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

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
ISBN-10
067441781X
ISBN-13
9780674417816
Category
History
Pages
368
Language
English
Published
1999-09-01
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Author
Matthew Frye Jacobson

Description

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 re-racialized to become Caucasian.

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