Lone Star

Cultural studies and social history are unlikely partners. One is trendy, sometimes brilliant and sometimes silly, and rarely touches ground; the other has grown stodgy—having discovered race, class and gender, it has not changed much in twenty years. But in The White Scourge, Neil Foley has used “whiteness,” which is all the rage, to bring the pair together.

Until the current turn toward whiteness by Noel Ignatiev, David Roediger, and others, the “white race” and “white manhood” has managed to be both at the center of much American history and curiously underexamined. Historically, whiteness, like race itself, is a strange and confusing concept. Who counts as white has changed over the course of American history. Not only the Irish, but a whole slew of Eastern and Southern European immigrants have become white. They have sought whiteness because to be white in the United States bestows privilege. In the United States to be a white man has meant encountering far less discrimination in where you could live and where you could work. It has often meant that you could usually take your civil rights for granted. But the real beauty of whiteness was that all its privileges were masked. White wasn’t privileged; white was normal. Whiteness became essential to the American conception of individualism because it is the only racial classification that exists to empower rather than disable its members. All the other American “races”—blacks, Indians, Asians, Mexicans—were all defined by not only skin color and physical features but also by their moral and intellectual deficiencies. Race for them is always a limit. They are expected to fail when placed in competition with whites. When whites succeed, however, they cite not their race but their individual abilities. For most of American history the idea of competitive striving among “equals” has presumed whiteness and masculinity. For everyone else, race ensures that the race is over before it has ever begun.

Neil Foley does not travel to the heart of whiteness; the heart of Texas will do. Central Texas is where the American South meets the American West. In Central Texas Southern agriculture lost both its plantations and its simple binary racial divisions. The migration of Mexicans and tejanos into the region complicated issues of race. Whiteness was not just an American construction. Mexicans had absorbed its lessons before their migration. Porfirio Díaz had fostered beliefs in white supremacy that some Mexicans carried with them over the border.

In Central Texas, as the binary world of black and white broke down, the dirty work of putting people into racial categories became less “natural” and more difficult than elsewhere in the South. Foley, the unreconstructed social historian, wants to see cultural abstractions such as race at work in the world, impinging on, and shaping peoples’ everyday lives. But he also shares cultural history’s fascination with hybridity and the fluidity of identities. Central Texas—with its convergence and combination of two systems of race/class relations, one Southern and one Western—is perfect for his concerns.

In studying the three “races” of Central Texas—whites, blacks, and Mexicans—Foley makes whiteness the key to his entire analysis. Whiteness is not only the preeminent American racial category, it is also “a complex social and economic matrix” (p. 7). With it comes both a privileged access to wealth and power and a masking of those very privileges.

In studying the political economy of cotton in Central Texas Foley, in effect, asks a twinned pair of deceptively simple questions: What happens when whites fail? And what happens when non-whites—in this case mexicanos—make a bid for enough whiteness to get land and escape Jim Crow?

Failure could endanger white men’s very whiteness since it joins them with non-whites whose race, white supremacists believed, doomed them to failure. Because in the American schema upward mobility is the result of individual qualities available only to white men, then downward mobility among white men displays not...