Content area
Full Text
Whiteness of a Different Colon European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. By Matthew Frye Jacobson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xii, 338 PP. $29-95, ISBN 0-- 674-06371-6.)
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. By George Lipsitz. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xxii, 274 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 1-56639-634-4. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-- 56639-635-2.)
American historians continue to reap the wages of whiteness. What looked like a passing fad has mushroomed into one of the most productive fields in American historical and cultural studies. Since the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois, whiteness studies have combined an analytical and a polemical dimension, as do these two books. Concerned to expand the subfield from its roots in labor history, both studies focus primarily on cultural production in explaining the historical development and social consequences of white identity in the United States.
Drawing on a mountain of diverse cultural artifacts, Whiteness of a Different Color traces the "vicissitudes of whiteness" over two centuries among "probationary whites," that is, nonWASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) European Americans. Race is as important for understanding the history of European immigrants as for understanding the history of nonwhites, Matthew Frye Jacobson claims. His book demolishes the commonsense view of contemporary historians that when earlier generations referred to the "Hebrew race" or the "Celtic race," they really meant ethnicity. Not so, Jacobson shows; they really meant race.
But precisely what Americans meant by race, and how they interpreted the physiognomies of those who appeared racially different, was subject to enormous historical change....