Whiteness studies became a recognized academic field in the early 1980s, emerging in relation to Black studies and poor white studies. Whiteness studies is grounded in an exploration and analysis of the ways that whiteness, which has functioned as a legal, racial, and social category, has been constructed and how it is maintained, resisted, and continues to manifest. Before academia’s official recognition of whiteness studies in the 1980s, however, Black authors—most notably W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin—were doing much of what is now called whiteness studies. Many white scholars, too, such as Lillian Smith and Winthrop Jordan, and white fiction writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner, were also carefully presenting, analyzing, and critiquing whiteness before the field was officially named. Critical whiteness studies, like critical race studies, is explicitly political in its resistance to racialized norms and the unjust power structures that these racialized norms produce. While whiteness studies is generally critical in this sense, it also includes less explicitly political analyses, such as Matthew Frye Jacobson’s, that focus on historical shifts in definitions of whiteness and are not explicitly critical of them.

Jacobson’s contribution to whiteness studies in Whiteness of a Different Color is in his careful tracking of the historical changes in whiteness in the United States.