Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
- ISBN-10
- 078672210X
- ISBN-13
- 9780786722105
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 416
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2006-08-08
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Author
- David R. Roediger
Description
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.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2018-12-04
- 368 pages
- Paperback
- Basic Books
-
- 2006-08-08
- 352 pages
- Paperback
- Basic Books
-
- 2005-05-31
- 339 pages
- Paperback
- Basic Books (AZ)
Similar books
-
Whiteness of a Different Color
By Matthew Frye JacobsonAccording to one Anglo-American observer in the 18805, German newspapers and German clubs fairly rattled with the question, “Will the Teutonic race lose its iden— tity in the New World?” Even by World War I, however, it had not: one ...
-
How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-racialism
By David R. RoedigerSurveying a period from the late seventeenth century—the era in which W.E.B. Du Bois located the emergence of “whiteness”—through the American Revolution and the Civil War to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the ...
-
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
By David R. RoedigerThe Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
-
How the Irish Became White
By Noel IgnatievThis is the story of How the Irish Became White.
-
Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past
By David R. RoedigerSee also Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: New Press, 1997), 74–112. Among the review essays, see especially, David Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies ...
-
The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States
By Claudia Sadowski-SmithThe book examines how their perceived whiteness exposes post-Soviet family migrants to heightened expectations of assimilation, explores undocumented migration from the former Soviet Union, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward ...
-
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
By Dr. Robin DiAngeloIn this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
-
American Immigration and Ethnicity: A Reader
By D. Gerber, A. KrautThis 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 ...
-
Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and the Second-Generation Progress, 1890-2000
By Joel PerlmannFor example, a reasonable interpretation of the segmented assimilation theory predicts that we should find that the second generation today is faring less well, compared to the children of the native born, than in the past.
-
Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It
By Shelly TochlukQuestioning the implications our history has for personal lives and social institutions, the book considers political, economic, socio-cultural, and legal histories that shaped the meanings associated with whiteness.