Ignaitiev's 'Wages Of Whiteness'

Unlike Jacobson’s detailed analysis of published media, Ignaitiev uses novel excerpts and published letters to introduce his chapters and highlight his historical analysis. He also prefaces each chapter with cartoons depicting Irish in a political context. The cartoons, letters, and experts introduce the reader to the theoretical and historical questions of the chapters and act as unifying themes throughout the chapters. Richard Allen and Richard Davis Webb’s Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America, a published address calling for radical emancipation in the United States lead by Irish, set up the central argument of Irish identity vs. American “whiteness” in the first chapter and emphasized the central
Minstrel shows placed white actors in stereotypically African-American characters complete with blackface and exaggerated dialects. They portrayed African-Americans as carefree, hypersexual, and as comics. By adopting the false “blackness,” the actors mocked the experience of African-Americans in contrast with the actor’s true “whiteness.” These performances also gave peoples like the Irish who existed in the liminal space between white and non-white an place to express their longing and assert their place in white society. The performance of “blackness” made the actors appear more “white.” This was not an identity handed down by elites; rather, the working class actors themselves created their personas and place in white society. This bottom up analysis distinguishes Roedinger’s work and shows the agency of the “white working class” in the creation of their
Jacobson presents an extended analysis of Jewish identity in The Jazz Singer. In the revolutionary “talkie” film, Jacki Roinowits leaves his family legacy as a cantor in his local synagogue to be a famous jazz singer. Like the minstrel performers in Wages of Whiteness, when Jacki dawns blackface and preforms the African-American jazz music, he leaves his Jewish identity behind and becomes part of the larger white society as emphasized on the publicity posters for the film and when the actor wipes the makeup from his face in the film revealing white skin in the midst of the “blackness”. In the end, Jacki reclaims his Jewish identity after his father dies an cannot sing the prayers in the synagogue by taking his father’s place; however, at the end he sees he can be loyal to both his faith and to his new white identity. The Jazz Singer was wildly popular as the first feature-length motion picture with sound, and it promoted the ideal of a “melting pot” of culture in which independent identities merged into a cohesive ‘white” identity. Through the analysis of film as an indicator of identity transformation and ethnic perceptions, Jacobson bring the history of “whiteness” in the United States into the 20th century and shifts the narrative away from the American South and North East to Hollywood on the West Coast. This