One thing I will take away from this semester is my understanding of the social construction of racial identity. Whiteness did not necessarily mean skin color. In fact, it meant your level of being accepted as American. Before this class, I wasn’t really aware that Irish, Greek or Polish immigrants were considered “non-white” during the turn of the 20th century. I knew that they were discriminated against but it is really interesting the language that Americans used to justify alienating all of these immigrants. Visually, it is more obvious that a black person would be considered non-white. However, what is not obvious is that someone who is only rumored, in Joe Christmas’ case, to have just a drop of “black blood” is in essence black. It does not matter the reality is–what matters is what people believe. Society has the ability to make people in-between and push them to the fringes and put them in structures that are almost impossible to escape. It seemed that the only way for these ethnic or “racial” groups to escape is actually by working together. This seemed to be the general trend that Cohen described in her book about the New Deal. In the 1920s, workers were separated by their ethnicities into distinct groups that were all in-between. In the 1930s, however, due to welfare capitalism which helped bridged the gap and opened the conversation for these groups, barriers were broken down. This helped in forming the identity of the “worker.” In this case, some of these racial groups overcame their inbetweeness (in the racial sense). However some of these ethnic groups were inherently different and it was harder to change. For example if someone was Polish and Jewish it was a lot harder to change because religion became yet another strike against them. It is important to note that blacks never really escape their inbetweeness in this time period. The construction of their racial identity has been so rooted in our history that it has been harder to debunk; the racial construction of immigrants was fairly new and limited to the 19th and 20th centuries.
The idea of the construction of race reminded me of Kathleen Brown’s book in Civ I. In the few chapters our class read, Brown talked about how blacks became constructed as slaves. After tobacco became the most profitable option for farmers, they were in need for a labor force. In the 1600s, the tithability of tobacco created a legal distinction between English and African women. Virginians took advantage of the fact that African women were used to working in the fields in Africa. This made them inherently different from white women. The fact that African women were taxed showed that their social status became defined by labor. In subsequent laws, slavery was then legally passed on through generations through the mother. Blacks who were involved in society since the early 1600s took the longest to overcome their discrimination and some might argue that there is evidence of discrimination today. Since they were here from basically the inception of the country you would think that they would be Americans.