Claiming Whiteness required complicity in Black subordination for Jews and Catholics

Evidence

Not all Jews were silent about lynching and other racial violence against Blacks. Open support of Blacks’ civil rights, however, played into the hands of Anglo-Protestant nativists’ claims that Jews were sympathetic to the despised Negro, which corroborated anti-Semitic conspiracies of disloyalty. To receive the full benefits of social Whiteness, therefore, Jews and Catholics had to participate in the subordination of African Americans. Arguably, it was not until Jews felt more secure in their Whiteness in the decades after World War II that they became more assertive in their support for African Americans’ civil rights. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 390

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The chilling inverse causality — felt security in Whiteness as a precondition for supporting other groups’ rights — is a paradigm-shifting claim about how solidarity works and when it becomes affordable.
• SEED: Essay angle bridging to Islamophobia: does Muslim civil-rights advocacy only become ‘acceptable’ once Muslims feel secure in American belonging, and what does that say about who gets to defend whom?
• XREF: connects to: Defending a Christian nation has meant defending the racial order — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 476; Anti-black animus taught European Catholic immigrants that they could be white — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 208