You're right about the angst. I'm taking a class in American cultural history at George Mason. We have to read a book a week - this week's book was about Slovak steel workers in Pittsburg. Those guys were despised by the ones who were there before them, the Irish, of all people.
We started talking about the "whiteness" debate, which I was not familiar with, so this morning I ran a search on JSTOR, an on-line database I can access using my student ID - 499 hits, with titles like these:
"Interrogating "Whiteness," Complicating "Blackness": Remapping American Culture"
"The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies"
"White Americans, the New Minority?: Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness"
"To Deconstruct Race, Deconstruct Whiteness"
There are books about it, like "How the Irish Became White." Allegedly, which the Irish came here, most people thought they were no better than blacks, and they did not think much of blacks, either.
amazon.com
And there's also a book about how Jews became white:
amazon.com
Not sure what point I am trying to make, I just was not familiar with it and thought it was kind of strange. Immigration is a hot topic these days. |
