Jacobson, Matthew Frye

OUR SYNOPSIS: Matthew Frye Jacobson examines the construction of whiteness through the lens of European immigration to the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. He locates capitalism and alleged worthiness for republican citizenship at the center of this racialization process. From the Revolutionary Era on, the U.S. was built on whiteness as a prerequisite for belonging. While whiteness as grounds for inclusion was granted by the state through the 1790 naturalization law, the subdivision and hierarchization of whiteness was constructed in pseudo-science and American culture. This is the core of his central argument that “race is not tangential to the history of the United States but absolutely central.” (42) He argues that especially from the first large-scale Irish migration in the 1840s to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, there was “a profound ideological tension between established codes of whiteness as inclusive of all Europeans, and new, racialist revisions.” (72) The national origins quotas system enacted in 1924 reflected these revisions, implemented eugenics through immigration policy, and remained in place until 1965. At this point, “minor divisions of humanity” such as those within whiteness faded away, replaced by the “major divisions” between “Caucasian” and Black or Asian. (92-94) He identifies a related but analytically separate process in the treatment of Jewish Americans, most specifically in 1877. In this case, race and religion were conflated in marking Jewish racial difference. He credits this to a combination of racial science and explicit anti-Semitism delineating Jewishness as racial starting in the 1850s and ending in the mid-twentieth century.