Existing comment:
Inventing whiteness:
Like other racial categories, "white" was created. Its boundaries have been built and protected by those in power and contested by those who were not.
1691 First legal use of the term "white":
The Virginia colony enacts a law prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks.
"And for prevention of that abomination mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease ... whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian ... shall... be banished and removed from this dominion forever."
-- The Laws of Virginia, April 1691 (3:86-88)
1790 Naturalization Act:
This law allows only "free white persons" to become US citizens. It is enacted at a time when one-fifth of the population is either African or descended from Africans -- the highest proportion in the nation's history.
1792 Militia Act:
Congress provides for an armed militia, consisting of "free and able-bodied white male" citizens ages 18 to 45, to be called into service when national need arises.
"[T]he idea of citizenship has become thoroughly entwined with the idea of 'whiteness'... because what a citizen really was, at bottom, was someone who could help put down a slave rebellion or participate in Indian wars."
-- Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
1795 The Caucasian race:
German scientist Johann Blumenbach uses a skull from his collection to exemplify the "white" race. It comes from a woman who lived in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black and the Caspian seas, the home territory, Blumenbach writes, of the world's most beautiful people. With this, the nonscientific term "Caucasian" begins to be used as an alternate word for white.
"Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the 'Caucasian mystery' invented quite innocently by Blumenbach is the oddest... [I]t became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Methods and Results of Ethnology (1865) |