Abstract
The emergence of an American cultural identity as white crystallized fairly early in America’s history with the founders and early settlers who for the most part came from the British Isles. The separation of the colonies from British rule was important. The role First Nations and blacks were to play in the uniqueness of America’s cultural identity was readily apparent. In the minds of the colonists, First Nations and blacks were both seen as cultureless savages. They never looked at them as Americans because they were unlike whites “in appearance, customs, and language.”1 Eventually, the American government had to take on the task of determining who was an American. Even though there was a social practice already in place, nothing offered a more powerful description of who was an American than the first Naturalization Act of 1790, which provided citizenship only to white men. What the American historian Alden Vaughan would later describe as the unbearable “multiethnic mix”2 was thus legally obliterated. Citizenship was not only about the legality it entailed in terms of rights; it also signified one’s equal status in society, equality that was denied to all racialized groups as well as to women. That America was “a white man’s country” gained both literal and symbolic meaning.
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Notes
Nelson examined the writings of white authors including Cotton Mather, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick. See Dana Nelson, The World in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1862 (1994)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness’, Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture” (1995, 432).
A profound discussion of race and racial slavery can be found in Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619–1990s (1975); see also Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994).
This book was republished by Cambridge University Press in 2004. For other alternative views on the issues of slavery and racism, see Joseph Boskin, Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony (1976)
Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia” (1989)
Daniel L. Noel, ed., The Origins of American Slavery and Racism (1972).
Handlin and Handlin 1950. Also see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963).
Edmund S. Morgan has argued that whites in seventeenth-century Virginia, for example, had a more flexible understanding of race and did not equate race with slavery. In many instances, whites and blacks would join together to oppose the rules of the plantation owners. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).
See Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia” (1989, 323).
See David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection” (1997, 12).
Gossett 1963, 30. See Richard Mayo-Smith, “Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States” (1894, 429–32).
See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1982)
see also Harriet Jocobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1973).
For further reading on Hudgins v. Wright, see Adrienne D. Davis, “Identity Notes, Part One: Playing in the Light” (1997, 232–37)
Robert Cover, Justice Accused, Anti-Slavery and the Judicial Process (1975, 51–55).
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979).
See Claire Jean Kim, “Clinton’s Race Initiative: Recasting the American Dilemma” (2000, 182).
Ronald Takaki has drawn our attention to the racism of Benjamin Franklin. See Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993); Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1979); From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (1987).
See Annals of Congress, Abridgements of Debates of Congress, 1789–1856 (1857, 184).
See Mark Train, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1962, chapter 32).
For a thorough reading of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991b)
Sucheng Chan, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese American Community in America, 1882–1943 (1991a). With the implementation of the Page Law, in 1875, Chinese women were barred from entering the United States.
Takaki 1993, 163. Also, quoted in Stephen Spencer, “The Discourse of Whiteness: Chinese-American History, Pearl S. Buck, and the Good Earth” (2002).
Wu 2002, 19. African American film maker Spike Lee, in his 1989 movie Do the Right Thing, used the same scenario in the film. See Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (2002, 19).
See Kobena Mercer, “‘1968’: Periodizing Postmodern Politics and Identity” (1991, 426–27).
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© 2010 Sherrow O. Pinder
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Pinder, S.O. (2010). Whiteness: The Definitive Conceptualization of an American Identity. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_3
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