Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies & History and Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. He earned his BA from Evergreen State College and his MA from Boston University. He completed his PhD in American Civilization at Brown University in 1992. His research focuses on changes regarding conceptions of race from 1790 to the present with a focus on immigration, migration, citizenship, civil rights, and imperialism.

While a relatively small number of racial categories are recognized in the 21st century, Whiteness of a Different Color demonstrates that at the turn of the last century, upward of 80 races existed, with the majority of these groups now absorbed within what we now call whiteness. Visual cues to distinguishing this array of white races were part of American culture, and most of these perceptual cues have no relevance today in the wake of the homogenization of European peoples under the supposed race of whiteness.

Focusing on shifting ideas of whiteness in the United States from 1790 until 1965, Jacobson demonstrates how the newer notion of ethnicity fails to comprehend the depth of meaning that European groups’ former racializations held.

Jacobson explicitly distinguishes himself from the work of both Theodore Allen and David Roediger, though he praises both, explaining that he is less interested in whiteness in relation to class and labor and more interested in the changing