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Matthew jacobson quotes

Matthew Frye Jacobson Interview. Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad And then, if pressed, most Americans will move to a spectrum, also based on color, of maybe five large groups. But at the turn of the century, there were upwards of 36 races in some schemes, 75 in other schemes, and the largest [number of distinctions] being within what we now think of as being one white race: [namely] the distinctions between Anglo-Saxons, who uniformly were at the top of the white hierarchy, on the one hand, and then [other white] groups like Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Mediterraneans, groups we now think of in terms of ethnicity, or culture-based groupings.

But at the time, the distinctions that people were implying by that phraseology - Celt or Hebrew - that was a level of difference that ran far deeper than modern distinctions of ethnicity. So when they talked about the Hebrew race or the Celtic race or the Slavic race, they really did mean race in the way that we tend to mean race when we use it a century later; that is, as a kind of biological, heritable package of traits of one sort or another.

Then there were some much finer kinds of schemes that would have thirty-six or so or forty races from Europe, some tags that at least are words that we've heard, like Hebrew or Celt, although it's a different meaning than we tend to think of now. Others of these distinctions are words that have just totally disappeared from the language, just as the visual distinction that one might make by looking upon a face has also just dissolved.

It has no more meaning in the late twentieth century. And that's written into our political culture very deeply, as early as The very first naturalization law says that only those who are "free white persons" can become naturalized citizens.

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Now, that had two incredible consequences, that phraseology, free white person. On the one hand, it laid the way for millions of people from Europe to get in as free white persons. But these were not at all the people who the law's framers had in mind. In fact, they were precisely the kind of people [about whom] the American inhabitants of the late nineteenth century started to wonder, "Well, how white are they?