Welcome to this text-based lecture presentation which will outline some themes from this week's readings and videos: the concept of "whiteness", the history of the term Caucasian, immigration, and visual stereotypes.

What and how do we think about "whiteness" today?

It's important to consider that the concept of race and racial classifications as we know them today are deeply influenced by the concept of whiteness. But what is whiteness and how do we think about it today? Who is considered white and who is not? Let's take a look at some census data from the United States government.

Map: Percentage of population self-reported as White American by state in 2010. Darker reds indicate higher populations of whites.

White people constituted 72% of the population in the U.S. in 2010

Are any of these designations surprising? If so, which ones?

In the United States, the idea of whiteness like the idea of blackness and other identifiers was constructed by complex social, political, and historical events. In other words, “Whiteness has a history of multiplicity.” (see Nell Irvin Painter’s article in the New York Times) and as such cannot be defined in a monolithic or uniform way.

What is Whiteness.jpg

The reality is that the concept of whiteness is fluid and our understanding of this identity may be traced to 18th century scientific thinking.

As you learned earlier in the semester, the Age of Enlightenment provided the backdrop for 18th century European theories about human difference. Likewise, the exploration of Africa, Asia, and the Americas brought Europeans in contact with people whom they found quite different from themselves.

To make sense of these differences European thinkers applied classificatory systems (remember the Great Chain of Being?) found in the natural sciences to account for the differences that they perceived. Some of these theories on human difference espoused by Enlightenment thinkers - including Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume among others - became quite prominent. These theories greatly influenced European ideas about economics, government, and science. Consequently, the framework of Enlightenment philosophy in Europe was the belief that reason and rationality provided an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetic values, and knowledge. One system of classification, proposed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, became quite popular and influenced the beginnings of race science.

To learn more about this early classification systems, visit the project website Understanding Race (www.understandingrace.org) and click on History.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840)

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Expanding on the work of Carolus Linnaeus, German professor of medicine Johann Friedrich Blumenbach introduced a race-based classification system in On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1795). In the second edition, Blumenbach changed his original geographically based fourth race arrangement to a five group one that emphasized physical morphology (the study of the form of an organism).

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J.F. Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate, 1795

Blumenbach’s five categories were:

Caucasian - the white race
Mongolian - the yellow race
Malayan - the brown race
Ethiopian - the black race
American - the red race

Although Blumenbach retained geographical names for his categories the change marked a shift from geography to physical appearance.

19th-century map of the five races of mankind (after Blumenbach 1779.jpeg

1851, A map of races (after Blumenbach 1779)

Blumenbach's "5 race" typology (and others like it) shaped people's understanding about human variation. It also codified certain ideas about "whiteness." As we have learned, "race" is a socially constructed and fluid concept that is impacted by historical and political processes. Groups of people who we would consider as "white" today were not considered as such in mid-19th century America.

Nell Irvin Painter, a widely acclaimed historian and author of The History of White People (2010), will teach us about the origins of the term Caucasian and the fluidity of "whiteness."

Connections: Immigration and Visual Stereotypes

In Week 6, you learned about the concept of the contact zone, as presented by Mary Louise Pratt, and its impact on the visual culture in colonial Mexico. To review, contact zones are social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.

Casta paintings are an example of “arts in the contact zone.” In colonial Mexico, they were developed in response to the inter-ethnic mixing that took place between indigenous Mexicans, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. As such, casta paintings were used by Spaniards to maintain socio-political control and to reinforce ideologies about race and “purity of blood."

Visual stereotypes in mid-19th century United States news media had similar functions. Public perceptions on the impacts of immigration in America during this time were strongly connected to beliefs about the traits of certain immigrant populations. These beliefs were reified (made real) in popular print media in the form of distinct visual stereotypes that were used to justify anti-immigrant policies and sentiment.

Let's explore the meaning behind visual stereotypes of Irish Americans in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

The History of the Irish Stereotype and Scientific Racism

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53. Irish Stogie-maker, Pittsburgh - 1909, photo-study by Lewis W. Hine

Look at the image above. What do you see? This is a photograph taken by Lewis Hine of an Irish woman who emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the early 20^th century. According to historians like Professor Michael O'Malley, Irish immigrants who came to this country in the mid to late 19^th century (due to a devastating famine) were seen by white, Protestant Americans as "not black, but not quite 'white' either.”

Illustration: Opper, Frederick Burr, 1882, The King of A-Shantee, Puck's Gallery of Celebrities Photograph: Hine, Lewis, 1909, Irish Stogie-maker

Look at the two images above. The photograph on the right realistically depicts an Irish American woman who is hard at work in a cigar factory. On the left, we see an illustration of a couple.

Can you name or identify the individuals in the illustration? Who are they? What are they doing? Where do you think they live? What objects surround them? Are there any visual cues about social class? For example, are they wealthy or impoverished? What is the artist trying to tell us and why is this couple depicted in this manner?

If you replied that the illustration is a depiction of an Irish American couple, you are correct. In popular cartoons of the 19^th century, Irish Americans were intentionally depicted by artists as non-American, non-white, and not fully human.

Let's look at this image below:

Left: Marriage certificate of Patrick O'Malley and Hester Holland Right: Image of the newlyweds Source: Professor Michael O'Malley, George Mason University

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Another view of the marriage certificate.

If we need further evidence of the ways in which Irish people were categorized as "not quite white" in the 19^th century, we can look at this marriage certificate of an Irish couple living in Virginia. Note that the racial designation on their certificate lists them as “Colored." How would we identify them today? A majority of us would probably identify the couple in the photograph as white.

Let's revisit "The King of A-Shantee" illustration and ask additional questions:

What are the visual elements and message of this visual stereotype? Why did the artist make it look this way? An equally important question, who is the audience?

Well, in this image, the physical features of the couple are elements taken from ideological stereotypes about Irish people. These stereotypes drew inspiration from scientific racism.

We learn from one of our writers this week, Professor Michael O’Malley, that the typical Irish stereotype consists of the association with drink (alcohol), a flattened nose, a pronounced mouth and lips, a low forehead, and a general air of brutishness, all of which we see here.

Further, the subject matter and visual details that we see in this image illustrate that this couple lives in poverty, are likely unemployed or possibly unskilled, and are unable to take care of themselves or their surroundings. It is a degrading stereotype of people.

Last week you studied Frederick Douglass and his use of photography in combating stereotypes of African Americans in the 19th century. Likewise, when we analyze this visual stereotype alongside of the photograph of the newlyweds above, we know that humans do not actually look like this -- this is imagined, invented and made to politically and socially disenfranchise the people who are being stereotyped.

Source | F. Victor Gillam, "The Immigrant," chromolithograph, Judge, 19 September 1903; from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g03659

(Note all of the varied reactions to the immigrant in the cartoon shown above. Some of the signs being held read, “He is a menace” or “He brings disease.”)

Why were Irish Americans and Irish immigrants of the 19^th century depicted this way?

To answer this, look to the reading by Michael O’Malley. He explains that during this time there was a massive influx of European migrants into America. Starting in the mid-1800s, many Irish began emigrating from Ireland en masse due to the Great Famine. Jewish, Italian, Eastern European, and others also immigrated to the U.S. at this time, crowding into major metropolises like New York and Philadelphia.

CJ Taylor, "The Mortar of Assimilation--And the One Element that Won't Mix," chromolithograph from Puck, 26 June 1889

Note here in this illustration above how Lady Liberty seems to be able to stir into the American melting pot every single immigrant; and this may be quite a positive image about the acceptance of immigrants, except for the one who stands out…..

the "brutish" Irishman. Michael O’Malley will tell us all about these types of images in the posted reading for this week.

One question we could ask about these painful stereotypes is why and how did the altering and stereotyping of facial features become the way that “Otherness” (also known as alterity) was communicated? To learn more about the term otherness click here.

O’Malley writes that the mid-19^th century was also a time when writers, physicians, and scientists were trying to establish methods, categories, and types in an effort to understand human variation and human populations.

One of those (now discredited) methods was physiognomy, the study of facial features. Many physiognomists characterized Irish people as having animalistic qualities. For examples, James Redfield's 1852 book Comparative physiognomy; or, Resemblances between men and animals classified Irish as "doglike", as evidenced on the page from Redfield’s book above.

This type of approach, as we have learned, is called scientific racism. Recall that scientific racism may be defined as the rationalization of white superiority over other groups through the use of pseudo-sciences such as Phrenology, Physiognomy, and Eugenics.

Image to the right:

Phrenology head from The Household Physician, 1905 via Wikimedia Commons

Here (above) is another slide showing a physiognomic comparison of facial features and types comparing the "Irish, Anglo, and Negro" types.

While we are defining terms, let's return to the definition of stereotype provided by Craig Owens.

Owens (1996) writes that a stereotype is “…a form of symbolic violence exercised upon the body in order to assign it to a place and keep it in its place. To become effective, stereotypes must circulate endlessly, relentlessly… so that everyone may learn their significations.”

The fact that these stereotypes of 19^th century Irish immigrants were in popular magazines such as Puck meant that these stereotypes circulated widely. A 19^th century viewer would have known how to identify these people based on the illustrated, visual stereotype alone.

This lecture document is only an introduction to the ideas and details presented by the scholars posted here this week. Please read and watch all posted items to gain additional, factual details about this content. Thank you!

Additional resources

National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Talking About Race: Whiteness

Sara Ahmed_A Phenomenology of Whiteness.pdf