America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of
historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race
resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and
culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the
competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power
has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing
the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking
it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this
nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic
assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were
reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counterhistory of
how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans
as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.
Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception,
emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one
another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized
vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of
racial formation--race as formed in conquest, enslavement,
imperialism, segregation, and labor migration--are all part of the
complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. "Whiteness of a
Different Color" traces the fluidity of racial categories from an
immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics,
society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history,
including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft
Riots of 1863.
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