Working toward whiteness : how America's immigrants became white : the strange journey from Ellis Island to the suburbs / David R. Roediger.

Author: Roediger, David R.

Edition: Pbk. ed.

Publisher: New York : Basic Books, 2006, c2005.

ISBN: 9780465070749 (pbk.)
0465070744 (pbk.)

Description: vi, 339 p. ; 21 cm.

Subject: Americanization.
Whites Race identity United States.
Working class United States History.
Race discrimination United States History.
United States Ethnic relations History.
United States Emigration and immigration Government policy.

Contents: New immigrants, race, and "ethnicity" in the long early twentieth century -- Popular language, social practice, and the messiness of race -- "The burden of proof rests with him": new immigrants and the structures of racial inbetweenness -- Inside the wail: new immigrant racial consciousness -- "A vast amount of coercion": the ironies of immigration restriction -- Finding homes in an era of restriction -- A New Deal, an industrial union, and a White House: what the new immigrant got into -- Afterword: the houses we've lived in and the workings of whiteness.

Summary: In Working Toward Whiteness, David R. Roediger brings the history of his now-classic The Wages of Whiteness, forward into the twentieth century. Roediger recounts how American ethnnic groups considered white today -- including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans -- once occupied a liminal racial status in their new country, and only gradually received the status of "white" Americans. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants -- the racist real estate agreements that keep immigrants out of white neighborhoods -- Roediger explores the murky realities of race in twentieth-century America. Working Toward Whiteness charts the strange transformation of these new immigrants into the "white ethnics" of American today.