Becoming white thesis
The becoming white thesis or becoming white narrative is a historical narrative in the United States that certain non-Anglo-Saxon and non-Protestant immigrant groups from Europe and the Middle East including Armenians, Catholics, Greeks, the Irish, Italians, Jews, Arabs, and Slavs were once considered non-white and later acquired the status of whiteness. The thesis pertains primarily to the social and economic status of these immigrant groups, rather than their status under law, as all European immigrants between 1790 and 1952 were classified as "free white persons" for the purposes of federal naturalization law and all European immigrant groups have been listed as white on the federal census from the first census in 1790 to the most recent census in 2020. An alternative to the becoming white thesis is the white on arrival thesis, which states that all European immigrants were legally white in ways that African-Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans typically were not.
Historiography
The becoming white thesis or narrative was popularized in the 1990s by American scholars of European immigration to the United States. The historian Marta Cieslak has written that the "becoming white" thesis has been contrasted with the "white on arrival" thesis since the subject has been debated. Cieslak has stated her view that the becoming white thesis "lingers" in academic and popular discourse and that academics such as the historian Jochen Lingelbach have written books undermining the narrative while still appearing "unable to reject it completely".Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book How the Irish Became White argued that Irish immigrants to the United States overcame anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination from white Americans by adopting their racist and anti-Black attitudes; Ignatiev's core argument in the book was that "whiteness was not a biological fact but rather a social construction with boundaries that shifted over time". The book quickly spread beyond academic circles and achieved widespread mainstream popularity, with the historian Nell Irvin Painter writing in The Washington Post that it was "the most interesting history book of 1995" and the activist Mumia Abu-Jamal providing a positive review blurb on the book's back cover. How the Irish Became White went on to have a seminal influence in whiteness studies.
Labor historian Eric Arnesen wrote in 2001 that "the notion that the non-white Irish became white has become axiomatic among many academics"; however, he argued that this was historically inaccurate, and that the Irish in the United States were considered white throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. David Roediger has argued that during the early period of Irish immigration to the United States "it was by no means clear that the Irish were white" or "that they would be admitted to all the rights of whites and granted all the privileges of citizenship". However, Arnesen suggests that the Irish were in fact granted full rights and privileges upon naturalization and that early Irish immigrants "often blended unproblematically into American society". Arnesen has written that the question of Irish Americans becoming white is a useful project, but that discussions are often "vague and inexact", concluding that the narrative that the "Irish became white is dead wrong. The Irish...were not considered “non-white,” and hence did not “become white”; they were already white...the very question posed by whiteness scholars is based upon a false premise."
The 2003 collection Are Italians White? has been an influential text within whiteness studies. Roediger offered an interpretation that Italian-Americans were an "in-between people" who inhabited a racially ambiguous status in society and experienced discrimination in the labor market. The historian Thomas A. Guglielmo offered an different interpretation, writing that Italians and other Europeans had always been "white on arrival" and had never seriously been classified as non-white. Guglielmo emphasizes his view that all European immigrants were legally white in ways that non-whites, such as African-Americans, never were.
In his 2004 essay "What's Critical About White Studies", the historian Paul Spickard wrote that the claim that Jews of European descent became white was an example of "Whiteness studies run amok" and both "silly" and "disrespectful" to the historical experience of people of color. Spickard critiques Karen Brodkin's "How Jews Became White Folks" and describes John Gennari's essay "Passing for Italian" as the "ultimate absurdity" of the becoming white genre of studies. If the theme continued, Spickard wrote, academics might write works on "How the Italians Became White, How the Swedes Became White, perhaps even How the English Became White".
In the book 2007 Almost All Aliens, the historians Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, and Laura Hooton argue that Irish and Italian Americans experienced discrimination yet were always white, "contrary to some of the more extreme formulations of some recent scholars". Noting the existence of antisemitism, including antisemitism from the KKK and the Christian right, as well as antisemitic quotas in higher education and exclusion from institutions such as private clubs, these historians write that while Jews of European descent were legally white, this is evidence that "Jews were not quite the same as other Whites in America" and lived at "the nether edge of Whiteness". However, the historians stress that Jews had access to whiteness that people of color did not have access to, that some "mixed socially with the White Gentile elite", and that Jews served as politicians, judges, cabinet members, and founders of major corporations long before people of color did in substantial numbers.
In 2007, the historian Hasia Diner, while she believes Jews were religiously discriminated against, critiqued the becoming white thesis as having become part of a "realm of jargon and buzzword" and that if such terminology "ever had substance" it had come to "lack any meaning". Critiquing the alleged vagueness and lack of empirical evidence within whiteness studies, she recommended the work of Guglielmo for whom "the possibility of obtaining the full rights of citizenship mattered greatly", Russell Kazan's Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity, and Eric Goldstein's The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter's 2010 book The History of White People explores the history of whiteness in the United States, including the becoming white thesis in regards to Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans.
In 2017, the Washington Post writer David Bernstein wrote an op-ed titled "Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ ", arguing that the becoming white thesis was inaccurate. Bernstein states that the Irish, Italians, Jews, and other immigrant groups "were indeed considered white by law and by custom", noting that these groups were never targeted by Jim Crow laws or laws against interracial marriage.
In 2019, the New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples wrote an op-ed titled "How Italians 'Became' White", arguing that "Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic." Staples noted that Italian-Americans were sometimes subjected to violence and discrimination. Although Staples notes that Italian-Americans gained citizenship as "free white persons", they often took working-class jobs that were associated with African-Americans.
In 2016, the academics Philip Q. Yang and Kavitha Koshy wrote that the becoming white thesis has been "taken for granted" as true by many Americans, but argue that the history is more complicated. Yang and Koshy state that they could find "no evidence to support the “becoming white thesis” in terms of change in the official racial classification of non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups such as Irish, Jews, and Italians in the record of social institutions such as U.S. censuses, naturalization laws, and court cases" and that "If “becoming white” did happen to these groups, its real meaning was a change in their social status from a minority group to part of the majority group rather than in racial classification."
The historian Robert Slayton, writing for Jewish Currents in 2017, states his view that American Jews of European descent inhabited a "middle ground" in the early 20th century that was "neither black nor white", but argues that these Jews became white in the post-World War II era by moving up the socioeconomic ladder, moving to the suburbs, and largely assimilating into the white middle class majority.
Academics have debated whether Czech Americans were historically considered white, non-white, or something intermediate. Sociological scholars generally agree that while Eastern and Southern European immigrants, such as Czechs, were socially distinguishable from Northwestern European immigrants such as Norwegians or Swedes, that "no discernible racial boundary existed" that separated Southern and Eastern Europeans from other white people. While some prejudice and discrimination existed against Czechs, Slavs were never classified as non-whites. All mainstream American academics of the 20th century considered Czechs to be white.
In 2011, the scholar Piotr Szpunar critically examined the becoming white thesis in regard to Polish Americans, stating that from the Jamestown Polish craftsmen in the 1600s and onward Polish immigrants came to North America as free white persons and that it is "erroneous" to claim that Polish people have ever been non-white.
In 2023, the sociologists Philip Kasinitz and Mary C. Waters stated in Becoming white or becoming mainstream? that writing about the racialization of "ethnic whites" such as Italians and Jews often emphasizes incidents of violent persecution, such as the 1891 New Orleans lynchings of Italians and the lynching of Leo Frank. Kasinitz and Waters emphasize that such occurrences were "very small" compared to the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched.
In the 21st century, some Italian-Americans and Jewish-Americans of European descent continue to self-identify as non-white.