Crafting “Whiteness” in Early America: A Critical
Overview
Dr. Ayan Mondal,
Assistant Professor,
Department of English (UG &
PG),
Bankura Christian College,
Bankura, West Bengal, India.
Abstract: “Whiteness” in America did not emerge from the blue.
The category in fact “evolved” in early America validating the very claim that
America “became” white more than manifesting the biological difference with the
blacks. In fact the twentieth century saw the burgeoning of a distinctive discipline
called “Whiteness Studies”. The present articles, however, focuses on what went
into being in order to “craft” whiteness in early America covering the
religious, cartographical and historical dimensions.
Key Words: white, black, cartography, whiteness
studies, craft
"One of the signs of the times is that we really don't know what 'white'
is", asserts Kobena Mercer, and adds that "the real challenge in the
new cultural politics of difference is to make 'whiteness' visible for the
first time, as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent
upon the disavowal and violent denial of difference" (Mercer 205-6).A pertinent
concern that has preoccupied critical attention in the United States is the one
that addresses the factors that have resulted in the nation’s “becoming” white.
The first thing that comes to mind is obviously the very “White” identity that
was crystallized by way of the country being inhabited mostly by people from
the British Isles as founders or early settlers. Such people already having a
share of being colonial rulers, started treating the First Nations and blacks
in America as “Others” in terms of customs, habits, habitat, language and
appearance and labelled them as cultureless brutes. Eventually, the task was to
determine who was essentially “American” was and who was not. The American
nation at one point of time started getting treated as an exclusively “white”
nation, as the presence of the First Nations and the blacks gradually came to
be obliterated at the cost of promoting the white settlers. Historians,
ethnographers, legal documents and even some Constitutional precepts and
amendments promoted this “self-inflated” amnesia of the American Nation. Pinder
elaborates this “amnesia” in the following words:
This
forgetfulness, this self-inflated amnesia is perfectly illustrated in the
history told by David Ramsay who boasts that the Scots, Swiss, Irish, Germans,
New Englanders, and Dutch “have been the sources from, which America derived
her population”. Equally oblivious was the French political thinker Alex de
Tocqueville who, when he visited the United States in 1830, described America
and its citizens as “Anglo Americans”. All documents that defined America,
including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, contributed to promote a white America (40).
Dana Nelson,
Cheryl I. Harris, Matthew Frye Jacobson likewise asserted how whiteness was
gradually “crafted” and very tactfully manoeuvred in America through the unjust
and discriminatory treatment of the non-whites, assigning them inferior
subject-positions. Apart from social and political domination, “racial”
domination was crucially essential to endorse their superiority. The Europeans,
in the words of Oliver C. Cox, “have not been content merely to accept their
present social and political dominance as an established fact. Almost from the
first they have attempted to rationalize the situation and to prove to
themselves that their subjugation of other racial groups was natural and
inevitable” (qtd in Pinder 42). Though scholars like Gossett tried to ascribe
the heathenism of the Native Americans and blacks as the basic cause of their
enslavement by their Puritan masters, it was evident that racism was already
implanted in the minds of the European colonists from the older world.
Eric Williams argued in 1944 that
“slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery”.
Barbara Lewis Solow, Stanley L. Engerman, Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin also
held that slavery in America predated racism. The Handlins argued that
initially the black indentured servants and their white counterparts were
treated alike. However, “Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676” was the first significant
historical phenomenon to create a gulf and a spirit of division between the
white and the black servants. Both the racial groups responded to Nathaniel’s
Bacon’s military call to raise arms against the Native Americans, although
their individual aims were different. For the whites, the basic aim was to grab
free lands for becoming prosperous farmers, whereas for the blacks it was the
urge to put an end to their servitude through revolution. However, things
turned out very different as the Rebellion resulted in a social hierarchy that
was consciously created by the ruling class to make even the “poor” whites feel
socially superior to blacks and non-whites. The white servants were entitled to
new lands and their black counterparts remained the discriminated lot.
Therefore, long before “slavery” was to officially get codified and initiated
in America, the “colour prejudice” was paramount there. Whiteness and
white-skin privilege, consequently got thoroughly established by the harmonious
synchronization of the genesis of slavery and racial prejudices. In the Harvard Law Review, Cheryl I. Harris
argued how by the1660s the degraded status of Blacks as chattel slaves came to
be strongly established by law. Harris argued:
Between 1680 and
1682, the first slave codes appeared, codifying the extreme deprivations of
liberty already existing in social practice. Many laws parcelled out
differential treatment based on racial categories: Blacks were not permitted to
travel without permits, to own property, to assemble publicly, or to own
weapons; nor were they to be educated. Racial identity was further merged with
stratified social and legal status: “Black” racial identity marked who was
subject to enslavement; “white” racial identity marked who was “free” or, at
minimum not a slave. The ideological and rhetorical move from “slave” and
“free” to “Black” and “White” as polar constructs marked an important step in
the social construction of race (Harris 1718).
This hierarchy
got inscribed in the American psyche through laws, political pamphlets and
other American institutions. A diachronic analysis of some of the laws and
documents might validate this claim.
In Hector St John Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782),
the much quoted passage reads:
What then is the
American, this new man? He is either a European or the descendent of a
European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other
country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman,
whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four
sons have four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving
behind him all his ancient prejudice and manners, receives new ones from the
new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank
he holds. He becomes an American by being received into the broad lap of our
great Alma mater. Here individuals are melted into a new race of men, whose
labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world (43).
It is
interesting to note that Crevecoeur in his long list of ethnicities and
nationalities did not include the Negroes, First Nations, the Chinese or other
racialized ethnic groups. For Crevecoeur, the American identity only signified
the strange mixture of diverse European nationalities. It was already
impregnated in the American psyche that the normative identity in US was only
the white American one. Pinder argued that even in contemporary times those
Americans of European descent who thought of themselves in terms of their
ethnicities (their Italianness, Greekness, or Jewishness) did not require to
spare a separate thought on “whiteness” because whiteness for them functions as
the unquestionable, singular norm. Pinder writes, “…whites as a race is never
talked about because whites are the norm and discussions of race are
traditionally applied only to demonstrate the perceived superiority of the “white race” over those who are looked on as
non-white. Indeed when the question is asked, who is an American? Many researchers
often find that whites view themselves as Americans and non-whites are viewed
as hyphenated Americans…” (Pinder 73). Thus when Crevecoeur was talking about
the Americans being “melted” into the new race in the new land, he considered
the blacks and the other racialized groups as the “unmeltable ethnics”.
Even Benjamin
Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the nation argued in favour of a
homogenous all-white America. In his essay “Observations Concerning the
Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries”, Franklin noted:
All Africa is
black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly
so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes are
generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the
Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white
people on the face of earth. I could wish their numbers were increased.
(Franklin 234)
Franklin’s
wistfulness of a purely white America also propelled him to further ask “why
should America in the sight of Superior beings, darken its people? Why increase
the sons of Africa by planting them in America where we have so fair an
opportunity by excluding of Blacks and Tawnies and increasing the lovely
whites” (234). Therefore the imperative drive of placing the whites atop in the
racial ladder was deeply pervasive in Franklin’s vision. The “Declaration of
Independence” drafted by Thomas Jefferson, however, rung a politically correct
affirmative note:
We hold these
truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed. (qtd in Sen and Sengupta 9)
Paradoxically
enough, Jefferson’s contention in “Declaration” was fraught with falsity and at
best, was only a half-truth. When Jefferson was talking about equality of “all
men” and the exercise of their “unalienable Rights” he thought only about men
of his race, divided by ethnicities, united by their whiteness. Paul L. Ford
argued in The Works of Thomas Jefferson,
how Jefferson thought of the independent black nation, Santo Domingo to be an
appropriate place for the blacks to reside. About Santo Domingo, Jefferson
contended that it was “inhabited already by a people of their own [black] race
and colour; climates congenial with their natural constitution; insulated from
other descriptions of men” (Ford 317). Therefore, Jefferson strongly believed
that it was impossible for blacks and whites to coexist in America, there being
certain acrimonious racial differences between the two. Jefferson’s idea of
“equality” of all men underwent several critiques, some of which Pinder summed
up very cogently:
The idea that
“all men are equal” vexed some of the most important figures. In fact, for
James Hamond, the former governor of South Carolina in the 1840s it was
“ridiculously absurd”. A decade later. “a self-evident lie” was the phrase used
by the Senator John Pettit to Jefferson’s notion of equality. As late as the
1980s, Pastor Richard G. Butler of the Aryan Nations noted, “When the Declaration of Independence talks about
“one people”, it’s not talking about a nation made for Asia, Africa, [or]
India. Judging the rights of citizens based on the colour of their skin has
certainly been an American pastime. (Pinder 55)
Several laws were promulgated and
implemented in post-independence America to pioneer and champion “whiteness”.
For instance the “Naturalization Act of 1790” read “all free white persons who
have, or, shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory
proof, before a magistrate by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and
shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States
for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship” (“Annals of
Congress” 184). The Act clearly had two-fold aims, as Pinder notes. First, to
suppress slave rebellions and violent uprisings and second, to curtail the
efforts of the First Nations to resist white infringements on their lands. Both
the aims pointed at the fundamental premise of strengthening whiteness in the
nation. Though this Act was slightly modified in 1802, by setting a five-year
residence of new immigrants compulsory for new immigrants, the basic
requirement of citizenship remained the same- celebration of “whiteness”.
Cheryl I. Harris also added another dimension to this idea of “naturalization”
of white citizens, where one’s “whiteness”, rather than owned “land” came to be
counted as property. Harris argued-
Moreover the
trajectory of expanding democratic rights for whites was accompanied by the
contraction of the rights of Blacks in an ever deepening cycle of oppression.
The franchise, for example, was broadened to extend voting rights to
unpropertied white men at the same time that Black voters were specifically
disenfranchised, arguably shifting the property required for voting from land
to whiteness. (Harris 1744)
The “Bill of
Rights” (the first ten amendments to the American Constitution between 1789 and
1791) was implemented to preserve and secure the basic rights, privileges and
liberties of the white people in the newly constituted nation. Needless to mention
that the First Nations and the blacks who were not naturalized as citizens of
America were unprotected by these constitutional amendments. In 1793, the
“Fugitive Slave Act” was enacted by the American Congress to facilitate, within
the frontiers of the United States, to facilitate capture and return of runaway
slaves to their masters. The Act also imposed severe punishments on anyone
assisting the flight of the runaways. This Act, therefore, attempted to
commodify and objectify slaves as “properties”. In 1830, the power of
“whiteness” became even more bolstered when President Andrew Jackson signed the
“Indian Removal Act” that amounted to the forced removal of the First Nations
from their homes. The Act enabled the President to grab lands possessed by the
Indians within the US territory in exchange of unsettled lands towards the West
of the Mississippi river. The Act therefore ensured almost a hegemonized
monopoly of the whites in the US territory at the cost of exterminating the
Native Americans. In 1850, another severe act ensuring the legal security of a
white man was implemented- the “Act Concerning Civil Cases”. The Act stated-
“No Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in
favour of, or against a white man”. The Act was strongly taken recourse to by
the California Supreme Court in 1854 when a white man was convicted. Pinder
sums up the case as follows:
In People v Hall, in 1854, Hall, a white
man charged with the murder of Ling Sing, a Chinese man, was convicted thanks
to the testimony of three Chinese witnesses. But the California Supreme Court
reversed the decision because, according to the Act Concerning Civil Cases,
Chinese were also included in the law. The judge affirmed that the Chinese
were” a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are
incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.
(Pinder 58)
In 1875 the
“Page Law” was introduced to put an end to cheap Chinese labour and “immoral”,
“lascivious” Chinese women from entering the US. The law not merely barred such
immigrants, but also imposed a ban against coolie labourers by announcing
severe punishments if they attempted to bring persons from China, Japan or any
of the East Asian countries to the US. Adverse attitudes towards the
Chinese-Americans aggravated in a series of acts and finally culminated in the
“Chinese Exclusion Act” passed in 1882 that suspended immigration of Chinese
men for the next ten years and denied dignity and citizenship to the Chinese
who were already residing in America. Pinder has it right when he comments “The
Chinese Exclusion Act was part of a tyrannical policy that was modified and
extended in various ways to Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Asian-Indian
persons in the United States” (58).
Slavery in America officially ended
with Lincoln’s famous “Emancipation Proclamation” in 1863.The Thirteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution too declared the abolition of slavery and
involuntary servitude. However, the general drive to keep the blacks subservient
remained. For instance, several Black Codes were implemented in the Confederate
states to retain white authority, supremacy and control. The Codes confined
exercise of all rights and privileges like owning properties, marrying, making
contracts, testifying in courts – specifically in matters exclusively involving
blacks-- only to the whites. Some Codes also prohibited former slaves from
changing jobs without the permission of their employers. Pinder rightly argues-
“The Black Codes, in their desperate attempt to reinvigorate the slave system
of incontestable white supremacy, constrained the life chances of African
Americans by maintaining them in structural subordination and dependency”
(Pinder 61). Thomas Andrew Bailey, the eminent historian, thought defensively
that the Black Codes were actually instrumental in putting the capriciousness
of the blacks under check, but in actuality they served to re-cast the previous
world of torment and torture, albeit in a sophisticated manner. Consequently,
many slaves in the Confederate states tried moving to the North. Interestingly
enough, the North also failed to offer the blacks a rescue as there they had to
enter into direct competition with the Irish immigrants. The Irish immigrants
in the North were already facing discrimination as they were treated as
non-whites. When the North saw increasing number of former slaves in the
post-Civil War years, the Irish workers found an opportunity to secure their
positions by setting them off against the blacks and the Chinese and “becoming”
white by appropriating the privileges accorded to people having white-skin.
Takaki aptly remarked- “the North for blacks was not the promised land” (Takaki
110). The Fifteenth Amendment to the US constitution granted voting rights to black
men, but the stain of racial discrimination was still indelibly etched in the
American psyche. In 1886, the landmark Plessy versus Ferguson case upheld
white-privilege by legitimizing and re-establishing racial segregation laws
based on the principle that came to be addressed as “separate but equal”.
These factors resulted in
whiteness’s gradual advancement to occupy a normative positionality. Pinder
rightly comments:
The subordinate
position of blacks was the “natural” outcome of white supremacy as a structure
that was solidly in place. In fact, blacks and other racialized ethnic groups
were not on the opposite side of the racial binary. All that mattered was white skin. Even the lowest of the lowest whites
had something that a non-white person could never possess, which was white skin
privilege. This was how whiteness worked. (65 italics mine)
American “whiteness” was crafted in
sundry other ways ranging from documents related to cartography, documents of
the visionaries and various captivity narratives and travelogues. Valerie Babb
noted in her book how the notion of a truly democratic and pluralistic America
that could have been achieved through the close proximity of Europeans,
Africans, and Native Americans was “sacrificed to the creation of whiteness”
(47). She argued- “In the 1540s…the New World was drawn as an unknown space,
dotted with then popular representations of the inhabitants and animals
encountered during surveys of eastern Europe, Africa and Asia”(Babb 48). A
particular 1544 map, for instance, associated with Sebastian Cabot addressed
the eastern part of the New World as “terra incognita” and the pictures there
indicated how the European mind sketched the unknown with the erstwhile
experiences of conquer and expansionism- “primitive fur-draped people holding
spears and a leopard-like animal standing nearby”(Babb 49). A 1547 map credited
to Nicholas Vallard points at a very crucial spot where a colonist directs his
attention to the indigenous people and the indigenous person is shown to be
very conscious of the group of approaching colonists. The shift in perception
from Cabot’s map to Vallard’s shows the possibility of an unfamiliar land’s
“white” exploration and colonisation. Likewise, John Smith’s A Map of Virginia (1612) showed a world
yet to be tarnished by the English and still under the control of the First
Nations, but Smith’s maps in his subsequent works like A Description of New England (1616) and Generall historie of Virginia (1624) make the English presence much
more palpable. In 1616 map of Smith, the name “New England” is distinctly
visible as is the royal coat of arms. Even the “narratives” of Smith portrayed
America as essentially English. A Map of
Virginia, for instance, stated – “The temperature of this countrie doth
agree well with English constitutions being once seasoned to this country” (3).
The cartographical details therefore clearly evince how the hitherto “savage”
space was transformed by the English minds into a distinctive English space.
The transition of Anglicized America to a more general “whitened” one, however
occurred with the insurgence of more European nationals to the new land. Babb
rightly comments about Smith’s narratives and cartographical details:
In essence, the
sense of entitlement expressed in Smith’s accounts accustomed English minds to
thinking of the North American continent as theirs for the taking. This
proprietary attitude fostered subsequent avowals of English superiority to
sustain the belief of English right to North America. As we will see, however,
when the advancement of their enterprise became dependent on their casting
their lot with those of other white European nationals, assertions of English
superiority were replaced by assertions of white superiority. (Babb 57-58)
Another facet of
American whiteness that needs to be discussed is the specific English belief in
the divine right to possess and rule North America. “The ethos of divine right
laid the attitudinal foundation for American whiteness”, writes Valerie Babb, “by
allowing the English to justify the exclusion from full participation in their
sanctioned community of those who were not like them, whether because of
religious, national or racial differences” (58) The writings of the visionaries
who were migrants-turned pilgrims in a new land showed “the growing use of
whiteness to represent English social identity” (Babb 59). William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, for example held
that America was “ devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage
and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts
of the same”(26). The description of the Native Americans whom Bradford
variously named as “Narragansett”, “Mohegan”, and “Pequot” reflect the
racially-inflected mind-set of the English Puritans in conceiving of the First
Nations and in projecting their own selves as “not savage” as a group.
Bradford’s portrayal, therefore, unsettles all dreams of conceiving of America
as a homogenized democracy. Cotton Mather, grandson of John Cotton and the son
of Increase Mather embodied almost three generations of Puritan theology,
thought and social power. Valerie Babb considered Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, The
Negro Christianized and A Good Master
Well Served as the prime books sustaining the Puritan vision. Babb notes –
“Though Mather spent much of his time organizing efforts to convert Native
Americans and to educate African American slaves, these groups are either
excluded from his mytho-history of New England or, in the case of Native
Americans, cast as hindering the region’s progress…As such Magnalia is one of the first documents to erase American diversity
and write America as white”(Babb
63-64).Though Mather tried to reinstate the myth of the pilgrimage of
the Puritans coming to the New World in Magnalia,
his descriptions in the book serve to underscore the racialized enterprise
in the pilgrimage. Mather compared his people with the Native Americans
asserting “This blessed People was as a little Flock of kids, while there were
many Nations of Indians left still as Kennels of Wolves in every corner of the
country” (Mather 133). In the sermon, The
Negro Christianized , Mather remarked about the slaves, “if they Serve God
patiently and cheerfully in the condition which he orders for them, their
condition will very quickly be infinitely mended, in Eternal Happiness” (32).
In Christianizing “happiness”, Mather’s sermon, therefore, attempted to whitewash
the new nation. A Good Master Well Served
took the “whiteness” impact one step further in associating whiteness with
positive values, dreams and ideals such as social mobility and liberation,
despite its assertion that there was very negligible difference between white
servants and black servants in seventeenth century America. Mather rebuked the
employer-masters stating “While you use them [the whites] for Servants, you
must so use them, that in Time they may come to be Masters” (12)Even in the
captivity narratives and the criminal narratives also, what was facilitated was
a cementing of whiteness by creating images of what whiteness is not.
Narratives of Mary Rowlandson, John Williams, John Gyles, John Frost, and Cathy
N. Davidson are important examples of the same. In the words of Valerie Babb:
Captivity
narratives recount intimate encounters between cultures, races, and religions
and employ consistent motifs to do so: meek English settlers are beset by
savage Native Americans; pious Puritans resist the corruption of papist sects;
helpless women and children surmount the vicissitudes of being prisoners in an
alien culture. Read over and over because of their drama and popularity, they
cemented in readers’ minds conceptions of “us” and “them”. (Babb 68)
“Whiteness” in
America therefore came to be constantly shaped, moulded, crafted and
reconfigured through the nation’s religious, political, philosophical as well
as literary agencies.
Works Cited
Mercer, Kobena, and Bad Object-Choices.
"Skin-head sex thing: Racial difference and the homoerotic
imaginary." Hoe do I Look?, Bay Press, 1991,
pp. 169-222.
Pinder, Sherrow O. "Whiteness: The
Definitive Conceptualization of an American Identity." The
Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Americanization,
De-Americanization, and Racialized Ethnic Groups, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013, pp. 39-65.
Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as
Property." Harvard Law Review, vol. 106,
no. 8, 1993, p. 1707, JSTOR.
www.jstor.org/stable/1341787. Accessed 5 Nov. 2016.
Crevecoeur, Hector St John. Letters from an
American framer. Edited by Warren B. Blake, E.P. Dutton &
CO, 1926.
Franklin, Benjamin. "Observations Concerning
the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries." The papers
of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree, Yale U
Press, 1961.
Babb, Valerie M. Whiteness Visible:
The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature. NYU P, 1998.
Bradford, William, and William J.
Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647.Random
House, 1981.
Mather, Cotton. A Good Master Well Served:
Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750. B. Green and J.
Allen, 1696.