Jim's post on the history of race in the US and the role of the Democrats strikes me as absolutely brilliant--I hope he writes it up as an article (and posts it). But two comments:
1. Although the expansive conception of the white race, as including Jews, Itialians, Slavs, etc. did not exist in colonial times, some conception of the white race did. One can see this, e.g., in Shakespeare's Othello, where Iago plays with Brabantio's revulsion against the "old black ram tupping your white ewe" to make trouble for Othello. This is around 1600. Winthrop Jordon has a great many more examples in his White Over Black. And anti-Black racism, or something like it, is expressed in the 18th c. as well, even more intensely.
2. Jim is surely wrong that the white/black axis did not feature prominently in Northern politics until the 1930s. True, Jim Crow was a creature of the South. But the ideas and values it represented were near universal in American society among non-Blacks from the 1800s on. The lack of actual de jure segregation in the North reflected the small number of Blacks there rather than a lack of prejudice and racism.
What is a more accurate statement of the matter is that the white/Black axis was drawn a bit differently, with Jews, Mediterranean immigrants, and Slavs outside the "white" category, though not in the wholly subordinated and despised "Black" one. The phenomenon of the whitening of these groups Jim so nicely analyses does not represent a change in the North in attitudes towards Blacks, or not thechange he suggests, but a change in the attitude towards the European immigrants.
--Justin
On Thu, 28 May 1998, Jim heartfield wrote:
> Steven uses the kind of example that we find a lot in Theodore Allen and
> David Roediger's books, which create, it seems to me, a seamless history
> of racism that stretches from slavery to the present. Allen has it that
> the invention of the white race is something that happens more or less
> from the outset of the US. But that approach seems wrong to me. Rather,
> the history of race and racism is more discontinuous that continuous,
> and the white/black counterposition that seems today to be the exemplar
> of race, did not feature prominently in the politics of race in the
> Northern states in the early part of the century.
>