How White Identity Has Changed Throughout American History
One of the reasons that talking about race is so challenging today is there is more than one way to talk about White identity. There are at least 5 different ways that people understand White identity today, and maybe more.
Depending on who you ask, Whiteness may mean:
1. ‘White’ or light skin
2. Ancestry from Europe
3. A social and historical construct
4. A social marker of culture
5. A spiritual or political marker of ideology
These different options make it easy to talk past one another, and addressing division without clarity about who we are is a recipe for trouble. But understanding the history of White identity and how it has been defined is a step toward clarity and toward unraveling the confusion that so often happens in conversations about race and Whiteness.
One of the key basic facts about Whiteness is that who is considered ‘White’ has changed multiple times over the course of hundreds of years. And for much of that time, most European peoples were not considered to be White. Over time and through various means, they came to be included in the definition of Whiteness, and the stories of how they were included are important for understanding the problems involved in discussing White identity today.
Nell Irvin Painter’s book, The History of White People, traces the changes of White identity over the course of America’s history. Painter identifies four particular expansions of what it has meant to be ‘white’ over that time. The first expansion she identifies was the inclusion of poor White men as White; the second was the inclusion of Irish immigrants as White; the third was the inclusion of Jews and Italians; the fourth is the inclusion of various other non-White people on the basis of values and ideology.
This post follows Painter’s description of each expansion; what we find is the hesitant inclusion and begrudging acceptance of previously hated and marginalized people as White when it became too hard to maintain the racial status quo. It is not a story of moral progress or the gradual maturation of White people. It is a story of the persistent failure of White people to love others, a failure that was empowered by a twisted self-perception.
Seeing how some groups came to be included as White and what they had to do to become White demonstrates that White identity is more than having light skin or European ancestry. Seeing this is hard, but it helps us to anticipate what may happen to the idea of race in the future, and it gives us wisdom in how to navigate current arguments about racial labels.
First Expansion
The first expansion of Whiteness that Painter explains is the expansion to include poor White people. In particular, White slaves were excluded from the first U.S. census:
The first U.S. census, taken in 1790, recognized six categories within the population: (1) the head of each household, (2) free white males over sixteen, (3) free white males under sixteen, (4) free white females, (5) all other free persons by sex and color, and (6) slaves. Three terms parsed the only race mentioned — white — and two categories demarcated slave and free legal statuses. Unfree white persons, of whom there were many in the new union, seem to have fallen through the cracks in 1790, though the four-fold mention of the qualifier “free” by inference recognizes the nonfree white status of those in servitude. Had all whites been free and whiteness meant freedom, as is often assumed today, no need would have existed to add “free” to “white.” The 1800 census fixed this problem through an enumeration of “all other persons, except Indians not taxed.” For these early censuses, “free” formed a meaningful classification not identical with “white.” (p104–106)
This was not a simple oversight by the government; it is part of a significant history of separating and ‘otherizing’ poor White people as being less than White in some way. From legislative reactions to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 to the development and proliferation of the term ‘White Trash’ in the 1800s, numerous attempts were made to treat poor White people as an entirely different race. Painter shares an example in the late 1800s of a family with the biblically-weighty designation of “Ishmaelites”:
In The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation (1889), McCulloch traced the family back to early English settlers migrating from Virginia into Kentucky and southern Indiana. Here, though unquestionably English, lay a different sort of heritage, for the “Ishmaelites” descended from the wrong English blood. Ishmaelite ancestors came from “the old convict stock which England threw into this country in the seventeenth century,” (p260–261)
Such examples demonstrate the imagined equation of Whiteness to purity, intellect and strength: ‘White trash’ didn’t measure up and so they had to be treated as ‘other’. But equating White with positive attributes also was done in other ways. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, sought to elevate Whiteness by extolling imagined glories of the Anglo-Saxon bloodline:
[Emerson] amplifies this theme in English Traits. Bodily strength, vigor, manliness, and energy emerge as natural outgrowths of early Saxon bloodthirstiness, presented lovingly. Nature created Saxons/Norsemen as “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength,” endowing their English descendants, in turn, with an “excess of virility.” (p167)
Celebration of the Anglo-Saxon bloodline was more than the work of an imaginative Romantic. Ben Franklin understood Anglo-Saxons to be the only true White people on earth, imagining most of Europe to be outside of whiteness:
[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
So not only was the definition of ‘White’ expanded to include those who were poor, it was also expanded to include very early German and Swedish immigrants. We must also see that the expansion of who was considered ‘White’ was not due to an inclusive and caring love that those in power had for those who were marginalized. This pattern is repeated again and again.
Second Expansion
The second expansion of Whiteness was the inclusion of Irish immigrants in the early to mid-1800s. Although there are few peoples in the world with lighter skin than the Irish, it was not at all easy for the Irish to be accepted as White. Catholicism was part of the conflict:
[T]he poor Irish could also be judged racially different enough to be oppressed, ugly enough to be compared to apes, and poor enough to be paired with black people… Irish Catholic immigration, while moderate before 1830, had now and then drawn Federalists and then Whigs toward nativist rhetoric, prompting the Protestant Irish to term themselves “Scotch Irish,” as distinguished from Catholics… Until 1821 New York denied citizenship to Catholics unless they renounced allegiance to the pope in all matters, political or religious. (p133)
But Catholicism was not always the primary stumbling block for inclusion into Whiteness. Both Thomas Carlyle and Emerson simply saw the Irish as subhuman:
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the most influential essayist in Victorian England, held the racial-deficiency view, having fled Ireland’s scenes of destitution in disgust after brief visits in 1846 and 1849. In one cranky article he called Ireland “a human dog kennel.” (p134)
In a very early musing, Emerson actually expels the Irish from the Caucasian race:
“I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.”
That was in 1829. Nothing had changed by 1852, when Emerson wrote,
The worst of charity, is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving… no shovel-handed Irish, & no Five-Points, or Saint Gileses, or drunken crew, or mob or stockingers, or 2 millions of paupers receiving relief, miserable factory population, or lazzaroni, at all. (p140)
Over time, the Irish became accepted as White. Part of this was due to a romanticizing of Celtic heritage:
In the mid-nineteenth century, the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–92) and the English cultural critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) offered admiring portraits of the mystic, romantic and doomed Celtic race in Poetry of the Celtic Races (1854) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866). (p144)
But Irish acceptance was primarily due to two other factors: the racism of Irish immigrants towards African Americans, and the increasing tensions of the Civil War. Painter describes the disgusting attitude of Irish immigrants toward African Americans:
Irish immigrants quickly recognized how to use the American color line to elevate white — no matter how wretched — over black. Seeking fortune on the white side of the color line, Irish voters stoutly supported the proslavery Democratic Party. By the mid-1840s, Irish American organizations actively opposed abolition with their votes and their fists. In the 1863 draft riots that broke out in New York and other northeastern cities, Irish Americans attacked African Americans with gusto in a bloody rejection of black-Irish commonality. In Ireland and in Britain, too, cultural nationalists seeking to shed racial disadvantage counterattacked, forging a Celtic Irish history commensurate with that of Anglo-Saxonists. (p143)
A political movement known as the ‘Know-Nothing’ movement brought together opposition to Irish assimilation in America, but it fell apart in the Antebellum period because of how acute the issue of slavery had become:
Once the slavery issue [of making Nebraska a slave state] split the Know-Nothing movement along sectional lines, the newly founded Republican Party picked up northern Know-Nothings unwilling to bow to southern devotion to slavery. In the South, Know-Nothings rejoined or ceded to Democrats. (p150)
True acceptance necessarily entails some degree of genuine love and care, some recognizance of inner humanity, and this was not given to Irish immigrants until circumstances forced the issue. Opposition to their assimilation simply dissipated because such opposition was too hard to maintain in a world where subjugating Black people was more important. Sadly, the same process repeated itself again in the early 1900s.
Third Expansion
The rapid increase in immigration from Southern Europe, particularly of Italians and Jews in the early 1900s, was opposed by the use of standardized testing.
Officials at Ellis Island figured Goddard’s tests in Vineland could help them decide who, among immigrants streaming into the country, could stay and who had to return. (p278)
Testers aimed high, promising to measure innate intelligence, not simply years of education or immersion in a particular cultural milieu. This claim was obviously absurd, but no matter. The allure of mental testing proved irresistible, because demand for ranking people was high, and the process was cheap and, best of all, apparently scientific. (p279)
The opposition to immigration produced literature that the Nazi’s would have been proud of:
During the great unrest following the First World War, Lorimer asked Roberts to investigate postwar immigrants. The upshot, in 1920–21, was Roberts’s pungent, firsthand reports from Europe, eventually gathered from his Saturday Evening Post pieces into a 1922 volume called Why Europe Leaves Home.
Immigration had reached crisis proportions, Roberts howled. It absolutely had to be stopped. Agreeing with his editor Lorimer three times in one article, Roberts termed immigration restriction “a matter of life and death for the American people.” The threat was racial: either the United States would break up into a series of racial groups, fighting, bickering, haggling “over their alien racial differences,” or, worse, “a new composite race of people wholly different from the Americans of the present day” would emerge, a motley, inefficient, mongrelized race.
…The intensity and widespread circulation of Roberts’s anti-Semitic venom merged into an ugly tide of hatred. Pounding away at the Jews as “mean-faced, shifty-eyed,” and “unassimilatable [sic]” “human parasites,” “a poisoned emigration from Europe,” and the natural agents of bolshevism, Roberts’ articles herald a deepening preoccupation with Jews in popular discourse. (p303–304)
But as with the Irish, inclusion into Whiteness was made easier when Jews and Southern European immigrants signaled their interest in assimilation, primarily through joining the cause of white supremacy over black people:
Looking back to the war years, an Italian American recalled a tempting invitation to take sides during the Harlem riot of 1943: “I remember standing on a corner, a guy would throw the door open and say, ‘Come on down.’ They were goin’ to Harlem to get in the riot. They’d say, ‘Let’s beat up some n****rs.’ It was wonderful. It was new. The Italo-Americans stopped being Italo and started becoming Americans. We joined the group. Now we’re like you guys, right?” (p363)
Italians sacrificed their culture and food. One woman described how her mother gave up eating homemade bread:
“A bread,” DeSalvo recalled, “that my mother disdains because it is everything that my grandmother is, and everything that my mother, in 1950s suburban New Jersey, is trying very hard not to be.” DeSalvo’s mother prefers commercial sliced white bread. “Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, she will stop being Italian American and she will become American American.” (p369)
The GI Bill and FHA loans helped Italian Americans greatly improve their social status:
For Italian Americans, highly segregated in slum neighborhoods and routinely called “wops,” “dagoes,” and “guineas” before the war, the 1940s brought brand-new money for college and homes. Before the war, Italian Americans had rarely achieved a higher education. But around 1940 their rates of college attendance quickly approached the national norm. (p365)
But Painter notes poignantly that the context of this social rise for Italian Americans was one — once again — of perpetuating Black subjugation:
Were all boats lifted by the government’s largesse? No, they were not. Economic subsidies reached few African Americans still segregated behind a veil created and constantly mended in Washington. Those lovely new suburbs, creatures of FHA and VA mortgages, were for white people only. Federal policy made and kept them all white — on purpose.
As in the New Deal, postwar policies crafted by a southern-dominated Congress were intended to bypass the very poor, which meant southern blacks in particular. John Rankin of Mississippi chaired the Committee on World War Legislation in the House of Representatives. He made sure that the servicemen’s bill included no antidiscrimination clause and that every provision would be administered locally along Jim Crow lines.
In 1940, 77 percent of black Americans lived in the South. They were leaving as fast as work opened up elsewhere, but 68 percent still remained in the South in 1950. A few aggressive blacks had pushed their way into GI programs, but local agents, invariably white, had obstructed the great mass. As early as 1947 it was clear — as investigations by black newspapers and a metastudy revealed — that the GI Bill was being administered along racially discriminatory line. It was, the report Our Negro Veteran concluded, as though the GI Bill had been intended “For White Veterans Only.” This color line appeared sharply in the suburbs. (p371)
In the third expansion of Whiteness we see again that inclusion in the definition of ‘White’ required the sacrificing of cultural and ethnic identity, and the embracing of the cause of black subjugation. Inclusion of Italians and Jews was not because of the love and care that White people had for marginalized people. Such an acceptance was not reflective of an increased maturity. It was in spite of on-going immaturity, and ultimately because of on-going hatred for Black people that overrode the hatred of Italians and Jews.
Seeing this pattern repeat so clearly should be deeply concerning. The ever expanding definition of White people exposes White identity as more than a marker of identity but also as a tool for upholding White supremacy.
Fourth Expansion
The fourth expansion of White identity, according to Painter, is the inclusion of well-known, high achieving people who, with their dark skin tones cause the whole idea of race to appear to be a thing of the past:
Today the attractive qualities that Saxons-Anglo-Saxons-Nordics-whites were assumed to monopolize are also to be found elsewhere. After a string of nonwhite Misses America, Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce Knowles are celebrated as Hollywood beauties; Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, dominate elite sports; …Robert Johnson… Bill Cosby… Oprah Winfrey… Colin Powell… Condoleeza Rice… Barack Obama… Michelle Obama… Thus, it is sensible to conclude that the American is undergoing a fourth great enlargement. (p389)
Another way to term it is what Cristina Beltran calls “multiracial whiteness”. Anyone can be celebrated and included as having the qualities of White people, no matter their skin color. Or, as Willie James Jennings puts it, “‘[W]hiteness’ does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world”.
But as with previous expansions of Whiteness, there is a cost: cultural assimilation, which is to give up Black cultural distinctives and to make allowances for perpetuating certain forms of Black subjugation.
A prime example of this is South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s remarks in October of 2020: “If you’re a young, African American or an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative, not liberal.” Note the subtle insinuations about the safety of non-White people in his state. All you have to do, Graham added is “you just have to share our values.”
This is, as Beltran puts it, “the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.”
While not always overtly hostile, multiracial Whiteness is nonetheless a form of racism. To expect people of color to act, think and speak according to White values is to say that the culture and values of people of color are inferior to the culture and values of White people. It is a subtle subjugation which can look like race tests in the context of church, or like Austin Channing Brown’s experiences in White Christian non-profits, or like the virulent reactions to Lecrae’s infamous July 4th tweet. It’s not hard to imagine that a similar exclusion could happen to Benjamin Watson, for example, if he continues to press the issue of reparations.
Conclusion
Today it’s easy to forget how much people hated the Irish, Jews, Italians and poor White people. It is genuinely good that those peoples are no longer as despised as they once were, but it would be very wrong to believe that such progress was inevitable.
The changing history of White identity should caution us that social patterns have a tendency not to disappear but to re-form in more acceptable packages for each era. History does not exactly repeat itself, but as Jemar Tisby puts it, “history does rhyme”. In every era we must look for and understand how identities are used to exclude and subjugate.
Pursuing unity in America must include facing this history and how our world today is affected by that history. We may not completely root the problem out, but we must try, and this means that we need eyes to see it. Colorblindness won’t end racism and White supremacy, it perpetuates them. Looking at the history of White identity is hard to do, but who we think we are, and who other people think we are, is influenced by society and history whether we like it or not. And being able to put words and ideas and history to the confusion in conversations about race is a move towards clarity and understanding.
