What It Means to Be "White" In a Rapidly Changing Nation
Being "white" was once a central feature of being American. Those who were able to become "white" had the fullest range of political rights and economic opportunities the rapidly expanding nation had to offer. Those who were not were subject, at various times, to enslavement, caste segregation, racial pogroms,ghettoization,and extreme forms of discrimination. As a result, new immigrants to the country worked mightily to "become" white, with the Irish achieving this goal after the Civil War, and Southern and Eastern Europeans achieving this after World War II. Many mixed race African Americans also participated in this process by "passing,"- moving to another part of the country away from friends and relatives and re-identifying as white. The numbers of people who did that ran into the hundeds of thousands; quite possibly in the millions
Another portion of dynamic were the extreme measures the society took to assure the preservation and growth of the "white" population. Untile the Loving v Virgina decision in 1967, nearly half the states had laws banning intermarriage between whites and non whites. These laws were basically designed to assure white women had white children. And extra legal measures, including murder, were used to assure the preservation of the "white race." From the late 19th Century right up to the 1950's, Black men were routinely murdered and mutilated for having consensual relationships with white women. Such relationships were defined as "rape" under lynch law, a sign of profound fears of intermarriage, "race mixing" and the erosion of a "white" majority, whose perpetuation was seen as an essential condition of the nation's successful growth and development
Now, all these strategies of "race preservation" are starting to With A Brooklyn Accent: What It Means to Be "White" In a Rapidly Changing Nation: