Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.(Review)

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. By Matthew Frye Jacobson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, x + 338 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

Matthew Frye Jacobson makes a lucid and compelling case that Americans have used race as a social construct to establish hierarchies of power and privilege for European immigrants. It was Irish "nature" (p. 48) and not their poverty that made them unfit for freedom. Sicilians were a lawless race-- something inherent in their nature. Jews inherited alien characteristics. So widely held were these beliefs regarding eastern and southern Europeans that they constituted a major factor in the passage of …