The “Becoming White Thesis” Revisited
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13038871 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip Q Yang (0000-0002-9082-3128, corresponding author), Kavitha Koshy |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2154-8935 • E-ISSN: 2154-8935 |
| Publisher | Kennesaw State University - DIGITAL COMMONS JOURNALS (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.62915/2154-8935.1096 |
| OpenAlex | W2336456390 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 39 |
The claim that some non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews became white in historical America has largely been taken for granted these days, but we see a need for a qualified rectification of this thesis. Did these non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups really become white? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how “becoming white” is defined. We have found no evidence to support the “becoming white thesis” in terms of change in the official racial classification of these groups in the record of social institutions such as U.S. censuses, naturalization laws, and court cases. Changes in the meaning of race in U.S. racial and ethnic lexicon explain why there is a discourse on how these non-Anglo-Saxon European groups changed their “races” to white. 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. Evidence lends credence to this argument. Our findings help settle a debate about if some non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups became white and have implications for race relations today and its pedagogy
Biology · White (mutation · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Genetics
White by Law
Racial and ethnic groups
Strangers in the Land Patterns of American Nativism 1800-1925
The wages of whiteness
Caste and class in a southern town.
Racial and ethnic relations
Shades of Citizenship
Are Asian Americans Becoming “White?”
The social life of a modern community
How Jews became white folks and what that says about race in America
The Wages of Whiteness
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
The Possibility of a New Racial Hierarchy in the Twenty-First-Century United States
Inbetween Peoples
Ethnic Americans
White On Arrival
Remaking the American Mainstream
White Women, Race Matters
Not Quite White
The Ethnic Dimension in American History
Whiteness, Racism, and Identity
Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination
Ethnic Americans
How the Irish Became White
White Americans, the New Minority
Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness
From bi-racial to tri-racial
Who Is White
The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race
The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People
Whiteness of a Different Color
Using Historical Sources in Anthropology and Sociology
Racial classifications in the US census
"Whitening" and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |