The Invention of “Whiteness”
How did this concept rear its ugly head?
The Invention of “Whiteness”
How did this concept rear its ugly head?
This term has existed for so long that most of us think it has always been in our lexicon, but as it turns out, it hasn’t.
“White” people aren’t a monolith, and they didn’t use to have a term that was an umbrella that all were included under. “White” folk have a long history of killing each other, and especially the British have historically thought of themselves as being superior to the rest, and are in fact to blame for this term even existing.
During the founding of the U.S. colonies Europeans didn’t identify as “white”, they identified with whatever nationality or religion they were: English, Irish, Scottish, Protestant, Catholic etc.
It wasn’t until near the end of the 1600s that the term “white” cropped up, to distinguish these people away from “black” or “Indian”.
In the Virginia Colony laws were passed in the 1660s and 70s to differentiate “white” indentured servants from “black” enslaved Africans. This was done for a very specific purpose to give the “white” servants a sense of superiority over enslaved individuals in an effort to break their solidarity with enslaved “blacks”.
These laws were passed in response to an event called Bacon’s Rebellion that happened in 1676.
This uprising was caused by frustrations among the European indentured servants who even after completing their servitude still weren’t finding opportunities to acquire land or financial independence in the new colonies.
They also were facing attacks by the Native Americans since many of them were out on the frontier, and the governor at the time wasn’t doing anything about it since he only really cared about the financial elite.
Along comes Nathaniel Bacon, a member of the financial elite, who decides to make a militia composed of indentured servants, the poor, and the enslaved African Americans and attack the Native Americans on his own. The governor tries to suppress this uprising but is unsuccessful. Bacon then leads his militia to Jamestown, the capital of Virginia, and burns it to the ground.
Bacon then suddenly dies of dysentery, and the governor who had fled to the East Coast returns. He then proceeds to execute some of the remaining militia and grants property rights, and some political power to the poor “whites” as well as passing laws to make “black” slaves permanently slaves. As well as making this permanent condition of being a slave something that is passed down hereditarily via the mother so as to always have slaves.
The financial elite were terrified seeing how the enslaved African Americans and indentured European servants worked together in a militia and were able to successfully overthrow the elite’s control. So they devised this plan of giving poor “whites” some power so that they would align their interests more closely with the rich elite who shared a skin color, rather than enslaved Africans who they actually shared more in common with.
European indentured servants often worked right alongside enslaved Africans, so it makes sense that they’d find solidarity with each other.
Unfortunately creating a racial hierarchy and giving additional priviledges like being able to own property, marry, or testify in court gave European servants a sense of superiority in many cases, and a vested interest to align themselves with their mutual oppressors, the financial elite.
This strategy seems to have worked extremely well because poor “whites” in the U.S. still very often align themselves with millionaires and billionaires (and soon trillionaires sadly). They assume I guess that one day they’ll get to be insanely rich too, and then they can look down their noses at even more people.
To further try to justify this new concept of “whiteness” a new pseudoscientific was cooked up that claimed Europeans were biologically and morally superior to Africans.
This concept was then used to help justify the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans.
These same people also would cite the “Curse of Ham”, one of Noah’s sons from the Bible as a way to try to justify their actions. They claimed this curse caused all Africans to be destined for servitude, while the Europeans were the “chosen”.
Unfortunately this concept of “whiteness” spread from the Virginia colonies out across the entire country, and eventually made its way into various laws banning interracial marriage, and giving voting rights to “whites” no matter their economic status, but still preventing even free “non-whites” from voting.
It’s important to note that who qualified as “white” evolved over time.
The English started this concept and accepted the Germans and Scandinavians rather quickly due to them being predominantly protestant and having similar customs. The Irish immigrants were initially considered racially inferior, similar to Africans, and weren’t accepted as “white” until the mid-1800s due to some of them siding with anti-abolitionists. Italians weren’t considered “fully white” and often faced racially motivated violence. As an example, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans in 1891. They weren’t accepted as “white” until the early 1900s.
The Irish, Italians, and Poles often faced discrimination due to having Catholic backgrounds.
Russians, Slavs, and Greeks also were considered to be racially inferior. Basically, any light-skinned folk who didn’t have extremely similar religious and cultural backgrounds wouldn’t make the cut of being “white” until it was advantageous to accept them in.
Jewish immigrants also fell into this “non-white” category until the mid-1900s when Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans decided to join up with the “whites” in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, thus pushing themselves closer to the “true whites” by distancing themselves from the “blacks”.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this phenomenon firsthand when I was a union organizer, contract negotiator, and then steward. Many workers will betray their class solidarity with their fellow workers when given the smallest amount of additional attention from their “betters”. In the case of this story the rich white elite, and in the cases I’ve seen management, whether that be immediate supervisors or people from corporate.
If more people were to know our history, perhaps they’d see how the same playbook is used time and time again to divide and conquer.