​The Road to Becoming White in America

Though written law or juries may declare an individual to be a certain race, the lived role of race is determined by the individual’s everyday interactions with a community in which skin color often takes a backseat to more practical realities. In The Invisible Line, Daniel J. Sharfstein explores the peculiar lives of Jordan Spencer and his descendants – mixed race individuals who successfully passed for white despite their dark skin during the 19th century – while Roediger and Barrett depict the Italian immigrants’ move from being “inbetween” races to white during the 20th century in The Inbetween Peoples. Both works illustrate that it is often at the border between categories that racialization is easiest to discern, as it is there that these processes become conscious and where explanation is required. Thus, this essay will focus on the skirmishes across such ambiguous racial terrain to explore the relationship between self-identification and racial categorization to conclude that, throughout American history, movement across the color line have supplied evidence for the contingency of racial identity on imitable characteristics and their acceptance by an audience – the community.

Racialization processes describe the various ways in which racial identities are assigned to individuals and in what way racial categories are mapped onto groups. When Italian immigrants first arrived in America at the dawn of the 20th century, they were racialized and “regarded as an inferior race” (Barrett and Roediger, 7). Drawing from Barrett and Roediger’s analysis of immigrant racial status in The Inbetween People, the new immigrants were not "white," either to established white Americans or, for that matter, to themselves. Examples abound, including the many cases of employers developing elaborate ethno-racial job classification systems in which races were deemed to have special abilities that fit them for particular kinds of work and excluded them from others. Among employers, Italians were referred to as just “white skinned Negros” (Barrett and Roediger, 32). However, nowadays both the general public and Italians themselves consider Italians simply an ethnicity within whiteness. How did it happen that a people jumped the color line from almost black to definitively white?

The racialization and eventual acceptance of Italian immigrants in America as white during the 1920’s occurred primarily through the context of interpersonal interactions in which a community assesses the race of another person against cultural criterion such as language and religion. Barrett and Roediger argue that for new immigrant workers, “becoming American means becoming white” and “racial identity was informed and shaped by” culturally specific ideas such as diet, gender roles, and occupation (Barrett and Roediger, 6). Racialization lay in cultural practices such as eating American hotdogs instead of Italian bracchiole, participating in a Protestant church service rather than a Catholic mass, or simply speaking English rather than Italian. The conflation of such practices and race culturally “Americanized” the previously foreign Italians and simultaneously drew them over to the white side of the color line. The only way for Italians to shed their racially inferior status was to “abandon all sense of national pride and to identify completely with the Americans” (Barrett and Roediger, 32). This meant performing their cultural assimilation for the community because it was a matter of whether the people at issue had been accepted by their community as white.

Though the case with the Italian immigrants’ shift towards whiteness was gradual, a number of individual African Americans and their families took a further leap across the racial spectrum when they secretly, purposefully, and rapidly fashioned for themselves a white identity. In Sharfstein’s narrative of Jordan Spencer, a dark skinned child of an interracial tryst, Spencer is a hardworking landowner living in the rugged mountain communities of Kentucky. Though he was dark-skinned – even labeled in the census as “mulatto” – his tight-knit 19th-century Appalachian community nevertheless preferred to integrate him as a neighbor by regarding him as white. If physical racial markers are sometimes overlooked, what markers do ascribe an individual to a certain race in the eyes of a community?

Jordan Spencer’s situation reveals the relationship between self-identification and external ascription of racial identity. One neighbor said that he never questioned the Spencers’ race “because [Spencer] tried to be a good man, and tried to avoid looking like a darkey, and because he wanted to raise himself up instead of lowering himself” (Sharfstein, 84). Jordan Spencer played a prominent role in his community as a farmer-businessman who lived his life with a debt that bound him to his community. Furthermore, as a major patriarchal head and a pillar of local trade, production, and leadership; to them, “such status could not mean anything but whiteness” (Sharfstein, 195). Jordan Spencer’s community could accept him as an equal as long as he never forced them to acknowledge his real ancestry. In the isolated Appalachians, it was easier for the community not to question the controversial race topic. For the community, it was “…more important that [Spencer] wanted to be white and acted accordingly” (Sharfstein, 83). Jordan’s acceptance as white despite his ambiguous physical appearance stands as testament that the difference between black and white was less about biology than it was about practical participation in the community such as working in the same harvest and paying the same taxes. Thus, it was never about the blackness of Jordan’s skin, but the way he practically fits into the everyday social and economic hierarchy of the white community.

Race is very much an identity that can be fabricated through performable actions. Spencer’s success at passing for white despite his dark skin shows the important of performance as it was ultimately his actions and not his appearance that held considerable bearing in his acceptance as a white man by his community. When Jordan Spencer passed as white, he was self-identifying his race, but he was also externally performing characteristics that the community ascribes to whiteness. Racialization involves the assignment of bodies to racial categories and the association of symbols, attributes, qualities, and other meanings with those categories. Blackness and whiteness are associated with certain roles. The color line functions in “terms of racism, not race; hierarchy as opposed to heredity; barriers instead of blood.” (Sharfstein, 328) This dynamic exists because “only in a world where blacks had the potential to compete with whites for power and privilege was it necessary to articulate reasons for keeping blacks in a permanently inferior status” (Sharfstein, 193). Thus arises mutually exclusive racial markers to preserve the literally black and white social order; blacks are poor and uneducated, and that whites are wealthy and cultured; – “being white required a constant display of who one was not” (Sharfstein, 263). Ironically, African Americans’ success in passing for white relies upon a community’s strong acceptance of these imitable traits as concrete markers of whiteness or blackness. These stereotypes allowed race to be believably performed simply by wearing a fancy coat or speaking a certain way. The binary, relative relationship between blackness and whiteness has similar dynamics to the relationship between self-identity and ascribed identity in that in both pairs there is a constant push and pulls between the elements.

When comparing self-identification and external racialization, historical racial identifications were often more a matter of an “imposed identity.” That is, external racial ascriptions in many ways mattered at least as much as one’s self-identification, if not more. Racial identity is not an essence, but a positioning. While one can self-identify their race, the racial identity is subject to change as spatial context changes because different “communities always play an active role in interpreting these rules for themselves” (Sharfstein, 9). For example, the ineffectiveness of court declarations in comparison to communal sentiments about race is illustrated in the cases of some individuals legally deemed “black” returning to their white communities to find that not much changes in how their neighbors treat them. And so, though it may seem that the Italian immigrants and African Americans passing situations are incompatible because Italians are much more physically similar to whites than blacks, both racial groups performance of certain traits associated with whiteness is analogous. Jordan Spencer’s family shows that, “like the recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, descendants of African slaves could assimilate completely into the larger world around them” (Sharfstein, 322). Though only a few blacks had light enough skin to pass for white, the bulk of their performance still hinged on successfully imitating the perceived personality and status of whites while simultaneously playing off the audience’s perception of what blackness entails.

​In social practice, individuals are largely racialized based on the ways in which their community perceives them against socio-economic characteristics such as wealth and occupation as well as cultural practices associated with certain racial groups. Both racial ascription and racial self-identification are contextual processes influenced by local meaning systems, demographics, and hierarchies. In the case of both the racialization of Italian Americans and African Americans passing as white, active performance of established racial traits in their everyday life made possible their assimilation into white society. Thus, it is through everyday interactions that boundaries between groups are created, reproduced, and resisted; and the social category of race is given meaning.