whiteness has always been elastic in the US, but it's always expanded to absorb different kinds of people of European descent.
it's an open q as to whether it will/can expand to subsume groups of Asian Ams or Latinos — and whether their racial formation in the US will allow it.
it's an open q as to whether it will/can expand to subsume groups of Asian Ams or Latinos — and whether their racial formation in the US will allow it.
https://twitter.com/rvmagee/status/1323840916134584320
Italians and the Irish and Germans and European Jews were subsumed into broader USian whiteness, but are the mechanisms by which that happened available today (and available to enough people) of MENA ancestry or Latin American ancestry or South Asian ancestry?
racial formation in the US isn't as simple and neat as "white people have power and new populations will become 'white' in order to access that power."
There's a systemic/structural dynamic to this as well: Does the world *treat* you like a white person?
There's a systemic/structural dynamic to this as well: Does the world *treat* you like a white person?
There's a reason that the people who came to the US via Ellis Island became "white" and the people who came to the US via Angel Island and the US-Mexico border did not and could not.
we can and should talk about the elasticity of whiteness and also not presume that, say, Cubans in FL tell you anything neat about Latino populations.
A lot of attention was paid to the fact that around 1M people who were Hispanic on the 2000 census were identifying as white on the 2010. census. "OMG, Latinos are becoming white."
The gag: a large number of respondents moved in the *opposite* direction over that same period.
The gag: a large number of respondents moved in the *opposite* direction over that same period.
This is from some reporting I did back in 2014. 
2 things:
the existence of Jim Crow and de jure white supremacy created a specific context for the policing of the borders of whiteness — and a calculus for which side new (Euro) populations might want to align themselves with. dropping surnames and the like.
the existence of Jim Crow and de jure white supremacy created a specific context for the policing of the borders of whiteness — and a calculus for which side new (Euro) populations might want to align themselves with. dropping surnames and the like.
and 2:
whiteness as constructed in the US has been so tied to Euro ancestry specifically that any shift that would allow, say, large numbers of MENA or South Asian people to enter the tent of whiteness would mean rewriting the "rules" first.
whiteness as constructed in the US has been so tied to Euro ancestry specifically that any shift that would allow, say, large numbers of MENA or South Asian people to enter the tent of whiteness would mean rewriting the "rules" first.
that could very well happen! but it's not as neat as just being like: "white people will just make Asian people white then."
(besides the fact that people are not passive participants in this, and maybe many don't *want* to be white?)
(besides the fact that people are not passive participants in this, and maybe many don't *want* to be white?)
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