The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation

The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation
Author: Linda Joyce Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2004-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135932425

This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Working Toward Whiteness

Working Toward Whiteness
Author: David R. Roediger
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2006-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 078672210X

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 Introduction to the 2018 edition, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.

Becoming American Becoming Ethnic

Becoming American Becoming Ethnic
Author: Thomas Dublin
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2010-09-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1439903697

Personal reflections on the challenges that face college students coming to understand their ethnicity in contemporary America.

How the Irish Became White

How the Irish Became White
Author: Noel Ignatiev
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135070695

'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

Whiteness of a Different Color

Whiteness of a Different Color
Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674417801

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.

Becoming White

Becoming White
Author: Margaret Blackburn White
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2009-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1452030766

BECOMING WHITE: My Family's Experience as Slave Holders--and Why It Still Matters follows the travels of three of my ancestral families as they came from the Old World to the new American colonies. In this lively history you will follow these families from Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland to their new homes in the colonies--and most important, see where and when they first came into contact with enslaved Africans, and how they became slave holders themselves. Although the book presents my own families' histories, it is really a parable for everyone's family history. Whether we came here long ago or last year; whether we are of European, African, Hispanic, Asian or Native American heritage, we have all been affected by the experience of being enslaved or of holding slaves. The thesis of the book is that the experience of holding other people as slaves was the origin of racism in the United States, and that that particular kind of racism has affected all of us--and even affects people who have never lived here.

American Immigration and Ethnicity

American Immigration and Ethnicity
Author: D. Gerber
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137086157

This work aims to enrich studies of American immigration history by combining and comparing the experiences of both European immigration, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Asian, Hispanic, Caribbean, and African immigrations in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Family History in Black and White

Family History in Black and White
Author: Christine Sleeter
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004462856

Situated within today’s changing racial demographics, Family History in Black and White: A Novel traces two competitors – one white and one black – for the same position. Both are urban high school principals. Ultimately, both must reckon with a surprising twist in their histories.

Black on White

Black on White
Author: David R. Roediger
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2010-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307482294

In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.