I can’t help but starting this post with a nod to pop culture, specifically the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster, Mean Girls. Karen (Amanda Seyfried) asks the new girl, Cady (Lindsey Lohan), “So if you’re from Africa, why are you white?” Yes, Karen was the dim-witted girl of the bunch but she was hardly the only one perplexed by the white girl from Africa. While this scene was exaggerated for the sake of laughs, misconceptions about race and color are hardly surprising.

An article by Martha Hodes in the American Historical Review exposes the malleability of racial constructions based on particular geographical settings. The very characteristic that may indicate “blackness” in the United States could indicate “whiteness” in the British West Indies or elsewhere. The family that she traces, the Connolly’s, experienced a radical shift in their social standing when they moved from New England to the Cayman Islands. In New England they were at the bottom of the social hierarchy—Eunice was a poor white widow and her new husband, Smiley, was (sometimes) “black.” However, in the Cayman Islands Smiley was respected as a sea captain and was considered “colored,” which because of his class status, meant he was essentially socially accepted as “white.”

Though that hardly touches on the complexity of Hodes transnational family story, it is clear that there was, and is, no universal definition for these socially constructed categories. Nevertheless, this has not deterred historians from seeking to explain “how diverse groups in the United States came to identify, and be identified by others, as white.”[1] Peter Kolchin provides a glimpse into this field of “whiteness” studies in an article published in the Journal of American History.  He notes two trends that have become problematic; first, whiteness is sometimes “treated as an artificial construct with no real meaning aside from its particular social setting;” second, at the other extreme, whiteness is presented as “omnipresent and unchanging, deserving attention as an independent force.”[2]  The latter is a particularly dangerous way to examine whiteness because it undermines the belief that race, and whiteness, are socially constructed and overlooks the way it can differ in broader contexts. It also often ignores the lived experiences by those who had to manage racial inequality, exploitation and oppression.

One of the ways this dualism can (and should) be challenged is by doing what Hodes does in her article—by analyzing “whiteness” outside of the United States bubble and making the study transnational. The Blood of Government, by Paul A. Kramer, also takes a transnational approach to race (though not explicitly whiteness) through the interchange between Filipino’s and Americans at the turn of the twentieth-century. Politicians were, instead, making the distinction between Christians and non-Christians, with the Christians being civilized and with the educated and non-Christians being the savage “other.”

Kolchin summaries three key contributions thus far: first, “these works have built on and solidified our understanding of how race is constructed;” second, “they have reminded us that race making applies to whites as well as nonwhites;” and finally, historians have found “a new way to emphasize the absurdity—and oppressiveness—of race as a system for categorizing humans.”[3] Though the field of “whiteness” studies is still young, there is a lot of promise for growth in the years to come.