I. "We're Nordics"
Considering Whiteness in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is possibly the most beloved American literary novel. If it's not the Great American Novel, it's certainly one of the most popular and best-selling novels of the 20th Century, its sales of 500,000 copies a year maintaining its elevated chart position. Gatsby, in fact, remains Scribner's highest selling title.

I myself, like many others, have read the book multiple times, each time seeing some new element or getting a fresh perspective on Fitzgerald's unsparing reckoning with class, self-invention, the decadence of the Jazz Age, et al. However, in my most recent reading—the fifth or sixth—I was in search of a covert racial theme.

My quest was sparked unexpectedly by a Zoom presentation by the Library of America, which has recently published a new edition of Gatsby, along with a selection of short stories. In connection with this new publication, LOA convened a panel of critics and other writers to celebrate and discuss the classic novel. One of the panelists, novelist and journalist Min Jin Lee, made a passing remark about a possible racial subtext being present alongside the more well-known and widely discussed themes. I had been following along with great pleasure, but Lee's remark made me sit up straight and take notice. The discussion moved along, but the possible existence of a heretofore unexamined racial element stayed in my mind. So I retrieved my copy of the novel and dived in again.

I found the first—and only overt—discussion of race early in the novel when Nick visits Tom and Daisy for the first time. Apropos of nothing, Tom begins to expostulate on the book he's been reading, The Rise of the ColouredEmpires (a fictional version of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color, a 1920s best seller warning of the threat to American civilization from increasing numbers of Eastern and Southern European immigrants), who at that time had not yet been admitted into the ranks of Whiteness.

"The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you
are, and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. "—And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?"

Fortunately, at this point Tom's diatribe is interrupted by a telephone call (from his mistress, as it turns out). Daisy has already openly mocked Tom and Nick finds his manner
"pathetic."

With this passage, Fitzgerald, whether intentionally or not, has suggested a sort of hierarchy of Whiteness. At the top are Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and many of the attendees of Gatsby's legendary parties, though many others—perhaps most—are curiosity seekers. Nick is able to find a place on the margin of this stratum: a Princeton man from a seemingly well off Midwestern family. Gatsby insinuates himself into this group, concealing his origins in the family of failed midwestern farmers, creating an old-money façade with his vast wealth, enormous house and estate, and luxurious possessions.

Below this level, there being no representation of a middle class, fall the working class, represented by the unfortunate George and Myrtle Wilson, the latter Tom's mistress, and the denizens of George's garage, mostly shiftless men who wander in and out and form a sort of Greek chorus during the confusion following Myrtle's death.

Then there's the question of Meyer Wolfsheim, head of a gambling operation that, according to Gatsby, fixed the 1919 World Series. As a Jew, he is clearly outside the charmed circle of "Nordics." Nevertheless, he is relatively honest and unpretentious, and had the discernment to see Gatsby's potential and start him on the path to accumulating a fortune.

Beyond the Pale (pun intended), one finds only two brief appearances by actual non-Whites. The first occurs on a trip into Manhattan:

"As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish [N]egroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeball rolled toward us in haughty rivalry."

Though mildly racist, these Black characters evince an energy and a  joie de vivre largely absent from the White inhabitants of Gatsby's world.

Later, amid the chaos following Myrtle Wilson's horrific death, "A pale, well-dressed [N]egro stepped near.

'It was a yellow car, he said, 'big yellow car.'

'See the accident?' asked the policeman.

"No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster.n forty. "Going fifty, sixty.'"

Amid the confusion and stammering expostulations of the others present, this man's calm, reliable, and well spoken testimony stands out clearly.

Myrtle's death, which sets in motion the events that lead to Gatsby's own untimely, death, is the most tragic element in the novel. The pathos of her aspirations to ascend into the upper class through her affair with Tom are at first humorous but her failure in the end is heartbreaking. Like Gatsby himself, she is destroyed by the very class she tried to join.

In the end, after Gatsby's murder and George's suicide, and the termination of Nick's brief romance with Jordan Baker, the top tier has closed ranks, Tom and Daisy have gone away, and Nick is left to ponder the meaning of the entire affair. Gatsby, Myrtle, and Nick himself have run up against the top level of their society and found it impenetrable, even hostile.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…."

The novel closes with the famous and ultimately ironic image of the green light at the end of Daisy's dock—ironic because Gatsby was not able nor ever could have been able to get past it.

II. What Color Is White?

For a long time I didn't know I was white. I had nothing to differentiate myself from. The Texas of my childhood was definitely segregated, but not as overtly as in the Deep South: No Whites Only entrances, White/Colored water fountains, or other separate facilities. It was simply rare to encounter a Black person. Asians had not made their way into North Texas in any significant numbers yet.

The only group that today would be called non-white was the large Mexican community. We liked the Mexicans. They were friendly, they were excellent auto mechanics, and they made the best food. I was not accustomed to thinking racially at that early age—if you had asked me, I probably would have said they were a darker shade of white.

Not to exaggerate, I did have occasional encounters with Black people. Obviously I noticed their skin color and other features, but I can honestly say that it made no difference in how I felt about or reacted to them. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had parents who never tried to instill bigotry or white supremacy in their children.

So when did I discover that I was white? There was no defining moment or dramatic revelation. I suppose it came about partly in response to moving around the wider world and partly that wider world coming into my home. Somewhere around the age of ten, I started watching the evening news with some regularity. The big stories in those days were the Vietnam War and the growing Civil Rights movement, neither of which I had a good grasp of yet. My parents didn't talk much about current affairs, at least not in my presence.

But by the time I was 14 I had developed a political and social awareness that had resulted in my opposition to the war and support for Martin Luther King and his movement. His assassination was a terrible shock to me and something of an eye-opener regarding the depth of racism in the United States. In my junior year of high school, I started attending a majority-Black high school in Oklahoma City and for the first time I had Black friends. There was some racial tension there and in the city at large, a great deal. Oklahoma City was attempting school desegregation largely through a busing program which was, to say the least, widely unpopular, though fortunately it didn't lead to violence as it had in other cities.

So that period in my life represented the dawning of racial consciousness on my part. I was learning that multiple races existed, largely based on skin color, and that I was a member of the white race.

That understanding held for many years. It never occurred to me to interrogate what whiteness actually comprised, or why it was the standard by which all other races were judged, or the unconscious benefits it entailed. I was unaware of the elasticity of whiteness, how different ethnicities were gradually allowed to become white, how whiteness in the US was originally restricted to the descendants of English and Scottish settlers (and later Scandinavian and German), and that even within whiteness, class distinctions existed.

Only in recent years, with whiteness being put under the microscope, with the growing awareness of White Privilege and White Fragility, and now with the attacks on DEI and the attempted erasure of People of Color (along with other marginalized groups) from American history, have I begun examining what it means to be white.

Honestly, I still don't have an answer. In light of the way the Irish, Italians, and (albeit ambiguously) Jews have been admitted into whiteness, I return to the question with which this essay is titled. And further, why do so many of us cling to this identity so desperately?