The History of White Politics and Identity

‘When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.’

So wrote Theodore Allen in his groundbreaking 1994 study The Invention of the White Race. The Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619, arrived, of course, not as free people but as slaves, having endured the horrors of transatlantic transportation, to be bought and sold by Europeans, who had begun to colonise the Americas.

So, in what sense were there no white people in Virginia? In the sense, as Allen observes, that the Europeans in Virginia did not see themselves specifically as white. They were English, their children were English. They were never referred to, nor did they refer to themselves, as white. Whiteness as an identity had to be constructed. And it was constructed as the notion of ‘race’ was constructed.

We have become so accustomed to looking at life through a racial lens that we imagine that all societies and all ages have done so, too. That is not so. It was only with the emergence of modernity that both the scientific concepts and the political language underlying the concept of race came to be developed.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries Europe underwent a series of intellectual and social transformations that laid the basis of the modern world. It was the period in which the modern idea of the self, and of the individual as a rational agent, began to develop; in which the authority of custom and tradition weakened, while the role of reason in explaining the natural and social world was vastly expanded; in which nature became regarded not as chaotic but as lawful, and hence amenable to reason; and in which humans became part of the natural order, and knowledge became secularised.

Humans were now seen as part of the natural order. So the question arose: how did humans fit into that order? Natural philosophers had begun classifying all of nature. How should humans be classified as part of this project?

A succession of scholars from Carl Linnaeus to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and beyond set out to answer this question. And in so doing they began classifying different categories of humans.

It was the German anthropologist Blumenbach, often considered the founder of anthropology, who established the five-fold human taxonomy – Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Malay and Americans – that is still widely used today, though the terminology is different. It was with Blumenbach that the term Caucasian enters our vocabulary.

The 18^th century, the Enlightenment, was marked by a passion for classification, and for bringing order to the seeming chaos of the world. But it was marked, too, by another belief, as deeply held: a belief in the universality of human nature, in the importance of universal values and the possibility of a common civilisation.

These two key aspects of Enlightenment thought seemed to pull in different directions in the debate about the nature of human differences. For much of the eighteenth century, though, most thinkers did not perceive a contradiction. That’s because the belief in universality led Enlightenment philosophes to view human groups less as natural classes than as artificial creations.

It is true that a number of leading eighteenth century thinkers – Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Jefferson – dabbled with ideas of innate differences between human groups. Yet, with one or two exceptions, they did so only diffidently or in passing. In the main, eighteenth-century thinkers remained highly resistant to the idea of race. Philosophical attachment to ideas of universality and human unity restricted the room for racial arguments.

It was not till the nineteenth century that racial thinking – the idea that humans could be divided into a number of essentially distinct groups – became established. And it did so in the context of opposition to Enlightenment universalism.

‘There is no such thing as Man’, wrote the French arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre in his polemic against the concept of the Rights of Man. ‘I have seen Frenchmen, Italians and Russians… As for Man, I have never come across him anywhere.’

De Maistre was a key figure in the counter-Enlightenment: the reactionary opposition to Enlightenment ideas equality, democracy and universality. For the counter-Enlightenment, tradition and authority, status and hierarchy, inequality and unreason, were the foundations of order and stability.

A more progressive critique of universalist ideas was developed by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, a key figure in the Romantic movement, whose concept of culture came to be highly influential, and still shapes much thinking today. For Herder what made each people or nation – or volk – unique was its Kultur: its particular language, literature, history and modes of living. The unique nature of each volk was expressed through its volksgeist – the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history.

Herder was no reactionary – he was a staunch supporter of equality. He occupies, however, an ambiguous role in modern political thought.  In the eighteenth century, Herder saw himself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, but also as someone forced to challenge some of the basic precepts of the philosophes in order to defend the cherished ideals of equality.  In the twentieth century, his pluralism, and celebration of what we now call particularist identities, would become the root of much antiracist thinking.

In between, in the nineteenth century, Herder’s impact was to encourage, albeit unwittingly, a racial viewpoint. Once it was accepted that different peoples were motivated by different sentiments, it was not a great step to view these sentiments as racial. Over time, Herder’s volksgeist became transformed into racial type.

The concept of racial type developed through the nineteenth century, as a group of people linked by a set of fundamental characteristics and differing from other types by virtue of those characteristics. Such characteristics included not just mental and physical traits, but also social needs, aspirations and values. Each type remained constant over time and there were severe limits on how far any member of a type could vary from the basic characteristics of the type. Here was the original politics of identity.

For proponents of racial science, the most superior racial type was the white race. The meanings of both race and of white identity were, however, significantly different in the nineteenth from what they are now.

Today, we tend to think of race as defined primarily by skin colour, or by geographic continent of origin. In the nineteenth century, it was defined by class as much as by colour. And that inevitably shaped the meaning of white identity.

In 1865, there was in Southampton, in southern England, a banquet in honour of Governor Eyre, the governor of Jamaica. In October 1865, Eyre had put down with the greatest ferocity a local peasant uprising. His actions divided opinion in England.  In response to the Eyre banquet, the pro-independence Jamaica Committee organized a counter-rally, on which the Daily Telegraph reported:

There are a good many negroes in Southampton who have the taste of their tribe for any disturbance that appears safe, and who are probably imbued with the conviction that it is a proper thing to hoot and yell at a number of gentlemen going to a dinner party.

In fact, as the historian Douglas Lorimer observes in his book Colour, Class and the Victorians,

the Daily Telegraph’s ‘negroes’ were… the very English and very white Southampton mob who thronged the streets outside the banquet hall, while their more respectable working class colleagues attended the largest popular meeting in the city’s history to protest against the official reception given to Governor Eyre.

The Southampton incident reveals well the nineteenth-century elite view of blacks and English workers as being part of the same ‘tribe’.  This was not simply an English phenomenon.  The French Christian socialist Phillipe Buchez, giving a talk to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, wondered how it could happen that ‘within a population such as ours, races may form – not merely one but several races – so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.’ The races that he was talking of were not from Africa or Asia, but the working class and the rural poor.

Today, when we talk of ‘white identity’ we do so largely in the context of the working class. Hostility to immigration and support for populism are seen primarily as working class phenomena. In talking of white identity, commentators talk continually of the ‘white working class’.

But, historically that is not what white identity referred to at all. ‘Race’ in the nineteenth century was about class and social status, as much as about skin colour. And the working class had the status of not being white. As the historian VG Kiernan observes

discontented native in the colonies, labour agitator in the mill, were the same serpent in alternate disguises. Much of the talk about the barbarism or darkness of the outer world, which it was Europe’s mission to rout, was a transmuted fear of the masses at home.

Whiteness in the contemporary sense only begins to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century. Two developments transformed the meaning of white identity: the coming of democracy, and the new imperialism, exemplified by the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the 1880s on.

The extension of suffrage to large sections of working class men (though not till later to women) modified the application of the language of racial inferiority to working class. In a political democracy, the racial view of the working class, which had dominated nineteenth century elite consciousness, was more difficult express openly, and slowly faded from public view.

The expansion of suffrage coincided with the expansion of imperial rule. There was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from Africa to the Pacific, a frenzy of land-grabbing by European nations. Between 1874 and 1902, Britain alone added 12m square kilometres and 90 million people to her Empire.

In the coincidence of democracy and imperialism, support for imperialism became ‘democratised’. Nationalism and racial thinking ceased to be an elite ideology, as it had been for most of the nineteenth century, and became part of popular culture. The racial superiority of the British people, for instance, was celebrated in mass circulation newspapers, in penny-dreadful novels, and in popular entertainment.

The consequence of all this was that the language of race became refocused more exclusively on skin colour, and on the distinction between Europe and the Empire. The ‘colour line’ now became the chief way of understanding and diving the world. ‘Colour bars’ and racial exclusion became a way of life both in the colonies and in the metropolitan countries. The 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth were the age of immigration controls. From America’s Chinese Exclusion Act, and the promotion of the ‘Yellow Peril’ panic, to the ‘White Australia’ policy to Britain’s ‘Aliens Act’, designed primarily to stop Jews fleeing East European pogroms from entering the country, immigration laws became a means of institutionalising racial difference and identity. It is important, the American historian and journalist Lothrop Stoddard wrote in his book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, that ‘the rising tide of colour finds itself walled in by white dikes’.

By the early decades of twentieth century, the concept of race had transformed. Whereas previously belief in the inferiority of non-European peoples was an extension of the belief in the inferiority of the lower orders at home, now it became the heart of racial thinking. Race became a black and white issue, and white identity took on its contemporary garb.