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From 1890 through 1924, the United States faced a wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. These new immigrants challenged Americans’ fundamental understanding of race. Roediger states “[t]he racial landscape discovered gradually by new immigrants to the United States was a mess.” American racial views were maddeningly inconsistent and regional. By the 1920s, American nativism and organized racism were strengthened by this wave of immigration, but it was not universal. There was no agreement in white America whether these new immigrants could or even should be assimilated into America. Roediger defines these recent immigrants as neither white nor black, but “in-between.” He highlights how being racially in-between affected the immigrants and their ultimately successful attempts to become white.
The immigrants brought their own racial attitudes toward America and they believed that they were white. They were surprised to learn upon arrival that they were not white Regardless of their own racial attitudes it quickly became apparent that they did not want to be categorized as Black. While white America discriminated against the recent immigrants, Roediger makes it clear that African and Chinese Americans still faced much worse discrimination and racial violence.
Roediger begins his discussion by explaining how Americans in the first half of the twentieth century viewed race and the new immigrants’ place in it. His examination of the political, legal, popular and academic sources is illuminating because he observes that Americans sorted the new immigrants based on their understanding of race, not ethnicity. Americans did not embrace the modern nuanced usage of ethnicity until the 1960s. He essentially recasts immigrant history in terms of American racial history.
Roosevelt’s New Deal also facilitated the whitening of the new immigrants by subsidizing white housing and programs that benefited white America disproportionately. Roosevelt’s alliance with and naturalized recent immigrants and Southern Democrats ensured that the reforms of the New Deal struck stark lines between black and white. By aligning themselves politically with Roosevelt, the new immigrants profited. Roediger argues that the new housing policies pushed immigrants and their families out of the slums and into homes in the suburbs. Unlike the immigrants, African Americans were excluded from home ownership in the suburbs by the use of restrictive racial covenants and institutionally racist lending practices.
While Roediger loses steam in his discussions of the CIO near the end of his book, this eloquent and well-researched book provides a satisfying explanation for how the new immigrants became white. Typically, this transformation from in-between to white has been seen as a product of the Second World War, but America’s racial attitudes did not change overnight. Instead of simplifying this transformation, Roediger has developed a strong thesis which emphasizes the importance of the passage the New Deal, the Johnson-Reed Act and acceptance by the recent immigrant of white American nationalism. This book is essential for understanding the modern notions of American whiteness.
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[[Category:Book Review]] [[Category:United States History]] [[Category:20th Century History]]
