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Reviews
Erika K. Jackson,
Scandinavians in Chicago: The Origins of White Priv
-
ilege in America.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 229 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08382-2.
In January 2018, President Donald Trump infamously talked of “shithole
countries” when referring to Latin America and Africa. Instead of im
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migrants from these parts of the world, the President remarked, the U.S.
“should have more people from Norway.” Why involve the Norwegians in
a racist tirade this way?
Erika K. Jackson’s fascinating new study,
Scandinavians in Chicago:
The Origins of White Privilege in Modern America
, sheds light on this co
-
nundrum. Drawing on Scandinavian-American and mainstream U.S. news
-
papers, periodicals, travel writing, and a variety of other sources, the book
presents a historical exploration of Scandinavians’ privileged position in
U.S. racial hierarchies from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. Jackson draws on
the critical study of whiteness that bourgeoned in the 1990s, but her study
seeks to overcome some limitations in this scholarship. Whereas most pre
-
vious scholars have concentrated on “groups who fought for legitimacy [as
whites],” Jackson notes that it is also “essential to investigate the process
by which those who achieved racial hegemony were able to do so” (4).
Consequently, she puts the focus on Scandinavians, whose whiteness was
not only beyond scrutiny but even hegemonic. Recently, such scholars as
Dag Blanck, Jørg Brøndal, and Gunlög Fur have started to explore Scandi
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navian Americans’ relationship to race, and Jackson continues this vein of
interrogation.
Her study focuses on Chicago, a major hub of Scandinavian immigration
to North America and one of the world’s most Scandinavian cities around
the turn of the twentieth century. It had the world’s second-largest Swed
-
ish community after Stockholm, while its Norwegian population was third
only to Oslo and Bergen. There were fewer Danes, but even they were not
a small group (some 18,000 in 1910). In Chicago, Scandinavians encoun
-
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tered the urban United States in much of its diversity. Almost four out of
five Chicagoans were immigrants or children of immigrants, Scandinavians
rubbing shoulders with the Irish, Germans, Poles, and many other Euro
-
pean nationalities. The city’s South Side had also a major African American
population.
Jackson tracks how Scandinavians’ status within the city’s ethnic hierar
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chy changed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
While in the 1840s some native-born Chicagoans could still lament the un
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civilized savagery of the Scandinavian newcomers, these kinds of remarks
became ever rarer as the century progressed. By the 1890s, Scandinavians
occupied an advantageous position on Chicago’s labor and housing markets,
and this social ascendancy was intimately linked to race. As the discourse
on European immigration became increasingly racialized, those groups that
could claim whiteness fared better than those whose whiteness was less
clear. Scandinavians were in a uniquely comfortable position. Not only did
most contemporary authorities on race agree that Scandinavians were in
-
deed white; indeed, they were viewed as an exemplarily pure stock of white
people, the representatives of the esteemed Nordic race
par excellence.
Jackson explores how the Scandinavian elite of Chicago learned to make
strategic use of this status as exemplary whites. For example, she dem
-
onstrates how Scandinavians used the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair Exhi
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bition (or World Columbian Exhibition) as an “opportunity to mark their
entrance into larger American society through acculturation” (63), using the
pavilions of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to portray an image of Scan
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dinavians as champions of racial progress and white civilization. Jackson
also pays careful attention to the gendered dynamics of racial construction,
particularly in a fascinating chapter on the image of “the Swedish maid.”
She examines how Scandinavian women emerged as the epitome of fe
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male virtue and competence in the contested market of domestic service in
urban America, with the Scandinavian-American press consciously play
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ing up these racial and gendered angles. Indeed, Scandinavians not only
conformed to already-existing U.S. notions of race, but sought to actively
influence mainstream racial perceptions.
Jackson’s study is a welcome challenge to the insularity of much of the
traditional immigration historiography. The classic story of immigrant inte
-
gration has been that of hard-working men and women pulling themselves
up by their bootstraps, receiving little help from the surrounding society.
This insular focus on ethnic communities and their strongmen has hidden
from view the broader societal structures – such as race – that have condi
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tioned immigrants’ access to important resources such as citizenship, em
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REVIEWS
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American Studies in Scandinavia, 51:2
ployment, housing and education. Jackson makes these contexts visible,
adding to the growing body of literature on immigrants’ engagement with
other ethnic groups and the broader U.S. society.
Yet, Jackson’s societal focus comes with some blind spots of its own.
She doesn’t in her analysis sufficiently acknowledge the internal debates
within whiteness historiography that she refers to in the introduction (7–8),
and her image of the U.S. society and its racial discourse can at times be
rather homogeneous (it appears that “American” is often used implicitly as
a shorthand for “white American”). However, perhaps the most significant
shortcoming is the book’s lack of transnational sensibility. Jackson discuss
-
es well the contexts of Chicago and the U.S., but has relatively little to say
about the immigrants’ connections to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. One
wonders how nationalist mobilizations in these countries affected the immi
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grants’ thinking on race and nationality. It would be interesting to explore,
for example, how Norwegian-Americans’ newfound interest in the Norwe
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gian language in the 1920s Chicago – a development that Jackson briefly
mentions (149) – was connected to the politicization of language in contem
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porary Norway. Jackson also leaves unaddressed the Nordic countries’ own
histories of colonialism and racism, and these histories’ implications for
Scandinavian ideas on African Americans or eastern Europeans. Engage
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ment with the bourgeoning Nordic postcolonial research, and transnational
immigration historiography, would have benefited Jackson’s analysis.
Despite this methodologically nationalist bent, Jackson’s study is a well-
crafted and fascinating look at the Scandinavians’ relationship with race in
the U.S. It breaks new scholarly ground but has also clear contemporary
relevance, as racial nationalism and white supremacy have been making a
troubling comeback in the U.S. political mainstream. To understand the in
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tellectual and social historical context of President Trump’s preference for
Nordic immigrants, Jackson’s book is a good place to start.
Aleksi Huhta
University of Turku
Philathia Bolton, Cassander L. Smith, and Lee Bebout, eds.,
Teaching
with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom
. Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, 2019. 304 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8101-
3911-4.