Letter from Jacobson to Morrison

Dear Toni,

There is little difference between Stavros and Teague O’Regan. You recount a Greek character becoming white—becoming American—by exhibiting his “racial contempt that transforms this charming Greek into an entitled white.” I explain the story of the Irish immigrant who turns from barbarian to Caucasian simply because of his proclamations against Native Americans. How, based on our countries economic, political, and social history can we say that race is fixed? Or that race is biological in any regard?

Allen and Roediger, as you must know, present the relativity and mutability of how race is defined in very compelling ways. However, you must have also noticed that there are certain limitations to their work since their arguments are primarily based on economics and class. They do not really examine the variability in whiteness and the political and social role that categories like white, Caucasian, and Celt have played over time; how have these definitions and hierarchies changed? Neither examines whiteness against centuries of historical movement and shifts—looking at merely decades of history is not enough for how much conceptions of whiteness have changed. Finally, neither author analyzes the privileges of whiteness in arenas like social and class power (they only look at the economic motivations).

Based on your article, I am pleased to notice that we understand each other and this issue of white privilege and whiteness as a conception. I find it interesting that you see the discussion of race, as evidenced in Stavros’ case, as a symbol for “pressing African American’s into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.” This is one point in which I would somewhat disagree—I would argue that this “race talk” that you refer to changes over time to establish new hierarchies with different races being at the bottom. While I would agree that African Americans have fairly consistently been pressed to the bottom of this hierarchy, as seen in Teague O’Regan’s case other “races” such as Native Americans also find themselves at the bottom of this hierarchy. The pyramid, in my opinion is heavily dependent on the historical time period.

Both George Sanchez and I seem to agree that there is a constant tension between the American “ideals” of how our nation should be organized and our need for cheap labor. This is one facet that has shaped our race relations—it is what allows for us to create these hierarchies and justify low pay or mistreatment of certain races. You mention that “race talk is forced to invent new, increasingly mindless” delimitations of racial identity as old stereotypes of race become inapplicable. Perhaps our nation will inevitably continue to create new divisions and sections—call them race, ethnicity, or some new term. Is there any way for us to stop this pressure to “become white”? Perhaps one way to thwart this shift is to write as you do—in a way that reaches out the more people than our community of scholars.

Yours truly,

Matthew Frye Jacobson

Questions:

1) What is the best way to shift this pressure in our society (and in many societies around the world) to "become white" or attain the privileges associate with becoming white? Do we attempt to erase the color-line or in some way overturn the race hierarchy? These are, I suppose, the big questions in this class, but they seemed especially prominent in these readings.

2) Are you convinced by Jacobson's argument that historical background in missing from the economic explanations of shifting definitions of race in Allen's and Roediger's arguments? Is history the most important analytical tool in examining the theory of "whiteness" in our nation?