Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination

February 2002 Historically Speaking 19 Eric Arnesen Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination* * I * ? rise ofa genre ofscholI l'i £-1 arship centering on JL JL JL ^^ white racial identity— on whiteness—is one of the most dramatic developments in the humanities and social sciences in recentyears. The new scholars of whiteness insist that race is not something that onlynon-whites possess but is a characteristic ofwhites as well, necessitating close scrutiny ofwhites' race and racial identity and the very construction of race itself. It would seem that the "blizzard of 'whiteness ' studies," as cultural theorist Homi Bhabha puts it, ought to elicit critical reflection. But with few exceptions, the assessments in print today have been authored by those writingwithin the whiteness framework and tend to be largely descriptive or supportive. This is unfortunate. In myview, the whiteness projecthas yet to deliver on its promises. The most influential historical studies of whiteness— notably byDavid Roediger , Noel Ignatiev, Matthew FryeJacobson, Neil Foley, and Karen Brodldn—relyon arbitraryand inconsistent definitions oftheir core concepts while they emphasize select, elite constructions ofrace to the virtual exclusion of all other racial discourses. Offering little concrete evidence to support many oftheir arguments, these works often take creative liberties with the evidence they do have. Too much ofthe historical scholarship on whiteness has disregarded scholarly standards, employed sloppy methodology, generated new buzzwords andjargon, and attimes, produced an erroneous history. The weaknesses ofwhiteness scholarship are particularly evident in its treatment of a subject that historians of the United States have chronicled for decades—the hostile encounter between Irish immigrants and African-Americans in the antebellum North. Long before whiteness came on the scene, historians described in copious detail Irish immigrants' political allegiance to the proslavery Democratic party, their workplace clasheswith blacks, and theirparticipation in anti-abolitionist and anti-black mobs. Whiteness scholars have revisited these issues, asking once again: "How and why did the Irish in America adopt their anti-black stance?" Attempting nothing short ofa paradigmatic revolution, whiteness scholars suggest that the necessarilyprior question, is "how did the Irish become white?" To pose this question is to assert that 19*-centuryIrish immigrants to the United States were not white upon their arrival—that is, they were not seen as white bythe largerAmerican societyand did not see themselves as white. Over time, whiteness scholars argue, theybecamewhite. Yet early and mid-1Qth-century commentators on the Irish did not speak ofwhiteness per se but invoked a more diverse discursive apparatus, weaving considerations ofreligion (which virtuallyvanish in the considerations ofthe whiteness scholars), notions ofinnate and observed character and behavior, andyes, race too into their anti-Irish commentaries. Therefore whiteness historians must assume the role of interpreter, translatingthe 1^-century vernacular of race and group inferiority into the late 20?-^?????? idiom ofwhiteness. Upon arrivingin the United States, David Roediger declares, "it was by no means clear that the Irish were white." This claim rests not on an examination of early and mid-19thcenturyscientific thought, nor upon the actual observations of contemporary nativeborn white opponents of Irish immigration, much less on anyassessment of what the Irish newcomers themselves happened to think. Rather, itis rooted largely in the negative views, held by some, ofthe Catholic Irish "race" in the antebellum era. The Irishwere mocked bypolitical cartoonists who "played on the racial ambiguity of the Irish" through simian imagery and by ethnologists who "derided the 'Celtic race;'" they were the butt ofnativist folk wisdom which "held that an Irishman was a 'nigger,' inside out." From these claims ofIrish racial distinctiveness and inferiority—which historians have long recognized and explored— Roediger decisively, if arbitrarily, places whiteness at the center ofthe equation. Noel This is a brief excerpt. For the complete article from which this was drawn, including notes and citations, see Eric Arnesen, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3-32. 20Historically Speaking · February 2002 Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, concurs: it was "not so obvious in the United States" when the Irish began "coming over here in large numbers in the 1830s and '40s, that they would in fact be admitted to all the rights ofwhites and granted all the privileges ofcitizenship." That theywere...