Summary Of Whiteness Of A Different Color

Through his book Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson explores the intricacies of what is described as whiteness throughout United States history. Jacobson opens his introductory chapter by describing the roots of race in society. He describes how society has long seen race to be a result of biological differences, but that scholars have recently questioned this notion with classificational conventions of interracial children, along with the idea that some races have either emerged or disappeared entirely from the eyes of the public, whereas their descendents still exist. Jacobson first introduces the idea that race is created, not biological, with an excerpt from Philip Roth’s Counterlife, in which two characters argue over …show more content…
He begins the chapter by referencing a work called Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, in which an Irish servant who accidentally becomes a war hero over a group of Indians and becomes a representative for the white settlers, in order to convey the exclusionary ways of American political culture in terms of self-government, and also the relative inclusion of those Euro-Americans who described ability to self-govern and helped combat described barbarous people of color into the white race. He then describes the shortcomings of economics and capitalism in describing race relations, as he highlights the idea that race has played an integral part in determining who can own property and who can self-govern. This chapter also touches upon slavery and describes how the Revolutionary War ultimately seeded the abolitionist movement. Though there existed pushback against the idea that white people were the superior group of people in the world, this anti-egalitarian view was still promoted repeatedly through legislation. Ultimately, the idea of a free black man was written off as a contradictory term. Overall, this somewhat indiscriminate whiteness became interconnected with ideas of citizenship and