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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2014
In the years following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the rich planters of colonial Virginia hit upon a New World expedient that would be fateful for the entire history of race in America. Edmund Morgan tells the story memorably in American Slavery, American Freedom. Having narrowly evaded death and devastation at the hands of the former indentured servants who comprised the region's lower classes, and still faced with a chronic shortage of labor, the planters began to import African slaves to work the tobacco crops on which their wealth depended. They weren't the first in the New World to try this approach. West Indian sugar planters had already successfully organized the labor on their large plantations along these “racial” lines, and there was sufficient precedent in Western culture at large for associating “blackness” with evil to defuse moral alarm at the practice.
1 Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.
2 Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black (Chapel Hill, 1968)Google Scholar.
3 In 1860 there were approximately 4 million African-American slaves in the South.
4 Scholars such as Kenneth Stampp, John Hope Franklin, Herbert Aptheker, Winthrop Jordan, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, Stanley Elkins, Peter Kolchin, Edmund Morgan, Orlando Patterson, David Brion Davis, and Ira Berlin, to name just a prominent few.
5 As detailed later in the essay: Eric Arnesen, Eric Foner, Adolph L. Reed Jr, Barbara J. Fields, Peter Kolchin.
6 Turner, Jack, Awakening to Race (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leverenz, David, Honor Bound (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012)Google Scholar.
7 Morgan emphasizes a stark profit motive as slavery's original driving force; Eugene Genovose, for one distinguished example of a different approach, pays more attention to the role played by quasi-aristocratic paternalism in the evolving history of the institution.
8 Saxton, Alexander, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London, 1990)Google Scholar.
9 In addition to the works by Roediger, Ignatiev, and Allen which I discuss immediately following, Lott, Eric's Love and Theft (New York, 1993)Google Scholar also concerns the Irish as both performers and chief audience of blackface minstrelsy. But as I suggest later in the essay, Lott's marvelous book distinguishes itself from these others by the nuance, historical specificity, and psychological subtlety of its account of Irish–black relations as mediated by the minstrel stage. Among other points, Lott implicitly acknowledges the official legal impossibility of choosing blackness by emphasizing the sublimation of any such illicit wishes into blackface performances.
10 Roediger, , The Wages of Whiteness (New York: 1991) 133–4Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., 49–50.
12 Ibid., 136.
13 Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
14 Allen, Theodore W., The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (New York, 1994–7), 1: 186Google Scholar.
15 Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 2.
16 Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), 5–6Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., 139.
18 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 8Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., 12.
20 Ibid., 9.
21 Ibid., 10.
22 Ibid., 258.
23 Turner, Awakening to Race, 102. For the idea of a “choice” of whiteness he here cites Baldwin, James's “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” in Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption (New York, 2010), 125–30, 128Google Scholar.
24 Turner, Awakening to Race, 20.
25 Ibid., 25.
26 Ibid., 26.
27 Ibid., 2.
28 Ibid., 89.
29 Ibid., 5.
30 Ibid., 5.
31 Ibid., 16.
32 Ibid., 16.
33 Ibid., 25.
34 Ibid., 33.
35 Ibid., 72, 73.
36 Ibid., 79.
37 Ibid., 93.
38 Ibid., 94.
39 Ibid., 108.
40 Ibid., 110.
41 Ibid.,116.
42 Ibid., 66.
43 Leverenz, David, Honor Bound (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012), 3Google Scholar.
44 Ibid., 1.
45 Arnesen, Eric, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3–32Google Scholar.
46 Ibid., 5.
47 Foner, Eric, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall, 2001), 57–60Google Scholar; Barbara J. Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, & Identity”, ibid., 48–56; Adolph Reed Jr, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, ibid., 69–80. James Barrett and Victoria Hattam dissented. James R. Barrett, “Whiteness Studies: Anything Here for Historians of the Working Class?”, ibid., 33–42; Victoria C. Hattam, “Whiteness: Theorizing Race, Eliding Ethnicity”, ibid., 61–68.
48 Reed, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, 76.
49 Kolchin, Peter, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America”, Journal of American History, 89 (June, 2002), 154–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Ibid., 161.
51 I take the phrase “white on arrival” from the title of Guglielmo, Thomas A.'s excellent book on Italian immigrants: White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago 1890–1945 (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, which offers a valuable corrective to whiteness studies on this topic.
52 Foner, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, 57–8, makes the point as follows: “in terms of legal and political rights, European immigrants never had to ‘become’ white. The men who wrote these laws and constitutions subsumed these immigrants from the outset within the category of whiteness.”
53 Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 20, raises the crucial question on this point: “Even if whiteness scholars managed to produce some convincing evidence that some Americans—manufacturers, professionals, or other elites—somehow doubted the full whiteness of new immigrant groups in the 30's and 40's, on what grounds do these historians single out these views, declare them hegemonic, and ignore all countervailing opinion, no matter how great? This raises the question of whose discourse counts.”
54 Friedman, Lawrence M., The History of American Law 3rd edn (New York, 2001Google Scholar; first published 1973) 161: “In southern eyes, black was black. Whether the person was slave or free was almost incidental. The free black was a dangerous person. The free black threatened the whole caste system.” By the same logic a “white” person claiming “blackness” would have been not only incomprehensible but unacceptable.
55 Ibid., 160: “White fraternizers were highly unwelcome. By 1834 in South Carolina, a white man who gambled with a black, slave or free, was liable to be whipped ‘not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.’”
56 Stauffer, John's The Black Hearts of Men (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar would seem to present a counterexample insofar as it describes, among other things, the extraordinary efforts of white men Gerritt Smith (for a time) and John Brown (unto his death), to acquire “black hearts”—to “view the world as if they were black” (at 1). The book movingly evokes the degree to which in the 1850s under the influence of distinctive strains of millenarian Protestantism both men temporarily succeeded in achieving subjective inward identification with their despised black brethren. But to its credit the book also candidly registers the extent to which in the long run this noble subjective aspiration was shattered by the overwhelming objective force of racist codes of law and convention. The fact that both Brown and Smith came to believe that violence was necessary to bridge the subjective and the objective in this sense shows clearly that becoming black by simple choice was impossible under the established (racist) legal code. And even for these prophets the price was very high: Brown, as is well known, paid with his life—and the lives of many others; Smith paid for a time with his sanity, after which some of the society's racist norms resumed their claim upon him. The extremely difficult prophetic–heroic nature of the self-transformations Stauffer thus describes helps to illustrate why it is unreasonable for historians to expect similar action from an entire group of hundreds of thousands of mostly very poor, uneducated, and marginalized people such as the antebellum immigrant Irish.
57 Quoted by Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 4, from Roediger, David, “Race and the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History,” International Review of Social History, 38 (1993), 127–43, 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 19–92. Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 23, cites for one example when Roediger (and James Barrett) note rank-and-file Eastern European immigrants’ lack of participation in Irish gang violence in post-World War I Chicago as an “abstention from whiteness.” Jacobson, similarly, “suggests that in attacking blacks in the Draft Riots in 1863, the Irish insisted on ‘whiteness’. With these and other words Jacobson treats whiteness and racialist beliefs and actions as virtual synonyms, substituting the former for the latter and presenting a maneuver for a novel interpretation.”
59 Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”, 15; Foner, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, 58, strongly seconds Arnesen: “Too often, as Arnesen notes, whiteness has been invoked as a synonym for an all-pervasive, never-changing system of racial supremacy.”
60 Lott, Eric, Love and Theft (New York, 1993), 148Google Scholar.
61 Reed Jr, “Response to Eric Arnesen”, 79.
62 David Leverenz, Honor Bound, 26.
63 Ibid., 27.
64 Turner, Awakening to Race, 113.
65 Ibid., 101.Turner uses this word twice in describing a “thought-experiment” which entails Americans’ large-scale forfeiting of property.
66 Ibid., 121.
67 This economic benefit is the principal focus of Lipsitz, George's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 2006; first published 1998)Google Scholar.
68 Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”, 13: “religion . . . virtually vanishes in the considerations of the whiteness scholars.”
69 Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,” 163: “to most Americans, for whom Protestantism went hand in hand with both republicanism and Americanism, the Irish immigrants’ Catholicism was far more alarming than their color. Indeed, some abolitionists managed to combine a passionate belief in the goodness and intellectual potential of black people with an equally passionate conviction of the unworthiness of the Irish, and in the 1850s many nativists saw little difficulty in moving from the anti-Irish Know-Nothing party into the antislavery Republican Party, a trajectory that would have been truly remarkable had their dominant perception of the Irish been that they were nonwhite.”
70 See again Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men.
71 See Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966)Google Scholar; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (New York, 1999Google Scholar; first published Ithaca, 1975); Davis, , Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Davis, , The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, also emphasizes the Protestant and millenarian sources of abolitionism.
72 Berger, puts it succinctly: “The age that saw the decline of honour also saw the rise of new moralities and of a new humanism, amd most specifically of a historically unprecedented concern for the dignity and rights of the individual.” Peter L. Berger, “The Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour,” in Sandel, Michael J., ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (New York, 1984), 149–58, 150Google Scholar.
73 Ibid., 157.
74 Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA, 1982) 79Google Scholar.
75 This is not to suggest that Emerson did not have a “positive” conception of human flourishing, but rather that he did not see coercive institutions of political power as the best way to bring about such flourishing. In the liberal view that Emerson shared with the American founders, the long history of abuses of political power dictated that the first step towards human flourishing would be to limit the coercive reach of government. With these limits firmly established in the form of rights, a society could and should then reflect and debate and move freely, democratically, and self-critically towards the most felicitous and fulfilling collective arrangements. In this manner, as Emerson put it in “American Scholar,” “The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence [sic] and a wreath of joy around all.” The sentence elegantly conjoins the “negative” (Enlightenment) and “positive” (Romantic) dimensions of Emerson's liberalism.
76 Turner, Awakening to Race, 27, italics mine.
77 Emerson took the problem of exploitation seriously: he recognized the importance of not deriving one's freedom and flourishing from the subjugation of others. But for all its imperfections in this regard he generally saw free trade as diminishing the exploitations on which feudal–aristocratic society was built. See Dolan, Neal, Emerson's Liberalism (Madison, WI, 2009)Google Scholar, for a discussion of liberal themes in Emerson's work as a whole.
78 Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,” 160, also found this diffuse, all-pervasive, unlimited quality in the whiteness scholars’ conception of race: “Race appears as both real and unreal, transitory and permanent, ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing.”
79 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays and Lectures (New York, 1983), 262Google Scholar, original emphasis.
80 Ibid., 263.
81 Ibid., 262.
82 Ibid., 273.
83 Ibid., 261.
84 Ibid., 262.
85 Ibid., 262.
86 Ibid., 102.
87 Ibid., 104.
88 Roediger, David R., Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (New York, 1994), 12Google Scholar.
89 Ibid., 67.
90 Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity”, 50.