by thenewgreen

Race is a much more elastic concept than we tend to acknowledge. American history has seen lots of immigrant groups that were the targets of suspicion and even racial violence — Jews, the Irish, Germans — gradually subsumed into the big, amorphous category of whiteness. The trajectory of that shift has been a little different for each of those groups — and notably, was informed by the fact that they were not black — but that's been the general template of immigrant assimilation. For much of our history, the process of becoming American has meant becoming white. (Word to Nell Irvin Painter.)