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How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white? David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today -- including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans -- were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants -- the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods -- Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America. A disturbing, necessary, masterful history, Working Toward Whiteness uses the past to illuminate the present. In an updated introduction, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Donald Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.… (more)
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I would not recommend this book unless you are writing a paper.
Of the new immigrants’ experience of race, Roediger writes, “There was little consensus understanding of race beyond the near certainty among whites that African Americans were at or near the bottom of any racial hierarchy and that Asian exclusion was unassailable as public policy” (pg. 60). Roediger continues, “The power of the national state was crucial in this context. It gave new immigrants their firmest claims to whiteness and their strongest leverage for enforcing those claims” (pg. 60). As for where ethnicity was created, he writes, “If not white before coming, they may have been so quickly engaged by the clear advantages of being white in the United States as to be virtually WOA [white on arrival]” (pg. 119). Finally, Roediger argues that records of personal interactions hold more significance than state records, writing, “The messy micro-encounters in which whiteness was and was not made best illustrate how important the question ‘According to whom?’ is when looking at racial categorization” (pg. 135).
In his examination of the role of housing, Roediger builds on the foundation of work by historians such as Gail Radford. He concludes that new immigrants understood the New Deal housing programs as an extension of 1920s restrictive covenant programs that linked home ownership with white citizenship (pg. 158). In this manner, “State policies worked even more powerfully to blunt the possibility of productive interracial (i.e., largely black-new immigrant) alliances through labor laws that were largely race neutral in their language” (pg. 208). To this end, Roediger argues that new immigrants “understood New Deal housing policy as both racist and whitening” (pg. 225). He concludes, “The argument here, however, is that what is called white backlash derived importantly from white expectations created by (and even before) the racial nationalism of the New Deal. When white opponents of the Sojourner Truth Homes acted in World War II Detroit, they did so with full awareness that the state could make race” (pg. 229).