How Did Jews Become White Folks?

“In its first words on the subject of citizenship, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to “white persons.” Though the requirements for naturalization changed frequently thereafter, this racial prerequisite to citizenship endure for over a century and a half, remaining in force until 1952” (López, 1). As persons from other countries migrated to the United States and attempted to acquire citizenship, the question of whiteness, specifically who and why an individual was white, arose; “whether one was “white,” however, was often no easy question” (López, 1).

The book has as its principal thesis the consideration of race as “a folk classification, a product of popular beliefs about human differences that evolved from 16th to 19th centuries” (Smedley, 2007, pag.24). The book also specifies three characteristics that distinguish the racial ideology in America: the absence of a category for biracial people, the homogenization of the black or African American Americans, and the impossibility to change a person’s race. (Smedley, 2007, pag.7)

There was a big gap between the native-born and immigrants in the 1920s. African Americans were not the only people who experienced racism in the 1920s. (Huggins) Masses of non-protestant immigrants arrived to the United States from south-east Europe. Most of them were Jews and Catholics. These new immigrants, along with Orientals, Mexicans, and Blacks, suffered the most from those who were involved with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (W.A.S.P.) values. (Racial Discrimination in America during the 1920s) In 1921, Congress passed many immigration laws to stop immigration from southern and eastern Europe. (Huggins) Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act which created a quota system. This

In recent years, there has been increased discussion about the treatment of minorities in the U.S. While there have been numerous laws passed that protect their freedoms, many Americans maintain a negative mindset toward other ethnicities. Due to people’s reservations, our country has been unable to make substantial progress toward equality. In The Nation’s article, “The Truth About Race in America: It’s Getting Worse, Not Better,” by Gary Younge, the author utilizes factual information, historical allusions, and related quotes to effectively contend that race relations are worsening within the United States.

In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation of white privilege and the damage it does not only to people of color, but to white people as well. This is an invaluable classroom resource: an ideal introduction to the social construction of racial identities, and a critical new tool for exploring the often invoked – but seldom explained – concept of white privilege.

Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color offers innovative insight into the concept of “race” and the evolution of “whiteness” throughout American history. Jacobson focuses his analysis on the instability of racial identification over time and how race has been created and perceived throughout different stages of history. He states in his introduction that “one of the tasks before the historian is to discover which racial categories are useful to whom at a given moment, and why” (p.9) and while he is successful in some respects, his analysis is somewhat incomplete in providing a full scope of the power relations that created, altered and maintained racial identities in the United States. While Jacobson offers a detailed

How race determined who was in and who was out. As Dickerson states “if race is real and not just a method for the haves to decide who will be have-nots, then all Europeans immigrants, from Ireland a to Greece, would have been “white” the moment they arrived here. Instead, as documented in David Roediger’s excellent Working Towards Whiteness, they were long considered inferior, nearly subhuman, and certainly not white” (69). This shows how race wasn’t about common culture or history but a concept to decide what race is good enough to be consider “white” or better than others. Even though the Europeans where the same race or color of the other people who considered themselves Americans or “white” they were still discriminated for being different and immigrants like everybody else. But soon they realized that identifying them self as being white gave them some sort of hierarchy. It gave them more class compared to the other races. As Debra Dickerson said, “If you were neither black nor Asian nor Hispanic, eventually you could become white, invested with enforceable civil rights and the right to exploit-and hate-nonwhites” (69). Being identify as white gave the power to have privileges that non-whites will never have since they are not the same color. Non- whites are treated unfairly compared to the white people in many ways. Discrimination not only took place between people of different races but

was the first time race was used to exclude an entire group of people from entering the United States.

“Race is always historically specific” (7). This quote summarizes a major argument in Mae Ngai’s book, Impossible Subjects. Ngai argues that since the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, race and immigration are closely tied together in the United States. This act solidified the category of the illegal alien and this group of people have since become a major concern for leaders of the government. Mae Ngai goes in-depth about how the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 impacted American immigration policies until it was replaced by the Immigration Act of 1965. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 greatly impacted the plight of racial and ethnic minorities and Ngai clearly depicts each of the many instances throughout her book. Some of the groups that became disenfranchised where Filipino immigrants during the 1920 and ‘30s and Japanese immigrants during World War II.

The intended audience for this article is people of Caucasian descent. “Yes, we all have unconscious biases, but white people 's biases support a racist system”(Blake, 4). In America, the Civil Rights movement was about freedom of people of color from white supremacy. While people of color are able to enjoy freedoms that they were not able to enjoy in previous centuries, there are still remnants of racial prejudices that exist. The author argues that while everyone stereotypes, racism continues to persist because of the stereotypes of prominent white persons.

As a result, another term must be used to refer to the power and domination that white people have over minorities; therefore, in this paper I will use the term "white supremacy" as opposed to "racism." In the Constitution, in slavery, and even in our cities today, white supremacy has been prevalent throughout our history. White supremacy and black inferiority are the two main problems that our cites face today; once white supremacy and black inferiority are ended in our country, then the majority of the problems in our cities will cease to exist.

Since its creation America has been called the land of opportunity, but around the late nineteenth century the United States started to become more exclusive by limiting the entry of European and Chinese immigrants by closing the doors to immigration from Europe and Asia in the 1920s. At that time, individuals that have been in America for a number of years started to narrow down the amount of ethnicities that the word white included. The book Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant stated that the white race can be broken up into superior and inferior races. Grant calls the pure Nordic race the superior upper class, while the other European immigrants and Jews were considered low class and inferior. Grants novel led to a separation and limitation of who is considered to be white, which led to the inferior whites being treated differently in America.

To become an effective counselor to Jewish Americans or any race or diverse population is to be aware of one’s thoughts and opinions concerning racism and racial advantage, as well increase knowledge of culture’s different from oneself (Hays & Erford, 2014). Jewish Americans are referred to those Caucasian individuals who have immigrated to the United States from another country, such as Eastern Europe (Hays and Erford, 2014). In this paper, I will identify and provide a description of the Jewish population and how they differ from myself in a variety of ways. Additionally, I will provide a reflection of my immersion into the Jewish culture via my observations and highlight what I have learned

In this article, Abby L. Ferber shares her thoughts and experiences while reading the works of white-supremacists as a Jewish person. Growing up, Ferber never noticed her Jewishness because she grew up in a Jewish community and attended a majority Jewish college. She wasn’t made aware of her Jewishness until she attended graduate school in the Pacific Northwest and another student referred to her as “the Jewish one.”

The stereotypical ideology set by the society is represented by people in the past in American history. On one consideration to tackle when thinking about racism is the fact that it was a different time - not a better time, but a time when people from other races had no voice. Within past decades, there have been several cases in American judicial system that undisputedly point to law enforcement making decisions based solely on the skin color. Eudora Welty exposes the traces of racism and discrimination