Nineteenth-century political cartoons expressed WASP perceptions of Irish Americans.[1] In the image above, a servant confronts her WASP mistress in a scene of domestic disorder. The caricature’s caption reads: “THE IRISH DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE THAT WE ARE ALL FAMILIAR WITH.”

The two women appear in contrasting ways to highlight ironic subversion of middle- and upper-class values. The mistress should be reprimanding the servant for making a mess in the kitchen—note the blowing teapot, smoking oven, and dropped plate. Instead, she is begging for a return to order (or perhaps herself apologizing). The servant, taller and stronger than the mistress with an Irish clover design on her dress, raises her fist defiantly. She is portrayed as “masculine” rather than “feminine”: her body is larger than her mistress’, with bulging muscles and legs spread aggressively. The two faces contrast: whereas the mistress’ features (gazing upward) are conventionally “feminine,” the servant’s are “masculine” (or perhaps apelike) with buck teeth, large upper lip, and downward self-righteous gaze. Finally, the ironic title contrasts “WE” with “THE IRISH,” identifying the viewer as WASP. Overall, the cartoon mocks Irish American pretensions to dignity and autonomy by presenting these as ridiculous imitations of the “serious” American Declaration of Independence. Irish self-assertion can only create domestic (national) disturbance.

Unlike in the 1800s, Irish Americans today (like Irish in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain, and elsewhere) are perceived, and perceive themselves, as fully and unambiguously white, ticking this box on census forms. Irish no longer stand out from white Americans in religion, wealth, politics, or education. How did Irish Americans undergo a social process—not merely of assimilation—but of whitening, and over many decades become white (Ignatiev 2009)? How did racial assimilation work with other European groups such as Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Jews? How has whitening changed, or not changed, white perceptions of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics? What is whiteness, and how does it reflect social power?

Chapter 7 Learning Objectives

7.1 The Social Construction of Race

• Explain what sociologists mean by saying that race is socially constructed
• Understand race as a relationship of power among social groups

7.2 Different Ways to Be White

• Contrast different ways that groups have claimed whiteness

7.3 Whitening: From White-Ethnic to White

• Define whitening
• Define white privilege

7.4 Whitening: From Darker to Lighter

• Explain how one-drop ideology differentiated whitening in North America vs. Latin America

Chapter 7 Key Terms (in order of appearance in chapter)

whitening (two versions): (1) A social process of immigrant assimilation into an established white group. (2) A social process in which a darker-skinned group becomes lighter-skinned by intermarrying with the lighter-skinned.

the social construction of reality (SCR): different social groups experience the world in overlapping yet distinctive ways

legal whiteness: white categorization of a group in formal law

social whiteness: white categorization of a group in everyday, informal actions (especially by established whites such as WASPs)

whiteness by “inspection”: North American way of determining whiteness, based on the one-drop rule (your physical traits like skin color)

whiteness by “decency”: Latin American way of determining whiteness, based on your position in the community

white privilege: unearned social, economic, and political benefits accruing to whites but denied to nonwhites (for example, in Brazil, South Africa, and the U.S.)

7.1 The Social Construction of Race

Chapter 3 introduced the concept of social construction. “As a phenomenon of the social world, not the natural world, race is a social construction that reflects differences of power among social groups” (Ch.3 above). The social construction of reality (SCR) is one of the most important ideas in social science and philosophy of the past century. Part of its usefulness is its flexibility; sociologists have different versions. But they’d all agree with the following:

Ancient and medieval European philosophers claimed that the world was completely independent of human actions and ideas. God created the world as containing certain kinds of animals, minerals, places, and people. Although people spoke many different languages, all languages referred to the same animals, minerals, places, and people. There was one sacred language that God used to communicate with people (Latin, in the Middle Ages). Likewise, there was one way of learning about God’s creation, through study of sacred texts (Bible) and logical reasoning. The world was independent of what people did. Reality was simply there, not the outcome of any process other than God’s creative activity.

In the 1600s and 1700s, leading European modern philosophers started to question this view. By the 1700s they were seeking to acknowledge and refute skeptical arguments that reason actually can’t tell us about reality in itself. Regardless of whether God exists or not, maybe we can’t know for certain what the world is like. So far this sounds like ancient skepticism doubting the trustworthiness of our seeing, hearing, tasting. But here’s the modern twist: the mind interposes itself like a screen between us (consciousness) and the world (reality). The screen doesn’t simply distort, but constructs (produces, generates) our awareness in terms of its own structures. Knowledge is an outcome of a process: the mind’s active processing of raw sensation. Thus, we can’t directly know reality because the mind has always already processed our sensory input (sights, sounds, smells) prior to our awareness. When you smell roses, you can’t smell the rose itself. You can only smell the rose as constructed (processed, produced) by your mind. The mind combines the raw smell (sensory data entering your nose) with its own processing structure. The result is your experience of smelling roses, or any other human experience—not unknowable reality “in itself.” Since all minds have identical structures, we all experience the same smell. By 1800, this argument had revolutionized philosophy (Gardner 1999).

After 1900, philosophers developed reality construction ideas in several ways. Here’s the version relevant to sociology: People are not just minds constructing reality. Rather, mentality is embodied, a way of doing things in culturally appropriate ways (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Ryle 1949; Wittgenstein 1953). Mind is visible in ordinary things our bodies do (grimace in pain) and say (announce an intention to eat chocolate) as we interact with each other. Healthy babies across the world have identical brain structures. But they are raised in different cultures with overlapping yet contrasting ways of doing things. Chinese and Italians both cook noodles; but they use chopsticks or forks to eat them. And the Mandarin Chinese and Italian languages refer to different types of noodles. Thus, against a background of human unity, different societies interpret reality in distinctive ways. Chinese experience is not identical to Italian experience. Modern French experience is not identical to medieval French experience.

Likewise, different groups within the same society (women vs. men, poor vs. rich, black vs. white, Los Angelenos vs. Kansans) make sense of the world in overlapping, yet distinctive ways. In the U.S., middle-class, urban white women—on the one hand—and working-class, rural Mexican men who are undocumented immigrants—on the other—likely have many cultural barriers to cross to understand each other. Now we can see why sociologists Berger and Luckmann (1966) described this view as “social” construction of reality (SCR). Our overlapping yet contrasting social identities shape our shared experience of the world in distinctive ways. Studying diversity has a lot to do with learning about these distinctive experiences. Sociologists are especially interested in how SCR relates to social inequality. How do powerful groups (e.g., whites, men, the wealthy, heterosexuals) understand the world in ways that contrast with the experience of less powerful groups (e.g., people of color, women, the poor, lesbians)?

A common misunderstanding: Some philosophers historically argued that the mind “creates reality” in the sense that, without people, the world would disappear. This view (“philosophical idealism”) is not what sociologists claim. Sociologists hold that human experience is the outcome of how various kinds of people use everyday culture (ways of talking and doing things) to navigate their lives. As Chapter 2 noted, all people, including scientists, always have a “view from somewhere” (Rorty 1979).

Race as socially constructed. “As a phenomenon of the social world, not the natural world, race is a social construction that reflects differences of power among social groups” (Ch.3 above). We’ve seen that race has no important biological basis. There are no human sub-species: race is an illusion, not biologically real. But we treat it as real, and that’s crucial. Sociologically, race continues to matter in the twenty-first century as a key part of social identities and distinctions across world cultures.

Human beings (Homo sapiens) have always sought to distinguish their particular group from others: us vs. them (Bourdieu 1984). “Our” way of life is better than “theirs”—as are our god(s), our mythical origins, our ceremonies, our food, our beauty, etc. In short, we are better than they. Using power and violence to enforce social distinction is a human universal. Perhaps especially since the prehistoric transition to agriculture (farming) and settled life, groups have distinguished themselves from others in numerous ways: by place of dwelling, housing, food, religion, gender, age, caste, class, etc.

Not, however, by race. It is a striking historical fact that race—in the modern (1800s) sense of a global hierarchy of peoples based on innate physical traits—did not begin to emerge until the 1400s, as a direct consequence of increasing European encounters with non-Europeans (Desmond & Emirbayer 2010). Not until the 1700s and especially 1800s did Europeans develop elaborate pseudo-scientific theories justifying white supremacy in terms of innate traits (white skin, brain size, bodily proportions: Gould 1996). Western Europeans invented race to explain and justify global colonization: first to themselves, then to colonized others (for the U.S., see Allen 1994; for Spain, see Warman 2003:68). Thus, the very concept of race—e.g., as a way many nations today categorize citizens on census forms (Loveman 2014)—originated as the new and modern way Europeans (1500s) distinguished themselves from everyone else to claim their own innate superiority. Simply by taking race seriously we are already accepting assumptions made long ago by European colonialism.

Like older “us-them” distinctions, race emerged as a relational concept (Blumer 1958; Desmond & Emirbayer 2010). Europeans (1500s) proposed a world hierarchy of peoples, with themselves at the top. Since then, race has always been a technique for whites to distinguish themselves from nonwhites. Centuries of European global colonization made racial whiteness synonymous with goodness (virtue), beauty, and truth; color became a sign of badness, ugliness, and falsity. As the color of power, whiteness marked the racial distinctions so necessary to European claims of natural superiority. For instance, the American binary opposition of “white or black” first arose in the British colonial era, with fateful consequences that still shape racial identity and race relations today. Between 1607 (Jamestown) and 1776, American whiteness acquired its modern meaning of “not-Indian” and “not-black” (Harvey 2007:Ch.2).

This either-or, mutual exclusivity of race—the one-drop rule (see Chapter 5)—was more rigid in North America than in most other regions of European global colonization. This descent rule forming the foundation of U.S. racial classification is relatively unique in the rigor of its ancestry principle for deciding who is and is not white (Fredrickson 1981:96). One-drop ideology allowed American colonists to embrace overall homogeneity—“whiteness”—of a wide variety of northwestern European ethnicities and peoples—English, Scots, Scots Irish, Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Swedes—while rejecting any similarities with African or Native American ethnicities, even people of mixed European ancestry. The fact that these Europeans were almost all Protestants made white racialization (as WASP) easier. The question of Indians was less clear, with some prominent whites such as Thomas Jefferson opining that Indians were closer to whites than were blacks (Klinkner & Smith 1999:23-24). Thus, American racial hierarchy was well established by 1776: whites (WASPs) on top, Indians in the middle, and blacks below.

7.2 Different Ways to Be White

Being WASP was a first way for Americans to be white. By 1800—regardless of wealth, social reputation, European vs. American birthplace, or European ethnicity—if you were of purely northwestern European ancestry, you were white.

Pan-white-ethnic nativism served an important political function particularly between 1763 and 1776, fueling cross-colonial (“American”) solidarity against the British Empire (Chasteen 2001:104-05). This was crucial to the success of Independence, since British North America was one of the most socially diverse regions in the eighteenth-century world (APAN:I:98-99). Though enslaved and free blacks, and Indians, also participated in rebellion, the white creole leadership (many of whom owned slaves) never contemplated civil and political equality with Negroes or Indians. The Founders envisioned the nation as white—as “not-Indian” and “not-black” (see Chapter 5). Indeed, following ratification of the Constitution, one of Congress’ first laws (1790) restricted naturalization to “free white persons”: only white immigrants could become citizens (Fredrickson 1981:145; Gómez 2018:146).[2]

U.S. revolutionaries had not needed nonwhite support nearly as much as did Latin American leaders (e.g., Mexico, South America) with much larger mestizo and indigenous populations (Chasteen 2001:105). Though the American Revolution depended on pan-white-ethnic unity, there was no political need for the Founders to develop a multiracial nationalist ideology, which moreover would threaten the slavery on which both southern and northern colonies profited. We’ve seen (Ch.5 above) that the most racially egalitarian of them (e.g., Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Jay, Hamilton) opposed slavery, but this group sympathized with proposals of black mass deportation to Africa—another version of white nationalism—rather than nonwhite full citizenship (Fredrickson 1981:144-145).

True, Latin American ethnic nationalism “celebrates the unique: a particular historical experience, a particular culture”; whereas U.S. civic nationalism “tends to focus on a set of shared political ground rules and ideals” (Chasteen 2001:215). But the North American colonies had already long excluded (using the one-drop rule) nonwhites from the political, economic, and civil spheres; and this exclusion continued long after Independence. Starting in the 1770s, U.S. legislation grounded citizenship rights in male gender and whiteness (APAN:I:202). In sum, the Founders blended civic nationalism with pan-white-ethnic nationalism (WASP nationalism excluding nonwhites). Race (whiteness) and nation were tightly interwoven from the very beginning in U.S. history (Harvey 2007:14), though in ways that contrasted with Latin American ethnic nationalism (1810-1825).

After 1830, large-scale immigration posed increasing challenges to WASP notions of whiteness (Jacobson 1998; see Chapter 6). Given WASP white nationalism, the new immigration simultaneously threatened their vision of American identity. Anti-Catholic nativists made explicit this WASP understanding that “white” also meant Protestant. Over the following century (1830-1920) of mass immigration, WASPs (old whites, established whites) displayed their power to accept or reject claims of whiteness by immigrants (new whites, white ethnics). The first Catholic presidential candidacy with a major party—Democratic New York Governor Alfred E. Smith in 1928, a second-generation Irish immigrant—only came many decades later, and his bid was hampered by ongoing anti-Catholic prejudice, especially in rural and southern regions (APAN:II:642). Even in 1960 when Kennedy (likewise Irish Catholic) won the presidency, he aroused similar widespread WASP prejudice.

All European immigrant groups, as well as Mexicans and Asians, lobbied persistently for WASPs to accept them as fully white Americans.[3] Their arguments hinged on claims of being “not-black” and “not-Indian,” negative relationships with blackness and indigenousness revealing the pervasive influence of the one-drop rule (white “purity” values) in American society. Yet, even if groups attained legal whiteness, like Mexican Americans after 1848, social whiteness often remained elusive. For instance, in 1850s Texas, as in New Mexico, Mexicans were categorized legally as white. Though Texas state law banned white-black marriage, Mexican-black marriages were only rarely prosecuted. Mexicans may have been legally white, but social whiteness was restricted to Anglos (non-Mexican whites) (Gómez 2018:107). In U.S. history, egalitarian law has frequently proven insufficient to end racist social customs (Klinkner & Smith 1999; see Chapter 5). Legal, formal citizenship rights do not guarantee substantive, real-world citizenship rights (Hohle 2018:29, 49).

Figure 7.1.[4] Irish American Al Smith was the 1928 Democratic candidate for president.

WASPs, in turn, evaluated immigrant groups’ claims of whiteness using criteria that strongly contrasted with how Latin American elites often viewed whiteness (Briggs 2002:61-62). Although both views (North America, Latin America) of whiteness were racist by assuming whites to be superior to nonwhites, there were key differences. North Americans often decided whiteness by “inspection,” for example by observation of a person’s skin color and hair type. Racial categorization was premised on the one-drop assumption, meaning that white and black were mutually exclusive. Whiteness was all or nothing: a person was either purely white or not white at all.

By contrast, Latin Americans often decided whiteness by “decency.” This view rejected the one-drop assumption. A person didn’t necessarily need to be of “pure” white race to be considered white by local elites. It could be sufficient to have some white ancestors, to come from gente decente (decent people: a worthy, honorable family), and to have done nothing to stain your family’s reputation (Yashar 2005). Whiteness was a personalized, social category having much to do with one’s family, wealth, and place in the community.

Table 7.1. Two ways of judging whiteness: inspection vs. decency

Sources: Adapted from Briggs 2002:61-62; Telles 2004:219.

Table 7.1’s categories express something fundamentally contrastive, rooted in distinctive colonial histories, about the social construction of race in North America versus Latin America (Telles 2004:1). Nevertheless, in Latin America there has been much judgment of whiteness by “inspection”—and in North America much judgment of whiteness by “decency” (and nonwhiteness by “indecency”) (Gómez 2018:155).

The white-skinned Irish exemplify this complexity. Like the cartoon image opening this chapter, many nineteenth-century images and descriptions portray the Irish as beyond the pale of civilization: a “race” mired in barbarism (Ignatiev 2009). Indeed, the very phrase “beyond the pale” originally referred to the wooden defenses (“pale,” “palisade”) separating “civilized” 1500s English Dublin from the “wild Irish” beyond (Fredrickson 1981:14-17). Many nineteenth-century British and American WASP observers drew detailed comparisons between Irish and blacks. For example, in 1849 Scottish author Thomas Carlyle—writing disparagingly about Afro-Jamaicans—claimed that

“‘[b]lackness’ was not simply a matter of biological endowment…but both consequence and manifestation of culture and labor. Indeed, the whiteness of the Irish was incidental and even something of an inconvenience, because ‘having a white skin and European features, [they] cannot be prevented from circulating among us [British] at discretion’” (Holt 1992:282).

Carlyle wasn’t judging the Irish as nonwhite by inspection, but by decency—or rather their “black” indecency (alleged lack of culture and laziness). The passage also shows how WASPs saw people of African ancestry as the lowest common denominator of humanity. As we’ve seen, whiteness is a relational concept: groups became “whiter” the higher they stood on the European racial hierarchy, with blacks at the bottom and the white-skinned but indecent Irish not far above.

7.3 Whitening: From White-Ethnic to White

After the first way to be white American (by being WASP), a new way emerged during mass immigration (1830-1920): whitening. As a form of European immigrant assimilation, whitening was the social process of established whites increasingly accepting a racialized group as “white” (or “American”). Such groups included Jews, Germans, Irish, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Russians, etc.

During the 1800s-1900s, WASPs acted as racial gatekeepers with power to accept or reject claims of whiteness: “the privilege to confer whiteness” (Moore 2018:70). In the twentieth century, whitening increasingly allowed Irish Americans and descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants to join WASPs as white Americans, an achievement of Americanization assumed to promote “progress” and “civilization.” Immigrants and their descendants wanted this because being perceived as white offered white privilege: unearned social, economic, and political benefits accruing to whites but denied to nonwhites, especially blacks (Desmond & Emirbayer 2010).

Whitening could also apply to Native Americans, though with much historical variation. For example, in 1924 the Snyder Act extended citizenship to all Native Americans not already citizens (APAN:II:618). Such overnight changes in political status could influence WASP perceptions of whiteness, but by no means guaranteed social or economic inclusion.

7.4 Whitening: From Darker to Lighter

For Americans of African ancestry, WASP racial purity ideology (determining whiteness by inspection) had always made being white impossible. No matter how light-skinned, one was always “Negro” (or “black” or “African American”)—both to bureaucratic categorizers in schools, workplace, and government, and to whites in everyday life. As we’ve seen (Chapter 4), the very category of white originated (1400s-1500s) as the European racial binary opposite of non-Europeans, especially black Africans. Whiteness was flexible and could mean many things—by 1945 even being Irish, Jewish, or Mexican—but it couldn’t mean being black.

After 1945, whitening of white ethnics didn’t diminish the power of the “white or black” one-drop rule. Rather, it simply added more groups to the expanded white category. Once whitened, descendants of white ethnics could themselves exercise white privilege over African Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans (APAN:II:760). Today, U.S. racial commonsense—among whites as well as people of color—often continues to assume black-white mutual exclusivity (whiteness by inspection). For example, Barack Obama’s emergence on the national political scene in the early 2000s generated much debate on how “African American” he was, given his Kansan white mother and Kenyan black father. Nevertheless, he was almost universally perceived as nonwhite (“our first black president”).

By contrast, Latin American racial categorization of Africa-descended groups worked differently, absent the North American one-drop rule (Loveman 2014). In both regions, white supremacy made whiteness socially valued, but Latin American color lines were often more permeable than the U.S. color line, especially where large mestizo populations lived. For centuries, dark-skinned Brazilians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, etc. had sought increased social acceptance for themselves and their children by marrying “up” with lighter-skinned partners (Chasteen 2001:84-87; Marx 1997:66-67). (U.S. blacks did too, but in the context of one-drop ideology.) Social status was strongly influenced by shades of skin color (Lamming 1953:xxxvii). Between 1880-1940, whitening of mestizo populations was a major national project for many Latin American countries—especially Brazil, with its large nonwhite population (Telles 2004:28-31). In a neocolonial age of ascendant white supremacy and scientific racism, elites introduced immigration policies promoting white European immigration, with the explicit goal of “lightening” the national complexion to “improve” the national racial type (Chasteen 2001:169, 215-16). According to such leaders—influenced and pressured by Europe and the U.S.—moving from darker to lighter was a form of national “progress.”

In sum, contrasting forms of white supremacy produced different versions of whitening in Latin and North America (Chasteen 2001:86). Today, whitening through intermarriage continues as an important route to upward social mobility for nonwhite Brazilians, with lighter skin color continuing to mark higher social status (Telles 2004:238). Throughout Latin America, race and class remain strongly linked: wealthier people tend to have lighter skin (more European and less African or indigenous ancestry), and poorer people tend to be darker with more non-European ancestry (Chasteen 2001:20-21; cf. Castellanos 1960; Volpi 2018; Warman 1979). Likewise, in the U.S., patterns of political, economic, and social power continue to correlate with degrees of European ancestry and shades of skin color.

Chapter 7 and Unit II Summary

Chapter 7 introduced the social process of whitening. Section 7.1 explained one of the most important concepts in social science, history, and philosophy: the social construction of reality. The section discussed what sociologists mean by saying that race is socially constructed.

Section 7.2 discussed different ways to be white. It contrasted different ways by which racial-ethnic groups have claimed whiteness. The contrasts center on Latin America versus North America.

Section 7.3 presented a form of whitening, defining it as European white-ethnic immigrant assimilation. The section also defined white privilege as unearned social, economic, and political benefits accruing to whites and whitened groups, but denied to nonwhites.

Section 7.4 presented another form of whitening. For centuries, New World groups of African ancestry sought access to the social privileges of whiteness by intermarrying with lighter-skinned people. Whitening, as a transition from darker to lighter skin across generations, worked in contrasting ways in Latin America versus North America. This was due to one-drop racial ideology in North America, and its absence in much of Latin America.

Overall, Unit II presented the historical relationship between whiteness and power. It illustrated this connection with historical overviews: of European global colonization, U.S. slavery in the colonial and national periods, U.S. immigration and nativism between 1830 and 1929, and whitening processes in the 1800s and 1900s.