Becoming White in 1881: An Immigrant Acquires an American Identity

ORM ØVERLAND


MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about whiteness as an acquired American identity. Scholars such as David R. Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson have identified the period of early Irish immigration as the time when whiteness became an important distinguishing factor both in identifying those who were others—they—and as an identity that allowed some to use the first person plural of the personal pronoun about Americans—we. Whiteness could become such a forceful metaphor because an identity as white had a long history of confrontations with Native Americans and Africans as well as with non-British Europeans. Benjamin Franklin was among the first to identify the American as English and white. In 1755 he expressed his fears that Pennsylvania was rapidly becoming Germanized: not only would the "aliens" not learn English but they could not acquire the white "complexion" of the English. Indeed, Franklin explained, "the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small." Africans are black, Asians and Americans (the natives) are "tawny," while Europeans such as Russians, Swedes and Germans "are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion," leaving the "Saxons" and the English as "the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth."