Becoming white thesis

The becoming white thesis is a historical narrative in the United States that certain non-Anglo-Saxon and non-Protestant immigrants groups including Catholics, the Irish, Italians, Jews, Arab Muslims, and Slavs were once considered non-white and later acquired the status of whiteness. 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 and other non-white people were not.

About

Nell Irvin Painter's 2010 book The History of White People.

Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book How the Irish Became White states that Irish immigrants to the United States were not always considered white. Ignatiev argues that some Irish people initially sympathized with African-Americans due to their own history of oppression at the hands of the British and that the Irish-American process of becoming white entailed adopting racist, anti-Black attitudes.

The 2003 collection Are Italians White? has been an influential text within whiteness studies. The historian David 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 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.

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’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)", 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.

The academics Philip Q. Yang and Kavitha Koshy have written 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 these groups 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."

Some critics of Ignatiev's book "How the Irish Became White" and other similar works say that the idea that the Irish were once non-white is a "false premise". Writing for IrishCentral, James Wilson wrote that the book panders to "white grievance" by exaggerating Irish suffering and that African Americans suffered more in the United States because at "no point in US history were the Irish kidnapped from their homeland and brought shackled to America".

In the 21st century, some Italian-Americans and Jewish-Americans of European descent continue to self-identify as non-white.

Homestead Acts

The Assyrian Muslim Cemetery and Mosque founded by Syro-Lebanese Muslim homesteaders in Ross, North Dakota, May 2023.

The Homestead Acts had no racial requirement. Native Americans were prohibited from acquiring land unless they renounced their tribal citizenship. Due to the lack of a racial requirement, non-Native groups including white, Black, Jewish, and Muslim Americans were able to acquire Indigenous land through the Homestead Acts.

Some historians such as Rebecca Clarren and Ellen Eisenberg have stated their view that some Jewish homesteaders, predominantly German Jews and Russian Jews, participated in white racism and white settler colonialism against Indigenous peoples as pioneers on the western frontier.

The novelist Laila Lalami has written that American Muslims of Syrian and Lebanese descent had a very different process of racialization compared to Black Muslims or Native Americans, noting that some Muslim Americans were able to become citizens as "free white persons" and some Muslim homesteaders gained Indigenous land in the Dakotas through the Homestead Acts.

Naturalization law and paperwork

Albert Einstein's 1936 declaration of intent for US citizenship. His color is listed as "White", complexion as "Fair", race as "Hebrew", and nationality as "German".

The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to "free white persons".

American Jews of European descent were legally classified as "free white persons" and thus eligible for citizenship. Jews are not mentioned by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the First Amendment protects religious freedom. Because of this, Jews of European descent were always eligible for US citizenship as "free white persons". While antisemitism continued to exist in American society, Jewish immigrants were not prevented from acquiring citizenship due to being Jewish.

During the late 1800s and early 1990s, although all Europeans were listed as white on the federal census, naturalization papers for European immigrants did have a race box. Jewish immigrants were listed as "Hebrew" by race. Other "race" options for immigrants included: African, Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Cuban, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Moravian, Syrian, Turkish, and other nationalities and ethnicities. Some German-Jewish immigrants to the United States objected to being described as of the "Hebrew race", preferring to list themselves as being of the "German race" on their naturalization paperwork. Some Jewish members of organizations such as the Central Verein der Deutschen Juden and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now known as the Union for Reform Judaism) strenuously objected to German Jews being listed as racially Jewish, viewing Jewishness as a religion and preferring that German Jews be allowed to list themselves as racially German.

Although all European immigrants were legally classified as white, some Middle Eastern and North African immigrants had their whiteness contested in court during the early to mid-1900s. In 1915, a federal court ruled in Dow v. United States that a Syrian Christian immigrant could be classified as a "free white person" and was thus eligible for citizenship under US naturalization law.

Because US law restricted naturalization to "free white persons", but did not define which groups counted as "white persons", this created ambiguity for Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian immigrants to claim that they were free white persons. In 1923, the Supreme Court of the United States decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that a Sikh man from India was not white and therefore not eligible for US citizenship. Thind had argued before the court that he was a high-caste Aryan and thus white and thereby eligible for citizenship.

In the 1922 Ozawa v. United States court case, a Japanese immigrant asserted that Japanese people should be classified as "free white persons". The court ruled against the Japanese immigrant.

Restrictive covenants

Until the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, religiously and racially restrictive covenants were used to keep African-American and other minority groups out of white Christian neighborhoods. Almost all covenants excluded Black Americans, while some excluded other groups as well, such as Jews, Asian-Americans, Syrians, Greeks, or Latinos.

United States Census

The Russian-born Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and the Czech-born anarchist Hippolyte Havel on the 1910 United States census. All have their race listed as "W" for "white".

White people have been enumerated in every federal census since the first US census in 1790. At no point in US history has any European ethnic group or nationality been listed as non-white on the US federal census. Irish, Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Sephardi Jewish, Greek, Italian, Slavic, and other European immigrants have always been listed as white on the census. The first census in 1790 had options for "free white males", "free white females", "all other free persons", and "slaves". For the 1800 and 1810 US censuses, "all other free persons" was amended to say "all other free persons, except Indians not taxed". For the 1820, 1830, and 1840 US censuses, an option for "free colored persons" was added. For the censuses in 1850 and 1860, the options were "White", "Black", and "Mulatto". Prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Native Americans were typically not citizens of the United States and were not always counted in the US census. For the 1880 and 1890 censuses, options were added for "Chinese" and "Indian" Asians. The 1890 census added additional options such as Quadroon, Octoroon, and Japanese. The five options for the 1900 census were White, Black, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. The 1910 census added an "Other" option and re-added "Mulatto" as an option. The 1920 census added options for Filipinos, Hindus, and Koreans. In the 1930 census, the word "Black" was changed to "Negro" and an option was added for Mexican-Americans, who had previously been classified as "free white persons" throughout the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s.

As of the 2020 United States census, people of European, North African, and Middle Eastern descent are classified as white. Because of this, Irish, Italians, Arabs, Slavs, European Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and other European and MENA immigrant groups are listed as white on the census. The classification of MENA people (Middle Eastern and North African) has been controversial. Some MENA people do not identify as white and have pushed for a separate MENA option on the US census. Some Jews, such as Mizrahi Jews or Israeli-American Jews, have also objected to being classified as white. Due to the history of antisemitic definitions of whiteness popular among some white supremacists, some Ashkenazi American Jews also object to being listed as white on the census.

See also

• Anti-Arab racism
• Anti-Irish sentiment
• Anti-Italianism
• Antisemitism in the United States
• Covenant (law)
• Definitions of whiteness in the United States
• Ellis Island Special
• History of immigration and nationality law in the United States
• Irish slaves myth
• Lynchings of American Jews
• Passing (racial identity)
• WASP
• White ethnic

External links

• How Armenian-Americans Became “White”: A Brief History, Ajam Media Collective
• Chapter VI: How the Czechs Became White, De Gruyter
• Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on), Washington Post
• The Expanding Definition of Whiteness | Nell Irvin Painter | Big Think, YouTube