Development Studies: Socio-economic Development from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Saleha Erdmann

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Hiding Behind the “Other”: construction of white invisibility through contrast

Soc/An 244--Arndt, Spring 2005

In the landscape of American culture Whiteness as a racial identity has become akin to the negative space in a painting—crucial in defining the space occupied by the subject, and yet all too often unnoticed.  In American discourse the subject of race has focused on people of color and treatment of people of color by whites, but more often than not neglects to define the culture of whiteness that outlines the cultures of other racial groups via restriction. Today, while American whites are able to accept their perspective as normative—the “American” perspective, people of color are forced to align themselves with a racial identity that characterizes them as “Other”.  Where a white person can be simply a doctor, a teacher, or a homeless person, a person of color is an Asian doctor, a Latino teacher or a Black homeless person.  However, whiteness has not always played such an invisible role in American society.  According to Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness of a Different Color, the United States government recognized forty-five racial groups in the early 1900’s, thirty-six of which were indigenous to Europe (78).  It was not until later in the twentieth century that these thirty-six groups were to be considered part of the umbrella category “white”.  The inclusion of groups like the Irish, Italians and Jews in whiteness was often established by contrast with people of color.  Thus, the largely invisible white identity that dominates American culture today is partly due to the ability of white groups to hide the significance of their racial identity behind the increasingly scrutinized racial identities of the Other.

In the 1840’s a wave of European immigration, particularly from Ireland, hit America and effectively challenged conceptions of whiteness.  A 1790 naturalization had decreed “all free white persons” the right to citizenship, but as certain undesirable European groups arrived, people in power rapidly backpedaled on their definition of “white” and emphasized Anglo-Saxon heritage.  Europeans such as the Irish, Italians and Jews were excluded from the rights and privileges of Anglo-Saxons and considered to be of separate races.  Tension between the Anglo-Saxon group in power and new European immigrants often manifested in violence and the same rhetoric used to dehumanize blacks and Indians was directed at these new arrivals (Jacobsen, 7).  By 1924, a new naturalization law significantly restricted the number of certain European immigrant groups allowed to enter the country.  In the 1920’s, as European immigration waned (due to the new legislation) and people of color seemed increasingly threatening to those in power, white identity was reconsolidated under the heading of Caucasian (Jacobsen, 8). 

One of the main processes that allowed non-Anglo Saxon Europeans to gain membership into white identity was to join in the abuse of people of color.   For example, groups like the Irish often participated in blackface minstrelsy.  When he mocked black people an Irish minstrel was able to emphasize his white identity through contrast (Roediger, 117).  Conflict between whites in power and people of color both at home and abroad (ie post-Reconstruction struggles by blacks for equal political rights) also motivated a more inclusive definition of whiteness, while at the same time creating a hierarchy of whiteness (Jacobsen, 214).  Jacobsen writes that the American melting pot that supposedly allowed so many European immigrants and their children social mobility was not as ideal as advertised.  He emphasizes, “how profoundly dependent their racial inclusion was upon the racial exclusion of others; how racially accented the native resistance was even to their inclusion for something over half a century (12).”  Thus, by shifting the focus onto the inadequacy of people of color, the boundaries of whiteness could quietly be redrawn on the sidelines.

The new whiteness/Caucasian identity that took shape in the 1920’s became a vehicle for assimilation.  As blackness as a race became more and more emphasized in the post-Reconstruction era, whiteness became more and more unified and also less distinct as it merged in the melting pot (Jacobsen, 152).   By the mid-1940’s, race was rarely an issue of whiteness anymore (264) and mainly an issue of the “Negro Problem” (111).  Roediger writes that within blackface entertainment “extreme cultural pluralism was at the same time a liquidation of ethnic and regional cultures, into a largely empty whiteness” (118).  Outside of blackface, the same effect was taking place in all aspects of society.  To be absorbed into white identity meant a significant degree of assimilation.

That “largely empty whiteness” led to the sacrifice of many easily identifiable cultural characteristics, which has enabled whiteness to function invisibly in American society.  Whiteness came to encompass a wide spectrum of distinct cultures that shared common geographical roots and relatively pale skin color.  Without distinct cultural characteristics to identify whiteness with, everyone in that category was allowed a certain fluidity of identity.  As people of Irish, English, and Italian descent intermarried and assimilated into the “empty whiteness” their identity became mainly a function of power, while identities of people of color became about food, music, and lifestyle.

Historically, people of color have been forced to define their identities (or their identities have been forcefully defined for them) by what they are not—white.  This reality was accentuated in all aspects of society, and anyone who tried to reject it often met a violent death (Roediger).   Certain European immigrant groups were also defined by what they were not.  The media often referred to the Irish and Italians as “savages,” drawing parallels with the status of American Indians (Jacobsen, 56).   And even when “white” or “Caucasian” became a blanket category, a hierarchy of superior and inferior whites still existed within it (41).  However, white fragmentation eventually dissipated.  Jacobsen writes that it was the civil rights era that finally erased boundaries between white groups, “ceased to concern the white races of Europe and came to refer exclusively to black-white relations and the struggle over Negro civil rights” (247).  

Race became equated with blackness, allowing whites to hide their racial identity behind that of blacks and for society as a whole to ignore other racial groups not included in the binary racial system (258). White activists in the civil rights movement could choose to acknowledge their racial identity, but were not forced to.  Under these conditions, whites were highly visible and held the majority of social, political and economic power, but their whiteness was essentially invisible.  The implicit function of white identity significantly outlined the conditions of blackness and other racial identities, without ever having to acknowledge the presence of whiteness itself.  

Jacobsen, Matthew Frye. 1998.  Whiteness of a Different Color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.            

Roediger, David R.  1991. “White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formation before the Civil War.” from Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.   London: Verso.