Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race is a historical analysis published by Harvard University Press in 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color was the 1999 joint winner of the Ralph J. Bunche award from the American Political Science Association. The book examines the evolution of racial categorization and identity in the United States, particularly focusing on how various European immigrant groups, initially perceived as distinct “races,” gradually assimilated into the broader category of “white” Americans. The book’s themes include Shifting Constructions in Whiteness, Property-in-Whiteness, and The Construction of the White/Black Binary.

Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies & History and Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on race from 1790-present with a focus on immigration, migration, citizenship, civil rights, and imperialism. In addition to Whiteness of a Different Color, he is the author of six academic monographs: Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era (2023); Odetta’s One Grain of Sand (2019); The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present (2018); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995).