern literature in particular, has been raised by black surrogates as
well as white parents. If Percy was brought up by a black nursemaid, so

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was his mind and the creative work that emanated from it. White sensi-

bilities depend o n black sensibilities; it is the relationship between the two,
not so much the separate halves, that is interesting. Willie Morris, a con-

temporary white Rlississippi writer, reveals a moment in The Ghosts qf
1’1fed~arEven in which a white friend from the Delta refigured his family’s

traditional feelings about race: “His mother died when he was little, and

his father was courting again, and for all purposes he was raised by an
illiterate black muledriver named Shotgun, whom he loved. ‘The black

people of the Delta didn’t sail past the Statue of Liberty when they came
to this country,’ my friend once said to me. ‘They made this place down

here. They workcd to dcath and got nothin’, cxccpt just the ground it-

self and it wasn’t theirs either. I’d look out from my porch at night when
I was a boy and wonder what they were thinking that night with their
lamps blinking in the shadows. Now I know they were thinking of the
same things 1 was’ ” (I 3).

I think of this book, then, as standing not only between Faulkner and

Styion but between Charles Chesnutt and iZugust Kilson, between Du

Bois and Baldwin, between Hurston and Toni Morrison as well. Ideally

I consider all these writers’ works as interworen and interdependent; a
fully realized discussion of race in twentieth-century American literature

cannot stand without the consideration of all thrse texts bound to-

gether. Ideally, a deep understanding of race and human relations more

broadly conceived will incorporate allvoices, each validated, each distinct,

each acknowledged as contributing to the conversation, both scholarly

and pedagogical. “That both whites and blacks, or more broadly people

of all colrxs, cannot truly embrace the range of North American h u –

manity as their own, as their imagined community, is the collective cost,”

Grace Elizabeth Hale writes. “Mahng whiteness American culture, the

nation has foregone other possibilities. The hybridity that could have

been our greatest strength has been made into a means of playing across

the color line, with its rotting distance of voyeurism and partisanship, a

confirmation of social and psychological division” (10).

In my experience, using white texts in addition to black texts to es-

plore the roots of racial discourse forces students of all races to more

directly confront themselves. Once they are introduced to the rhetori-

cal miscegenation that exists in white as well as black texts, it quickly be-

comes evident that students (and the texts themselves) do not have a dif-
ferent history from “the other” and never did. Black and white are and

always have been inextricably Linked, just as male and female have always

been inextricably linked. “One of the most important results of recon-

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ceptualizing from ‘objective truth’ to rhetorical event will be a more nu-

anced sense of legal and social responsibility,” writes Patricia Williams,

whose L41chemj ofRace and R&bts incisively examines the racial thicket of

contemporary legal discourse.

This will be so because much of what is spoken in so-called objec-

tive, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities and

unexarnined claims that make property of others beyond the self,

all the while denying such connections. . . . In racial contexts, [this]
is related to the familiar offensiveness of people who wiU say, “Our
maid is black and she says that blacks want. . . I’; such statements
both universalize the lone black voice and disguise, enhance, and

“objectify the authority of the individual white speaker. As a legal

tool, however, it is an extremely common device by which not just
subject positioning is obscured, but by which agency and respon-

sibility are hopelessly befuddled. (11)

This is my impulse as well: to nudge scholarship and students alike to

examine and take responsibility for their 01urz language, their awn racial
thinking, their own sense of personal and cultural histor!; rather than

treating race (and African American literature, through which race issues

are most frequently taught) as a kind of localized anthropology project.

” E w n among left-inclined students, the idea that race is natural is so in-

grained that there is an assumption that liberal and even radical educa-

tion must be trying to teach that race is not very important, but nonethe-

less a material realitj~,” David Roediger writes in Toward the Abolition of
Whitpne.rx “When students do ‘get it,’ they are often tremendolisly en-
thusiastic. Seeing race as a category constantly being struggled over and

remade, they sense that the possibilities of political action in particular

and human agency in general are vastly larger than they had thought.

They reflect o n the manner in which structures of social oppression have

contributed to the tragic ways that race has been given meaning. They

often come to indict those structures” (2).

As uncomfortable as some white students might be to get “inside” a

black text and dscover a wound that “their” ancestors might have some-

how “caused,” looking directly at white texts to discover the racial com-

plexity and pain there as well is an entirely different experience. Lillian

Smith offers a very different reading experience than reading &chard
W i g h t o n the “same subject.” White readers of Wight, for example,

might find easy access to his anger, but the? are still somehow capable of
keeping it at arm’s length; it is, after all, “his” (that is to say black) anger.

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By contrast, white readers of Smith, or any of the others in this study,
will find an entirely dfferent entrance into the psychological experience

of race and racism. Examining the seeds of racism in fertile ground is

quite difierent from seeing them in full bloom.

Black readers should also find such an analytical tool useful, for it

shifts the weight, or the “problem,” of race from the shoulders of hfri-

can American literature onto the shoulders of American literature writ

large. In my experience, African Xmerican students tire quickly of
African Xmerican literature being used as the only vehicle through

which racial discourse can be examined; introducing white texts into this

mix would certainly balance the account. Reading white texts, of course,

would also force black students to complicate their own understanding

of race, to realize that white racial thinking is n o more simple or mono-

lithic than black racial thinking. Reading Cash the week after reading

Percy the week after reading Faulkner would certainly go some distance

to proving this. Now that we have made significant strides in adding

black texts to the American canon, we can encourage students to engage

d l / the myriad voices threadmg through ail their texts (and all their

heads), be they black or white. It is, of course, as useful for black read-

ers to understand the complexities and vagaries of the white mind as it

has been for white rcaders to understand the vagaries and complexities

of the black mind.

Historically speaking, of course, the late twentieth century offers a

fascinating coda to the mid-twentieth century who would have thought

that reverse migration, among Aifrican Americans in particular, would

have taken hold just a few decades after s o many people left? Willie
hlorris discusses a 1997 ~Vew~week story in which it was reported that the
reverse migration of middle-class blacks back to the South was up 92
percent over the 1980s and that “a net tide of 2.7 million-more than
half of the post 1940s migration-will have headed South between

1975 and zoro.” Earlier this year, black and white residents of two cen-

tral Georgia counties held an art exhibit memorializing two black cou-

ples lynched in broad daylight in 1946 One oil painting, according to the

A t h t a Constitzdon, portrayed two couples “first enjoying life and then

. . . after their bodes were riddled with bullets.” Clearly, the South is no
closer to finishing its struggle with questions of race than is the rest of

the country

Eventually, of course, we will begin to understand that all these voices

exist and always have existed together, as instruments in the same band.

“Our ability to transcend racial chauvinism and inter-ethnic hatred and

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1940s
Account: s3915756.main.ehost

the old definitions of ‘race,’ to recognize the class commonalities and

joint social-justice interests of all groups in the restructuring of this na-

tion’s economy and social order, will be the key to constructing a non-

racist democracy, transcending ancient malls of white violence, corpo-

rate power and class privilege,” Marable writes. “B!- dismantling the

narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going be-
yond ‘black’ and ‘white,’ we may construct new values, new institutions

and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and
racial oppression” (201 – 2).

In a similar vein, Wideman writes in Futhuruloig that “the implicit pres-
ence of the paracbgm of race flickers just beneath the surface, offering

its quasi-religious authority to the notion that problem groups are some-

how fundamentally different from the rest of us, sanctioning the most

drastic solutions to maintain the world as it should be. T i t h the same

blind, rclcntlcss logic of the computer whirring through the billion on/

off choices of its circuitry, the \Yestern mindset seems disposed to con-

quer by dviding, apprehending the world in polarized terms of ei-
ther/orn (67 – 68).

Fifty years before Kideman, Ralter White wrote of the dangers of

the dualistic thinhng he found so prevalent among his contemporary

white Southerners. “It ~ n a d r no cliiference how intelligent or rnlented my

millions of brothers and I were, or hen- virtuously u7e lived. X curse like
that of Judas was upon us, a mark of degradation fashioned with heax=

enly authority” Vhite wrote in his 1948 autobiography. “There were

white men who said Negroes had no souls, and who proved it by the

Bible. . . . Theirs was a world of contrasts in x-alues: superior and infe-
rior, profit and loss, cooperatix-e and noncooperative, civilized and abo-

riginal, white and black. If p u were o n the wrong end of the compari-

son, if you were inferior, if you were noncooperative, if you u w e

aboriginal, if you mere black, then you were marked for excision, espul-

sion, o r extinction. 1 was a Negro; I was therefore that part of history
which opposed the good, the just, and the enlightened” ( I T – 12).

There is something of the !;in and yang in this. The cultural is
not only made up of two complementary colors (in this case black and

white); each side also has the seed of its opposite growing within it.
White is defined by the existence of black, not just opposite it but ~vithitz

it as well, and vice versa. This, to be sure, is a radically different notion

from the system of racial “opposites” we as a country (and as a Kestern

civilization) ha\-e been cultivating for centuries, a dualism that creates hi-

erarchies of separation flowing quickly from white/black and man/

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Account: s3915756.main.ehost

woman to rich/poor and good/evil. One way to tear down these duali-

ties is to reveal the complexities and “inner opposites” inherent within

each of us. As Faulkner explored so intricately inilbsalom, Absalom!, once

white is revealed to cofztaitz and dqend z@~n black, ancient myths of racial
purity vanish like so much Appalachian mist. This, of course, is why the
metaphor of miscegenation holds so much power in Southern litera-

ture; once black blood is found to be flowing in white veins, images of

unalloyed “whiteness” can n o longer be taken seriously Hallowed por-

traits of pure-blooded ancestors must be removed from the walls, and
reframed.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America
Author(s):

Peter Kolchin

Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jun., 2002), pp. 154-173
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians
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Whiteness Studies: The New History
of Race in America

Peter Kolchin

Suddenly whiteness studies are everywhere. The rapid proliferation of a genre that
appears to have come out of nowhere is little short of astonishing: a recent keyword
search on my university library’s electronic catalog yielded fifty-one books containing
the word “whiteness” in their titles, almost all published in the past decade and most
published in the past five years.1 All around us, American historians and scholars in
related disciplines from sociology and law to cultural studies and education are writ-
ing books with titles such as The White Scourge, How the Irish Became White, Making
Whiteness, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and Critical White Studies.2
Although the term “whiteness studies” might at first glance suggest works that pro-
mote white identity or constitute part of a racist backlash against multiculturalism
and “political correctness,” virtually all the whiteness studies authors seek to confront
white privilege-that is, racism-and virtually all identify at some level with the
political Left. Most of them see a close link between their scholarly efforts and the
goal of creating a more humane social order.

Whiteness studies authors manifest a wide variety of approaches. In many of the
disciplines outside history, prescriptive policy goals assume a central position; writing
on whiteness in education, for example, Nelson M. Rodriguez calls for the creation
of “‘pedagogies of whiteness’ as a counterhegemonic act” predicated on the need to
“refigure whiteness in antiracist, antihomophobic, and antisexist ways.”3 Although

Peter Kolchin is Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
I would like to thank Margaret L. Andersen, Anne M. Boylan, Lori Ginzberg, and the graduate students in my

advanced seminar (Tracey Birdwell, Evelyn Causey, John Davies, Karen Ryder, and Christine Sears) for helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Readers may contact Kolchin at .

1 DELCAT search, (Sept. 26, 2001). Of the 51 titles, 3 have
publication dates before 1990, 3 from 1990 to 1993, 12 from 1994 to 1997, and 33 from 1998 to September
2001. The figures do not represent a precise and all-inclusive total of whiteness studies books: a few, including the
oldest (a 1943 work on visual perception), are unrelated to the field, and other whiteness studies books are not on
the list because the word “whiteness” does not appear in their titles. Whiteness articles are vastly more numerous:
an online search of Expanded Academic ASAP (published by Gale Group) yielded 373 references to works pub-
lished since 1985 containing “whiteness” in their titles, citations, or abstracts.

2 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997);
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Cul-
ture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in White-
ness: How White People Profitfrom Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds.,
Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia, 1997).

3 Nelson M. Rodriguez, “Emptying the Content of Whiteness: Toward an Understanding of the Relation

154 The Journal of American History June 2002

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 155

such didacticism is far from absent in the work of whiteness studies historians, their
focus has been on the construction of whiteness-how diverse groups in the United

States came to identify, and be identified by others, as white-and what that has
meant for the social order. Starting from the now widely shared premise that race is
an ideological or social construct rather than a biological fact, they have at least par-
tially shifted attention from how Americans have looked at blacks to how they have
looked at whites, and to whiteness as a central component of Americans’ racial ideol-
ogy. In doing so, they have already had a substantial impact on historians whose work
does not fall fully within the rubric of whiteness studies but who have borrowed
some of the field’s insights, concerns, and language.4

This essay represents an effort by a sympathetic but critical outsider to come to
grips with this burgeoning field. I will deal primarily with historical literature,
although I will refer to works in other disciplines, and I will pay particular attention
to two books that are among the best and most influential of the whiteness studies

works: David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s

Whiteness of a Different Color.5 Because the two books differ from each other in
important respects, they reveal both the diversity within and the common assump-
tions behind whiteness studies, and they suggest some of the insights and potential
pitfalls of the genre. My aim is to produce not so much a final evaluation of a finished

project as a tentative progress report on a literature still very much in evolution.6

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. Building on Alexander Saxton’s
analysis of the “ambivalent stance” of white workers in a racist society, Roediger pays

particular attention to the efforts of Irish immigrants-who faced such extreme prej-
udice that “it was by no means clear that the[y] were white”-to differentiate them-

between Whiteness and Pedagogy,” in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe et al.
(New York, 1998), 33.

4 See, for example, Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, andAnxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and
Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul. Life inside the Antebellum Slave Mar-
ket (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern
Courtroom (Princeton, 2000); and Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black
Equality (Princeton, 2001).

5David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York,
1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1998). See also the revised edition of Roediger’s Wages, which reprints the original edition with the
original pagination, adding an “Afterword” and a list of “Selected Critical Writings”: David R. Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1999), 185-89, 190.

6 Extensive scholarly commentary on the whiteness studies literature is just beginning to appear. A symposium
that appeared too late to consult in preparation for this article includes a sharply critical essay by Eric Arnesen with
responses (also mostly critical) by six historians: “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagina-
tion,” International Labor and Working-Class History (no. 60, Fall 2001), 1-92. For a perceptive evaluation that
focuses on works by nonhistorians, see Margaret L. Andersen, “Whitewashing Race: A Critical Review Essay on
‘Whiteness,”‘ in Deconstructing Whiteness, Deconstructing White Supremacy, ed. Woody Doane and Eduardo Bo-
nilla-Silva (New York, forthcoming).

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156 The Journal of American History June 2002

selves from black slaves, establish their own whiteness, and thereby prove their
Americanness. (This argument receives further elaboration in Noel Ignatiev’s sugges-
tively titled book, How the Irish Became White.)7

Roediger combines the emphasis on class that one would expect of a labor histo-
rian with some decidedly nontraditional-postmodern-touches. He displays a par-
ticular sensitivity to the significance of language, from metaphorical attacks on
British “slavery” by American revolutionaries to use of the terms “wage slavery” and
especially “white slavery” to describe the condition of free white workers; in rejecting
the word “servant” in favor of “hand” or “help,” he suggests, “farm and household
workers … were becoming white workers who identified their freedom and their dig-
nity in work as being suited to those who were ‘not slaves’ and ‘not negurs.”‘ He also
provides an intriguing if highly speculative psychological argument that as the coun-
try 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 partici-
pants could “both display and reject the ‘natural self.”‘ And, in a practice he shares
with many other whiteness studies authors-especially those working in disciplines
other than history-Roediger foregrounds himself and his subjective reaction to his
subject, beginning the book with a personal narrative of his own route from a racist
past.8

Although 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. Jacobson’s broad scope
enables him to depart from a binary (black/white) view of race and to explore the
close, troubling, and troublesome relationship among race, ethnicity, and national-
ity.9 Revealing the extraordinary malleability of American conceptualizations of race,
Jacobson outlines a three-stage chronological progression of racial categorization.
From the 1790s to the 1840s, in an era of relatively few immigrants, Americans saw
people as either white or black. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, a period of mas-

sive 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. Finally, beginning in the 1920s, with immigration
restriction, color again triumphed as a badge of race, and Americans came to see-
and celebrate the diversity of-a “Caucasian” race that encompassed diverse nation-
alities previously deemed racially deficient. “To trace the process by which Celts or

7Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 134; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics
and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990); Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.

8 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 49, 116, 3-5.
9 Another book moves beyond a binary treatment of race by focusing on the interaction among whites, blacks,

and Mexicans in central Texas: see Foley, White Scourge. For the suggestion that “adding Indians to the picture
changes our view of the history of race in the South,” see Ariela Gross, “Beyond Black and White: Cultural
Approaches to Race and Slavery,” Columbia Law Review, 101 (April 2001), 681. Roediger has recently praised the
effort to move beyond the black/white racial framework of The Wages of Whiteness; see David R. Roediger, “The
Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter
1999), esp. 592-600.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 157

Slavs became Caucasians,” Jacobson writes, “is to recognize race as an ideological,
political deployment rather than as a neutral, biologically determined element of
nature.”10

Although sharing Roediger’s interest in the construction of race, his didactic goal
in exposing that construction, and his belief in the centrality of race-and racism-
to American history, Jacobson differs from Roediger in approaching the past almost
entirely in cultural terms. 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.” Dealing principally with perceptions of immigrants
rather than with the immigrants themselves, Jacobson is more concerned with images
and representations than with actual social relations. (This “American studies”
approach is even more pronounced in Grace Elizabeth Hale’s book Making White-
ness, which delineates the emergence of a southern “culture of segregation” in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Nevertheless, the difference between
Jacobson’s approach and Roediger’s is more one of degree than of essence: despite his
focus on the working class, Roediger pays careful attention to cultural manifestations
and is hardly an economic determinist. Indeed, as I will suggest below, if both Roedi-
ger and Jacobson start from the premise that race is artificial, constructed, and with-
out inherent meaning, in some ways Roediger appears even less inclined than
Jacobson to see race as a function of concrete-class-relationships.

One’s first reaction to Roediger’s and Jacobson’s books-and to the field of whiteness
studies in general-is likely to be excitement. Indeed, even after repeated readings of
these books (in conjunction with using them in graduate seminars), I still find myself
sharing in the students’ typical feelings of discovery and delight in a promising new
way to look at history. But a vague yet persistent sense of unease is also a predictable
response. Although the precise nature of the unease may emerge only gradually, it
centers on the elusive, nature of whiteness and on concern about overreli-
ance on whiteness in explaining the American past.

In approaching both the excitement and the unease generated by whiteness stud-
ies, it is useful to begin with an understanding that underlies the entire genre. White-

ness studies authors build on what is now a historical (and biological and
anthropological) commonplace: race is a “construct” rather than an objective way of
explaining differences among human beings. There are varying versions of this pro-
cess: historians typically refer to either the “social,” “historical,” or “ideological” con-
struction of race; according to the anthropologist Edgar T. Thompson, “races are
made in culture, not found in nature”; the biologist Stephen Jay Gould rebuts what
he terms “biological determinism”-the belief that “shared behavioral norms . . .
arise from inherited, inborn distinctions.” But all the versions mean essentially the

10 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 14.
11 Ibid., 18; Hale, Making Whiteness. In criticizing Roediger for focusing too heavily on economics, Jacobson

also targets TheodoreW Allen’s account of the rise of white racial consciousness in the English mainland American
colonies. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vols., New York, 1994-1997).

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158 The Journal of American History June 2002

same thing: race is “made” by humans; how humans have assigned people to one race
or another has varied dramatically over time and space; and racial categorizations

have no intrinsic meaning or validity aside from the particular social circumstances
that engender them.12

An almost infinite number of examples illustrate the constructed nature of race-
and of whiteness in particular. Although the well-known “one-drop rule” dictates
that in the United States anyone with the slightest bit of black “blood” be categorized
as black, there is no particular logic to labeling people black who are part white and
part black, and in some places they are not so labeled. Two possibly apocryphal sto-
ries drive home the arbitrary character of such racial categorization. According to
one, the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier insisted that the Haitian population was
98 percent white. Asked by a puzzled American how this could be, he responded
with a question: “How do you define black in your country?” “Receiving the expla-
nation that in the United States anyone with any black blood was considered black,
Duvalier nodded and said, ‘Well, that’s the way we define white in my country.”‘
Equally telling is a story about the Mexican War: “When Americans marched into
the Mexican city of Saltillo in 1847, they were greeted by a woman from New Jersey,

who worked in a Mexican textile mill. ‘Americans I am glad to see you,’ she
exclaimed. ‘I have seen but one white man in eight months, a negro from New
Orleans.””3

But perhaps the most striking example of the arbitrary and changing nature of
race, cited by Jacobson, is to be found in Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable classifica-
tion of the world’s population in 1751:

All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the newcom-
ers [that is, the English]) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French,
Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the
Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal
body of white people on the face of the earth.

What clearer evidence could current Americans need of the subjectivity of race than
Franklin’s insistence that Germans and Swedes were nonwhite?14

Whereas the immediate excitement about whiteness studies stems from their new
way of underscoring the subjectivity of race, the accompanying unease relates to the
version of that subjectivity that the whiteness studies authors propound. The seminal
historical statement on the construction of race, of which the construction of white-

12 Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations
(Durham, 1975), 325; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), 20. See also Joseph L.
Graves Jr., The Emperors New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, 2001). For a
prominent historian’s recent assertion that “historical construction” of race is more accurate than “social construc-
tion,” see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,
Mass., 1998), 1.

13 For the first story, see Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New
York, 1982), 146; for the second, see David Montgomery, “Empire, Race, and Working-Class Mobilizations,” in

Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA, and Africa, ed. Peter Alexander and
Rick Halpern (Houndsmill, Eng., 2000), 15.

14Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 40.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 159

ness is a variant, is to be found in Barbara J. Fields’s influential essay “Ideology and
Race in American History” (1982). Noting that “ideas about color, like ideas about
anything else, derive their importance, indeed their very definition, from their con-
text,” Fields warned against reifying racial “attitudes,” which have no meaning aside
from their concrete historical setting. “An understanding of how groups of people see
other groups in relation to themselves must begin by analyzing the pattern of their
social relation,” she explained, “-not by enumerating ‘attitudes’ which, endowed
with independent life, are supposed to act upon the historical process from outside.”
Suggesting that there can be no such thing as a generalized “white” attitude toward
“blacks” (or, one might add, toward “whites”), she argued that race is shaped by con-
crete human interactions, particularly by class relations. Because race is a subjective
ideological construct whereas class “can assert itself independently of people’s con-
sciousness”-that is, class can be an objective category-“class and race are concepts
of a different order; they do not occupy the same analytical space, and thus cannot
constitute explanatory alternatives to each other.”’15

Fields’s formulation of the construction of race frames a set of tricky problems cen-

tering on the reality, pervasiveness, and permanence of whiteness and especially its
relationship to concrete historical conditions. Scholars approach the problems in dif-
ferent ways. Some explain whiteness as a direct function of dominant economic
interests. According to the historian Theodore W Allen, for example, the “white
race was invented by the “plantation bourgeoisie” in order to facilitate its oppression
of African slaves. Similarly, the anthropologist Karen Brodkin maintains that in the
United States Jews were treated as racially different so that they could be exploited as
industrial laborers. “Initially invented to justify a brutal but profitable regime of slave

labor,” she explains, “race became the way America organized labor and the explana-
tion it used to justify it as natural.”’16

Leery of an approach that they see as overly deterministic, Jacobson and Roedi-
ger-along with many other whiteness studies authors-go to the other extreme, not
only denying that race is a direct function of dominant class interest, but coming
close to portraying race as a ubiquitous and unchanging transhistorical force rather
than a shifting and contingent “construction.” Reflecting a broad-based, ongoing
shift in the historical profession from social to cultural history, they are more com-
fortable discussing “tropes” than actual social relations, and they display notable
unease about coming to grips with class, interest, and power. Jacobson explains that
class has received enough attention from others and that he will therefore emphasize
“other areas.” Hale, in her delineation of the “culture of segregation,” almost totally
ignores class-indeed, power relations of any sort-speaking broadly of the attitudes
of “whites,” “southerners,” and “Americans” as if these had generalized meaning
divorced from their specific environment. Even Roediger, who identifies himself as a
Marxist, firmly rejects the view that race is superstructural. Specifically contesting
Fields’s assertion that whereas race is entirely constructed, class has both objective

15Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” 146, 149, 150.
16Allen, Invention of the White Race, II, 97; Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says

about Race in America (New Brunswick, 1998), 75. See also Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic.

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160 The Journal of American History June 2002

and subjective components, he maintains that neither race nor class has meaning

aside from people’s consciousness of them. Roediger recognizes the problem: “To set

race within social formations is absolutely necessary,” he writes, “but to reduce race

to class is damaging.” True enough, but in positing race and class as equal-and
equally constructed-he backs away from examining race “within social formations”

and implies that it has intrinsic meaning apart from specific relations of power. 17
In short, there is a persistent dualism evident in the work of the best whiteness

studies authors. At times, race-and more specifically, whiteness-is treated as an

artificial construct with no real meaning aside from its particular social setting; at

other times it becomes not only real, but omnipresent and unchanging, deserving
attention as an independent force. Race appears as both real and unreal, transitory
and permanent, ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and nowhere, everything and
nothing. Many of the whiteness studies authors are aware of this dualism and see it as

a reflection of a similar dualism in whiteness itself. “Whiteness is everywhere in U.S.
culture,” notes one, “but it is very hard to see”; “no one at this point really knows
exactly what whiteness is,” assert two others, even while discussing its pervasiveness.

Observing that the white women she interviewed in California did not feet white so
much as “normal” or “regular,” the sociologist Ruth Frankenberg calls whiteness “an
unmarked marker of others’ differentness”; just as many people consider their own
speech-unlike the accents they hear all around them-standard, whiteness, even

while omnipresent, appears unrecognized except as that which is normal. Jacobson
apologizes for not putting “race,” “white,” and other racial “fabrications” in quota-
tion marks but then asserts that “race and races are American history . .. ; to write

about race in American culture is to exclude virtually nothing.” The all-and-nothing
character of race challenges all the whiteness studies authors, who must decide
whether race is-and explains-everything or nothing.18

The central question one must confront in evaluating whiteness studies is the
salience of whiteness as an explanation for exploitation, injustice, and, more gener-
ally, the American past. In addressing that question, the matter of context becomes

crucial. Simply put, in making whiteness omnipresent, whiteness studies authors risk

losing sight of contextual variations and thereby undermining the very understand-
ing of race and whiteness as socially constructed.

17 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 21; Hale, Making Whiteness; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 8. For
Roediger’s discomfort with Barbara J. Fields’s formulation of the relationship between race and class, see David R.
Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York, 1994),
25-27. Iver Bernstein has suggested that Roediger’s approach “takes its cue from the recent critical writings of
George M. Fredrickson urging greater consideration of race as an independent psychological category of analysis
and, like Fredrickson’s work, calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’s dissatisfaction with the materialist treatment of race
by American Marxists during the 1930s”; Iver Bernstein, review of The Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger,
Journal ofAmerican History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 1120.

18 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 1; Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, “Addressing the Cri-
sis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy of Whiteness,” in White Reign, ed. Kincheloe et al.,
4; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993), 198;
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, ix-x, 11. One of the first whiteness studies works to note this “everything-
and-nothing quality” was an analysis of film; see Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen, 29 (Autumn 1988), 64.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 161

Nonhistorians are particularly prone to deprive whiteness of historical context. As
Roediger notes in pointing to “tensions” within the field of whiteness studies, “much

cultural studies work in the area lacks historical grounding and ignores or miscon-
ceives the emphasis on class relations common among historians of whiteness.” In

Scenes of Subjection, for example, the literary scholar Saidiya V. Hartman portrays

white racism as a constant unaffected by any change in the social order, including
“the nonevent of emancipation,” and sees virtually everything done to or for African

Americans as an expression of that racism. A similar inattention to context underlies

Brodkin’s attribution of American prejudice against Jews (their “temporary darken-
ing”) to the desire to exploit them as industrial laborers, without bothering to place

that prejudice in the framework of the long European history of anti-Semitism-an

anti-Semitism that was not always rooted in economic interest and did not always
require that Jews be seen as nonwhite. Writing as if racism were a uniquely American
illness, the American studies scholar George Lipsitz muses that “it must be the con-

tent of our character.’19

But inattention to context bedevils many of the historians as well. In White
Women’s Rights, for example, one of the few historical works to examine the way

whiteness shaped the experiences and behavior of women, Louise Michele Newman
too often strays from her intriguing exploration of the impact on feminism of a par-

ticular form of evolutionary racism and generalizes about the views of “white

women,” who resisted patriarchy for themselves but sought to impose it on “inferior”
races. Pushing far beyond the sensible observation that most white feminists shared

the racial prejudices common among whites in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, she understates the range and complexity of feminist thought and
argues that racism was “an integral, constitutive element” of feminism itself, or as she

puts it, “feminism developed . .. as a racialized theory of gender oppression.”20
Such overgeneralization is especially prevalent among historians who rely heavily

on image, representation, and literary depiction. Grace Elizabeth Hale’s densely writ-
ten but fascinating book, Making Whiteness, has the rare advantage among whiteness
studies works of dealing with that part of the country where race has most pervasively

shaped social relations: the South. But Hale loses much of that advantage by paying
virtually no attention to social relations and confusing what is southern with what is
more generally American until the reader is unsure whether she is describing south-
ern whiteness or American whiteness, or whether she thinks that it does not make
any difference. The South, she concludes, “lies not south of anywhere but inside us.”
Never really explaining what she means by “whiteness” (which at times she equates

19 Roediger, “Pursuit of Whiteness,” 580; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-
Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 116; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 76; Lip-
sitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 213. “Some Europeans who believed in race classified Jews as whites or even
Aryans, even if for the most part they were considered the enemy,” according to George L. Mosse, Toward the
Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978), xii. In discussing “tensions” within whiteness
studies, Roediger also points to historians who “disdain cultural studies approaches, and even inquiries into race
and cultural representation more generally, as ethereal and frivolous.” See Roediger, “Pursuit of Whiteness,” 580.

20 Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New
York, 1999), esp. 8, 183, 21.

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162 The Journal of American History June 2002

with segregation) or whose interests it served, she is on equally slippery ground in
confronting chronological context. “Whites [all? most? some?] created the culture of
segregation,” she proclaims, “in large part to counter black success.” This thesis is

perfectly plausible, if undemonstrated. But in arguing that the myths of the happy

slave and of criminal Reconstruction were products of the late-nineteenth-century
imagination, Hale largely ignores earlier versions of those myths propounded by pro-
tagonists in the struggles over slavery and Reconstruction; the arguments that she
treats as new were appropriations and modifications of arguments previously forged
in real social relations. Indiscriminately mixing fiction and nonfiction as documenta-
tion, she confuses description (at which she is very good) with explanation and
almost totally ignores interest and politics in her delineation of the “making” of
whiteness .21

Although Jacobson pays more attention to contextual variation, he too can paint
with a very broad brush, in the process placing a heavy explanatory burden-I
believe too heavy-on whiteness. His focus on image and representation makes it
difficult to judge the prevalence of particular ideas, because in quoting extensively
from racist stereotypes, he makes no effort to give equal time to the opponents of
such views. Brilliantly exploring racial depictions of diverse immigrant groups that
Americans would later consider ethnic rather than racial and thereby showing the
subjective character of race, he too often blurs a crucial distinction between “race” on
the one hand and “nation,” “nationality,” and “ethnicity” on the other. For if both

race and nation are constructed (imagined) communities, they are differently con-
structed: whereas race implies inherent, immutable characteristics, national and eth-
nic identity can be conceived of as inherent but need not be. Throughout much of
American history, Americans have promiscuously combined racial and nonracial
thinking in differentiating among groups; sometimes they assumed that differences
were inherent, sometimes not, and often they failed to articulate clear positions on
the question (no doubt because they had not formulated such positions). Jacobson
himself notes in passing that discrimination was not always based on color or race-
“The loudest voices in the organized nativism of the 1 840s and 1 850s harped upon
matters of Catholicism and economics, not race”-but he tends to assume the bio-
logical nature of arguments that could as easily be interpreted as cultural. (See, for
example, his citation of the assertion in the 191 1 publication A Dictionary of Races or
Peoples that “‘the savage manners of the last century are still met with amongst some
Serbo-Croatians of to-day”‘ as evidence for emphasis on the “physical properties” of
race.)22

21 Hale, Making Whiteness, 295, 21, 43-84, passim. For a study that approaches the making of segregation and
whiteness in a southern state historically, see Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation
Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000), esp. 132-54. See also Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender andJim Crow: Women and
the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996).

22 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 69, 79. For a persuasive distinction between a “civic” American
nationalism rooted in equality and universalism and a “racial” nationalism that assumes inherent national charac-
teristics, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and the Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001). For
nation as “imagined community,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991). On the close historical links between race and nation (and between rac-
ism and nationalism), see also Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge,

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 163

The role of whiteness in this process of distinguishing among groups remains
murky. On one hand, Jacobson portrays the 1840s-1920s as a period of “variegated
whiteness” in which white Americans saw some whites as whiter than others, warns
us not to “reify a monolithic whiteness,” and speaks of a “system of ‘difference’ by
which one might be both white and racially distinct from other whites.” On the
other, he speaks of the “process by which Celts or Slavs became Caucasians.” The
unresolved issue here is the extent to which Americans conceived of whiteness (rather
than other criteria such as religion, culture, ethnicity, and class) as the main ingredi-
ent separating the civilized from the uncivilized.23

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; to most Americans, for whom Protestant-
ism went hand in hand with both republicanism and Americanism, the Irish immi-
grants’ Catholicism was far more alarming than their color. Indeed, some
abolitionists managed to combine a passionate belief in the goodness and intellectual
potential of black people with an equally passionate conviction of the unworthiness
of the Irish, and in the 1850s many nativists saw little difficulty in moving from the
anti-Irish Know-Nothing party into the antislavery Republican party, a trajectory
that would have been truly remarkable had their dominant perception of the Irish
been that they were nonwhite. And as Jacobson points out, the 1790 law that limited
naturalization to “free white persons” “allowed Irish immigrants entrance as ‘white
persons”‘; in what sense, then, should one speak of their subsequently “becoming”
white? This can make sense if whiteness is to be understood metaphorically, meaning
“acceptable,” but Jacobson and other whiteness studies authors clearly intend the
term to serve as more than a metaphor; indeed, if it is understood only metaphori-
cally, much of their analysis collapses.24

The overworking of whiteness is especially noteworthy in the work of David Roe-
diger, for he professes greater interest in specific social relations than many whiteness
studies authors. Nevertheless, his argument too often depends on blurring important
distinctions among whites, thereby belying the commonality of the “wages of white-
ness” he outlines. His starting point is promising: living in a slaveholding republic,
white workers in the (northern) United States increasingly defined themselves by

Mass., 2000), 41-56; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
(London, 1991); and Gross, “Beyond Black and White,” 681. For an interesting synthetic study of American atti-
tudes toward foreigners that recognizes but at times fudges the distinction between racial and culture “difference”
arguments, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home
and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000). The promiscuous mixture of racial and nonracial depictions of
“nationalities” has a parallel in the mixture of racial and nonracial arguments in defense of slavery; see Peter
Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993), 184-97.

23 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Diferent Color, 6, 14.
24 Ibid., 51. On the anti-Catholic heart of American nativism, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade,

1800-1860: A Study of the Origins ofAmerican Nativism (New York, 1938). On the “Paddy” stereotype, see Dale
T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, 1986). On the
lives of Irish immigrants, see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America
(New York, 1985); and Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (1941; Cambridge, Mass.,
1991). On the antislavery character of northern Know-Nothingism, see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The
Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992).

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164 The Journal of American History June 2002

what they were not blacks, slaves. But defining oneself as not-black and as not-slave
are not at all the same, and Roediger’s fudging on that crucial point is especially strik-
ing coming from someone who usually pays such careful attention to language. The
“not-slave” formulation led to the elaboration of a “free-labor” ideology that com-
bined an emphasis on the dignity of labor with a condemnation of chattel slavery as
the antithesis of free, republican (that is, American) values; the “not-black” variation
led to a racist denigration of nonwhites and the insistence that the United States was
a “white man’s country.” The two views could go together, but often they did not,
and Roediger’s argument that whiteness was an essential element of free-labor ideol-
ogy is unpersuasive. If some labor radicals took what amounted to the proslavery
position that slaves in the South were better off than “free” white workers in the
North, others did not, and the argument in any case rested less on the degree of
whiteness than on the degree of exploitation. Similarly, Roediger’s thesis that in
rejecting the term “servant” in favor of “hired hand” and “help,” workingmen were
“becoming” white conflates two very different forms of resistance to dependence that
could be, but were not always, combined. The uppity domestics who tormented
Frances Trollope in Cincinnati expressed little or no concern for whiteness as they
asserted their American equality, and they contrasted their rights, not with black
dependence, but with that stemming from English hierarchy. Responding disdain-
fully to Trollope’s expectation that she would eat in the kitchen, one servant typically
“turned up her pretty lip, and said, ‘I guess that’s ’cause you don’t think I’m good
enough to eat with you. You’ll find that won’t do here.”’25
The question is not whether white racism was pervasive in antebellum America-

it was-but whether it explains as much as Roediger and others maintain. In an argu-
ment 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 nonwhite. (To establish this point one would have to analyze
the “racial” thought of Americans about the Irish, a task that neither Roediger nor
Ignatiev undertakes.) Indeed, the whiteness studies authors often display a notable
lack of precision in asserting the nonwhite status of despised groups. Roediger sug-
gests that Irish whiteness was “by no means clear”; Ignatiev speaks of “strong tenden-
cies . . . 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 poor
whites 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.” What is at issue is not the widespread hostility to and discrimination
against the Irish, Jews, poor whites, and multiple other groups, but the salience of
whiteness in either explaining or describing such hostility and discrimination. The
status of southern poor whites is especially telling, for despite persistent “racial”
stereotypes of them as shiftless, slovenly, and degraded, such stereotypes did not usu-

25 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 49; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. John Lauritz Lar-
son (1832; St. James, N.Y., 1993), 33. The essential starting point on free-labor thought is Eric Foner, Free Soil
Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970).

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 165

ally include denials of their whiteness. Americans have had many ways of looking

down on people without questioning their whiteness.26
A brief consideration of the ideology of four prominent nineteenth-century Amer-

icans-the Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, Illinois’s Democratic
senator Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Ohio’s Republican senator Ben-
jamin F. Wade-illustrates the risk of overemphasizing whiteness. Like most white
Americans, all four were in some sense committed to whiteness. In his famous speech

hailing the secession of the southern states, Stephens boldly identified as the “corner-
stone” of the new government “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the
white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral
condition.” In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Douglas mercilessly denounced
his Republican challenger as a supporter of black equality and boasted that “this gov-
ernment was made on the white basis…. It was made by white men, for the benefit
of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship
to white men.” Lincoln responded that he did not favor “political and social equality
between the white and black races”; noting the “physical difference” between the
races, he proclaimed that “inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a
difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, hav-
ing the superior position.” Upon his arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1851, Wade
complained that “the Nigger smell I cannot bear,” adding that the food was “all
cooked by Niggers until I can smell and taste the Nigger.”27

Yet any treatment of those four men that stopped at their common commitment
to whiteness would be so incomplete as to be totally misleading. Stephens was an
ardent Confederate whereas the other three were committed Unionists. Their differ-
ences on slavery and black rights were even more notable. Stephens was a defender of
slavery and black racial subordination. Douglas saw slavery as a minor issue whose
fate should be left to local (white) control. Lincoln believed that slavery was morally
wrong as well as socially degrading, eschewed the race-baiting that Douglas and
many other white Americans took for granted, and in his debate with Douglas imme-
diately qualified his support for white supremacy with the ringing assertion that
whether or not “the negro” was equal in all respects, “in the right to eat the bread,
without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal

ofJudge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” Wade was an ardent opponent of
slavery, who became one of the most enthusiastic proponents of a radical Reconstruc-
tion policy designed to remake the South and provide equal rights for the former

26 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 134; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 76; Foley, White Scourge, 5, 70;
Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 56. For an antebellum view of poor whites, see D. R. Hundley, Social
Relations in Our Southern States (New York, 1860); for a historical study, see Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the
Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, 1994). A
powerful English “racial” prejudice against the Irish existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a world
far removed from a slaveholding republic; see Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From
Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 30 (Oct. 1973), 575-98; and Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
Wenches, andAnxious Patriarchs, 33-37.

27 William E. Gienapp, ed., The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection (New York, 2001),
71-72; Andrew Delbanco, ed., The Portable Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1992), 107, 115; H. L. Trefousse, Ben-
jamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio (New York, 1963), 311.

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166 The Journal of American History June 2002

slaves, as well as a sturdy champion of the rights of women and of labor. In short,

what is most significant about the careers of the four men lies, not in their shared

expressions of whiteness, but in the sharply divergent positions they took on the

major issues of their era. Whiteness turns out to be a blunt instrument for dissecting
the nuances-or even the major outlines-of their political ideology and behavior.28

One of the most striking features of many whiteness studies works is their subjective
character, their postmodern accentuation of self. Often the authors supplement anal-

ysis and prescriptive proposals with personal anecdotes, recollections, and rumina-

tions-sometimes, but by no means always, confined to an introduction or
conclusion. George Lipsitz, for example, provides a long personal account beginning

with his reaction as a child living in New Jersey to the murder of a civil rights worker
in 1963 and moving on to his current determination, as an adult in California, to
resist “racist attacks on communities of color” abetted by “the mendacity and mean-

ness of Governor Pete Wilson.” Ruth Frankenberg begins her book with an autobio-
graphical discussion of how as a white feminist she struggled with charges of racism.

In detailing how Jews became white, Karen Brodkin not only discusses her own
childhood and the question of Jewishness in an autobiographical introduction, but
throughout the volume writes explicitly as a Jew (noting, for example, that “prevail-

ing classifications . . . have sometimes assigned us to the white race”). Roediger
begins The Wages of Whiteness with an account of how he came to reject the racism he

had taken for granted as a child. “Until very recently,” he observes, “I would have
skipped all this autobiographical material, sure that my ideas on race and the white
working class grew out of conscious reflection based on historical research. But much
of that reflection led back to what my early years might have taught me…. My own
youthful experiences . .. could have given me the central themes of this book.”29

Even when they do not engage in such autobiographical exercises-and historians

are usually the most reticent of the whiteness studies authors in this regard-virtually
all of these authors display a highly didactic tone and a tendency to blend policy pro-
posals with historical analysis. Of course, they are hardly alone in producing present-
minded or partisan work; as Peter Novick and others have shown, even the most
avowedly “objective” works of history have been ideologically laden. Few historians
have been so eager openly to mix scholarly analysis with prescriptive advice, however,
or to proclaim their political goals so bluntly as those engaged in the study of white-
ness. Thus, Jacobson, the most restrained of the authors under review, suggests that
“perhaps the most far-reaching ambition” of Whiteness of a Different Color is “to help
loosen the grip of race,” and Hale, asserting that “integration . . . is our only future,”

28 Delbanco, ed., Portable Abraham Lincoln, 115. For a nuanced view of the antebellum Republicans and race,
see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 261-300.

29 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, viii-xx, esp. xviii; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 2-5;
Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 1; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 3-5, esp. 5. For highly personal autobio-
graphical musings, see Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York, 1999). See also
Foley, White Scourge, xiii-xiv; many of the essays in Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, eds., Whiteness: Feminist
Philosophical Reflections (Lanham, 1999); and those in Kincheloe et al., eds., White Reign.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 167

proposes “a newly imagined integration [that] would incorporate black autonomy,

authority, and subjectivity.” Ending The Invention of the White Race with a hope for

the future, Allen declares that “perhaps in the impending renewal of the struggle of

the ‘common people’ and the ‘Titans,’ the Great Safety Valve of white-skin privileges
may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class European-Americans as

the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class
interests vis-a-vis those of the ruling class.” These authors wear their hearts on their
sleeves.30

Those present-minded concerns help explain why it is in the 1990s that there has
been such an explosion of work on whiteness. As in other fields, that work is in part

self-propelling: once a significant body of scholarship on a topic appears, it acquires a
life of its own. But underlying the new interest in white power, privilege, and identity
there is evident an intense discouragement over the persistence of racism, the unex-

pected renewal of nationalism, and the collapse of progressive movements for social
change that characterize the current era. Jacobson points to the “ethnic revival” in
America among groups that deny white privilege and see themselves as victims and
concludes that “racism now appears not anomalous to the working of American

democracy, but fundamental to it.” Noting the “chastened and disspirited mood of
contemporary American liberalism,” Roediger observes that “the absence of a liberal
labor vote-both because so few workers are now organized and because a majority
of those in white households containing a union member have voted for Reagan and

Bush over the last three elections-makes prospects for an ongoing mildly progres-

sive, class-based alliance inauspicious.” A sense of political disillusionment and a con-
viction that class-based efforts to remake the world have been tried and found

wanting link Roediger’s perception of the bleak current situation with his under-
standing of the past: “the historical record of antiracist achievements of coalitions for
economic reform,” he laments, “is quite modest.” In whiteness, Roediger and other
authors see the latest answer to the old question (and its more modern variants)

posed by Werner Sombart in 1906, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

Only through a confrontation with whiteness, they suggest, can a revitalized Ameri-
can Left emerge.31

Because their work is so heavily prescriptive, important clues to the whiteness

studies authors’ understanding of whiteness emerge from what they suggest should
be done about it. Pushing the logic of its constructed nature to its ultimate conclu-
sion are those, Roediger and Ignatiev foremost, who call for the “abolition” of white-
ness. Asserting that “whiteness, like royalty, threatens to arrange human society by
the rules of animal breeding,” Ignatiev and John Garvey, who since 1992 have served
as coeditors of the journal Race Traitor, proclaim that “the key to solving the social
problems of our age is to abolish the white race…. Treason to whiteness is loyalty to

30 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 10; Hale, Making Whiteness, 11, 296; Allen, Invention of the White
Race, II, 259. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profes-
sion (Cambridge, Eng., 1988).

31 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 12; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 7-8; Werner Som-
bart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, trans. Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands (1906;
White Plains, 1976).

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168 The Journal of American History June 2002

humanity.” Central to this abolitionist goal is belief in the moral emptiness of white-
ness: “There is Italian culture . . . but there is no ‘white culture’-unless you mean
Wonderbread and television game shows,” pronounces Race Traitor. “Whiteness is
nothing but the expression of race privilege.” Distinguishing sharply between white-
ness and blackness-he capitalizes “Black” and “Blackness” but not “white” and
“whiteness”-Roediger agrees with Ignatiev on the emptiness of whiteness: “It is not
merely that whiteness is oppressive and false,” he explains; “it is that whiteness is
nothing but oppressive and false.” Noting that “we speak of African American culture
and community, and rightly so,” Roediger exhibits some momentary unease at cele-
brating “Blackness” while condemning “whiteness”-“neither whiteness nor Black-
ness is a scientific (or natural) racial category”-but in the end insists that “the
former is infinitely more false, and precisely because of that falsity, more dangerous,
than the latter.” As a result, even though all race is socially constructed, the overrid-
ing need is “to attack whiteness as a destructive ideology rather than to attack the con-

cept of race abstractly.” Hale agrees. “Would America be American without its white
people?” she asks at the end of Making Whiteness. “No. It would be something better,
the fulfillment of what we postpone by calling a dream. “32

Precisely what “abolishing whiteness” means is open to question, however, in part
because the meaning of “whiteness” is similarly open. Ignatiev argues that the word
“racism” is “useless” because it has too many meanings, but one could suggest that
there is also a hierarchy of meanings for abolishing whiteness (based on a hierarchy of
meanings for whiteness itself) from rejecting white privilege (or racism), to rejecting
white “identity” (that it matters whether one is white), to claiming that there is no
such thing as being white, to seeing whiteness as an evil to be combated. On a practi-
cal level, there is a need to be clear on what one is being asked to reject.33

There is also a practical political issue that, given the policy concerns of so many of
the whiteness studies authors, demands consideration. In the revised version of The
Wages of Whiteness, Roediger expresses dismay at charges that he is “down on white
people” and counters that “there is, of course, not the slightest animosity toward peo-
ple who are categorized as white in Wages of Whiteness.” True enough, but there is a
thin line between saying that whiteness is evil and saying that whites are evil, and it is

easy to see how Roediger and Ignatiev can be misunderstood on this score. They
make a legitimate distinction between black and white as nonparallel terms, pointing
out that there is a black (and an Asian American and an Italian American) culture but
not a white culture. This argument holds, but only up to a point: there is no one
black (or Asian American) culture, not every black person is culturally “black,” and as
Jacobson shows, the distinction between cultural and racial definitions of ethnic
identity is so tenuous that at times it appears nonexistent. Equally important, there is
a serious political problem with first proclaiming that race is arbitrary and then argu-

ing that to identify as white is reprehensible but to identify as black is virtuous.

32 Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York, 1996), 2, 10, 288-89. This volume reprints
Race Traitors first five issues, dating from 1992 to 1996. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 13, 12, 3;
Hale, Making Whiteness, 296.

33 Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 178.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 169

Indeed, such an argument is less likely to dampen white racism than to fuel a sense of

white ethnic identity-and victimhood-of the type that the journalist Tony Hor-
witz describes so graphically in his recent book, Confederates in the Attic.34

The most obvious solution to this problem is to challenge the desirability of any
racial identification, black as well as white. The British sociologist Paul Gilroy sug-

gests that it is time to abolish “race” itself, not just whiteness, and the historian Mia
Bay, raising the question of “anti-racist racism,” suggests that “the concept of race is

virtually inseparable from the idea of a hierarchy among the races.”35 Many of the
nonhistorian whiteness studies authors, however, reject the notion of abolishing

whiteness in favor, not of a more general abolition of racial identification, but of the
substitution of a new, “good” whiteness for the old racist version. “If whiteness is

emptied of any content other than that which is associated with racism or capital-
ism,” suggests Frankenberg, “this leaves progressive whites apparently without a gene-

alogy.” George Yidice, who teaches cultural studies, agrees that whites need some
form of white ethnic identification. Suggesting that the abolitionist position “seems

more wishful thinking than carefully thought-out strategy,” he argues that “declaring
nonwhiteness … is not really an option for many whites in precarious positions” and
proposes instead “a rearticulation of whiteness” based on “imagining nonracist and
nonnormativist ways of being white.” Warning of conservative efforts to capitalize on

feelings of white victimhood, Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, scholars
whose interests span education and cultural studies, assert “the necessity of creating a
positive, proud, attractive, antiracist white identity.”36

If it is easy to see why many of these scholars are uneasy about asking whites to
renounce their whiteness while celebrating everyone else’s multicultural ethnic diver-
sity, there are reasons why encouraging people to identify with a reconfigured “good”
whiteness seems even more problematical. To begin with, this approach implies that
racism stems primarily from misunderstanding and ignorance, and that the solution
to it therefore lies more in changing minds than in confronting interests. Equally
important, because positing the goal of creating a new and better whiteness implicitly
accepts the legitimacy of racial identification, it comes close to vitiating race’s con-
structed character itself. And finally, since, as Bay points out, every racial identifica-
tion implies a negative judgment of outsiders-feeling that it is “good” to be white
(or black or Asian) inevitably implies there is something less good about being non-

34 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 186; Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished
Civil War (New York, 1998).

35 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Mia
Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (New York,
2000), 224, 225. Thomas C. Holt, by contrast, calls on African Americans both to embrace and to transcend their
blackness, noting that “there is a difference between being nourished by our history and being consumed by it”;
Holt, Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century, 122.

36 Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 232; George Yudice, “Neither Impugning nor Disavowing
Whiteness Does a Viable Politics Make: The Limits of Identity Politics,” in After Political Correctness: The Human-
ities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Boulder, 1995), 271, 261, 259;
Kincheloe and Steinberg, “Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness,” 12. Nelson M. Rodriguez notes that it is “diffi-
cult” to say “what would constitute a [positive] pedagogy of whiteness” but warns that “asking white students to
renounce their whiteness in some total sense is doomed for failure”; Rodriguez, “Emptying the Content of White-
ness,” 33, 34.

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170 The Journal of American History June 2002

white (or nonblack or non-Asian)-encouraging a renewed sense of whiteness is
unlikely to promote a more equitable or harmonious social order. In short, neither
the goal of abolishing whiteness alone nor that of promoting a more positive white-
ness seems especially promising. The different meanings of whiteness and its aboli-
tion are once again pertinent. Repudiating white privilege is one thing, but it is hard
to imagine a successful assault on whiteness in the sense of people’s self-identification
as white except within the broader context of breaking down racial identification in
general.

Because the whiteness literature is so diverse, summing up its contributions is by no
means easy. Nevertheless, several conclusions seem justified. First, this rapidly grow-
ing body of works has provided insights that collectively help us refine our interpreta-
tion of race in America and at large. These works have built on and solidified our
understanding of how race is constructed. At their best, they have underscored the
historical process of racial construction, showing how assumptions about race and
races have changed over time and exploring human agency in the making of race.
They have reminded us that race making applies to whites as well as nonwhites; in
Neil Foley’s words, “whites are raced.”37 They have demonstrated that racial catego-
ries are not always constructed as binary opposites, although that insight is partially
obscured in the effort to portray nonprivileged groups as of necessity nonwhite-that
is, to fit complex racial thought into a binary mold and make whiteness alone the
defining racial concept. And perhaps most important, they have found a new way to
emphasize the absurdity-and oppressiveness-of race as a system for categorizing
humans.

The contribution of whiteness studies to our understanding of actual social rela-
tions is less clear. In viewing whiteness as an independent category, many whiteness
studies authors come close to reifying it and thereby losing sight of its constructed
nature; in assigning whiteness such all-encompassing power, they tend to ignore
other forms of oppression, exploitation, and inequality; and in focusing so heavily on
representations of whiteness, they too often ignore the lived experiences-as well as
the perceptions-of those perceived as nonwhite or “not quite” white. In moving
beyond a binary treatment of race, it is important to keep in mind that African
Americans’ experience of race differed qualitatively from that of other ethnic groups
because of the involuntary nature of their immigration, their enslavement, and the
unparalleled virulence of the racism directed against them. Applied properly, a multi-
racial approach can underscore the distinctiveness of African Americans’ racial his-
tory, but without attention to concrete social conditions that distinctiveness is more
likely to be obscured than clarified.

In short, we are back to the question of context. One of the most striking features
of the whiteness studies works is their assumption-sometimes asserted and some-
times unspoken-that the racism they describe is uniquely American and that Amer-

37 Foley, White Scourge, 1 1.

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 171

ican whiteness can be understood in isolation, without considering anything abroad.
In this respect, they differ markedly from the best of the “old” works on race; in Race

(1963), for example, Thomas F. Gossett placed American racial thought in European

context and portrayed American racism as a particular manifestation of a broader
intellectual phenomenon. Despite Roediger’s persuasive argument that the virulence
of white racial identification stemmed from the particular circumstances of living in
a slaveholding republic, white racism has by no means been a peculiarly American
phenomenon, and grounding the study of American whiteness in broader interna-
tional context can help accentuate the particular nature and features of race making
in the United States. In an account that should sound familiar to students of the
nineteenth-century United States, Sue Peabody argues that eighteenth-century
France produced antislavery sentiment and racism-both “derived from the same
ideological origin: the tension between colonial slavery and the cult of liberty in
France.” The current debate over the European experience of empire and the role of
race in constructing the colonial “other” and work on race and racism in places as
diverse as modern England, eighteenth-century France, and twentieth-century
French West Africa are surely pertinent to the study of whiteness in America, as is the

long European history of racial thought and anti-Semitism.38
Historical works on whiteness could also benefit from more historiographical con-

text. Before whiteness studies, historians of race debated the emergence and evolu-
tion of white racism in the southern colonies, suggested that the American
Revolution promoted a sharp increase in white racial consciousness, and studied the
rise of segregation in the post-Civil War South.39 They, too, argued that racial under-
standing and categorization evolved-that is, that race was “constructed” (although
they did not use the term)-and noted, in a manner foreshadowing Jacobson’s treat-
ment, the rise of racial prejudice against immigrants in the second half of the nine-
teenth century. “By a little judicious tampering, the historians and political scientists
could adapt racial theory to the needs of the moment,” noted Gossett. “The fact that
race has no precise meaning has made it a powerful tool for the most diverse pur-

38 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963; New York, 1997); Sue Peabody, “There
Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York, 1996), 71;
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their
Empire (New York, 2001); Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Nation (1987; Chicago, 1991); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in
French West Africa, 1895-1960 (Oxford, Eng., 1999), esp. 93-123; Alexander and Halpern, eds., Racializing
Class, Classifying Race; Mosse, Toward the Final Solution.

39 See, inter alia, Oscar Handlin and Mary F: Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 7 (April 1950), 199-222; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the
Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); T. H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia,
1660-1710,” Journal of Social History, 7 (Fall 1973), 3-25; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Free-
dom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and
Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (July 1989), 311-54;
Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York, 1971); Duncan J.
MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1975); William Stanton, The Leopard’s
Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago, 1960); George M. Fredrickson, The Black
Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971); C.
Vann Woodward, The Strange Career ofJim Crow (New York, 1955); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the
Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978); and Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in
the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984).

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172 The Journal of American History June 2002

poses.”40 In some ways, what is newest in the historical works on whiteness is a new
language, a new way of saying something that is not all that different from what
many historians have been saying for some time. Indeed, despite appearances, white-
ness studies represent less a radical new departure than an evolution of a historical
scholarship that has long been preoccupied with the changing ways of making race.
The focus on whiteness represents a new way of addressing old questions, but the
central concern of the new scholarship-how, under diverse conditions, Americans
conceptualized and reconceptualized race-is very much in line with the historical
literature of the past four decades.41
As it builds on the old history of race, the field of whiteness studies has-despite

its current limitations-considerable unfulfilled potential. It is not surprising that
authors in the field have sometimes claimed more for whiteness than the evidence
will support or that their work is often characterized more by boldness than by
finesse, for such is typically the nature of new disciplines or approaches. Many of the
same strengths and weaknesses can be noted in works that burst upon the historical
profession in the 1970s emphasizing “the” slave community and “the” sisterhood of
women.42 Indeed, just as later historians built upon and refined those exciting but
overargued works, one might suggest that whiteness studies authors in the future will
reach in new directions even as they continue to fill in and revise the outlines set by
their predecessors. Although it would be presumptuous to predict the exact nature of
this future scholarship, I would hope its characteristics would include greater atten-
tion to historical and geographical context, more precision in delineating the multi-
ple meanings of “whiteness,” continued effort to move beyond a strictly binary
approach to race even while emphasizing the distinctive ways African Americans
experienced race and racism, continued exploration of the complex relationship
between race and nation, closer consideration of the Souths role in shaping American
notions of race, more sustained treatment of actual lived relations, and more inclu-
sive examination of the way nonwhites and whites-in-the-making have perceived
whiteness (and nonwhiteness) .43 In its prescriptive mode, whiteness studies scholar-

40 Gossett, Race, 118.

41 1 am not the first to make this suggestion. See David A. Gerber, review of Whiteness of a Different Color by
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Reviews in American History, 27 (Sept. 1999), 436; and David W. Stowe, review of White-
ness of a Different Color by Matthew Frye Jacobson and The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lipsitz,
Journal ofAmerican History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1359.

42 For historiographical treatment of these subjects, see Peter Kolchin, “Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave
Community: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal ofAmerican History, 70 (Dec. 1983), 579-601; Peter Kolchin,
“American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery, 1959-1984,” in A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David
Herbert Donald, ed. William J. Cooper Jr., Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell (Baton Rouge, 1985), 87-111;
Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (New York, 1989), esp. 64-96; Nancy A. Hewitt, “Beyond the
Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History, 10 (Oct. 1985), 299-321; Linda
K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of
American History, 75 (June 1988), 9-39; and Joanne Meyerowitz, “American Women’s History: The Fall of
Women’s Culture,” Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies (special issue 1, 1992), 27-52.

43 For writings by African Americans on whites and whiteness, see David R. Roediger, ed., Black on White:
Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York, 1998). There is considerable disagreement over black per-
ceptions of whiteness. The poet bell hooks, for example, generalizes (on the basis of childhood recollections) that
“white people were regarded as terrorists,” whereas the historian Mia Bay, noting that “black folk culture chal-
lenged racial stereotypes rather than reversing them,” suggests that the black masses rejected racial categorization
and recognized white variability far more than intellectuals did. bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black

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Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America 173

ship will need to confront the disagreements dividing those who would abolish

whiteness, those who would reconfigure whiteness, and those who would abolish
race in general and to confront whether in making pronouncements about such goals

they are not-like King Canute commanding the waters to stop-considerably over-

estimating their own influence.
The accelerating pace of publications on whiteness suggests that we will be seeing

a great deal more work in this area over the coming years. Perhaps it is not too much

to hope that ten years from now, we will be able to conclude that it was in their sec-

ond decade that whiteness studies really came of age.

Imagination,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paul A. Treichler (New York, 1992),
341; Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 168, 226-27.

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jun., 2002) pp. 1-393
Front Matter [pp. ]
Previews [pp. 15]
Round Table: Self and Subject
Here Is the Problem: An Introduction [pp. 17-19]
Self, Subject, and the “Barefoot Historian” [pp. 20-24]
Thinking about Self in a Family Way [pp. 25-29]
Last Words [pp. 30-36]
Using Self, Using History… [pp. 37-42]
A Pail of Cream [pp. 43-47]
Of Cats, Historians, and Gardeners [pp. 48-53]
Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924 [pp. 54-86]
How the Working Class Saved Capitalism: The New Labor History and The Devil and Miss Jones [pp. 87-114]
Afterword [pp. 115-118]
Is the Supreme Court Sometimes Irrelevant? Race and the Southern Criminal Justice System in the 1940s [pp. 119-153]
Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America [pp. 154-173]
Exhibition Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 174-179]
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Book Reviews
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Recent Scholarship [pp. 338-393]
Back Matter [pp. ]