When I started graduate school at Boston College back in 2001, a field known as whiteness

studies had gained significant interest among scholars. Books like Making Whiteness, the

culture of segregation in the South, and Working Toward Whiteness, How America's Immigrants

Became White, had recently been published.

And they were just two of many different monographs written on the subject.

By the way, if you want to get a lot of funny looks in Boston while you're riding on the tea,

try reading Noel Ignatyev's book, how the Irish became white when you're on your commute.

But studying whiteness wasn't new.

As is the case with a lot of great work on race and racism in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois

did it first.

In his 1910 essay, The Souls of White Folk, Du Bois wrote,

The Discovery of Personal Whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing, a

19th and 20th century matter indeed.

The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

He goes on to say,

Today, we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden emotional conversion has

discovered that it is white, and by that token, wonderful.

In the 1990s, this new generation of scholars was expanding on DeBoise's analysis. Their work

examined the process of white racial formation, and they identified ways in which different groups of Americans were able to claim that identity,

or were excluded from it.

One of the most influential works of this generation was The Wages of Whiteness by David Rodiger.

The title itself is a reference to De Bois's book, Black Reconstruction in America,

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