Invention of the white race

[J Cullen]

Lawrence Goodwyn argued, in Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in
America (1976), that the preliminary success of the agrarian populists in
forming coalitions with black sharecroppers in the 1890s was a major reason
for the passage of Jim Crow laws. The Populist coalition threatened to
usurp the power of the Bourbon Democratic establishment, which reacted
violently at the polls to maintain power and engineered the segregation
laws to make sure that blacks and whites never would get together again. In
the North, Goodwyn wrote, it was just about as difficult for the farmers to
get together with the immigrants in the cities as it was to get them
together with the blacks in the South.

You may recall that the Ku Klux Klan was opposed to immigrants and
Catholics, particularly in those areas where blacks were scarce.
Anti-Catholic activity continued at least through the 1960s. When my
father, an Irish Catholic, ran for state representative in Iowa in 1960 to
help fill out the Democratic ticket, the Klan rallied near our town and
burned a cross in support of the god-fearing Protestant Republicans.

That changed in the 1960s, as the ethnic Americans became white and, after
1968, increasingly Republican. Now the Klan recruits Irish Catholics. I
suppose that's progress.

-- Jim Cullen


>There isn't any special mystery about how US racial ideology works if you
>remember that in the key period of the biologization of the issue,
>1890-1920, scientists constructed long lists of the continuum between the
>pure (anglos) and the nearly apes (so-called "Hotentots", or Bantu
>peoples, and Australian/New Zealand/Papuan blacks generally competed for
>this position of honor).  And while reasonable men no doubt disagreed
>about precise placements, some putting Jews a little lower, others a
>little higher, the general principle that there were middle possibilities,
>neither strictly speaking white nor nonwhite, was present.  This is
>counterintuitive because, at the same time (because of the property needs
>of the earlier slave state), the US was unique in not recognizing a
>hierarchy among "grades" of black blood -- any African descent at all made
>you black.  What I'm saying is not, obviously, that the system made sense,
>but that it worked ideologically, because it fit with a remarkable variety
>of interests.  What it worked best for was illustrating to Jews, Slavs,
>Italians, etc. that, if we "worked hard", we could prove that we were
>"white".  It took some time for this line to be bought on a large scale --
>it was quite counterintuitive to all those class conscious immigrants.
>Many refused the compliment.  But in the long term it seems to have worked
>pretty damned well after all.
>
>Kenneth Mostern
>Department of English
>University of Tennessee
>
>"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage."
>	Theodor Adorno

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