Colonial settings elevated the European proletariat into whiteness

Evidence

Working-class English, for instance, migrated to the colonies and became white where they might not be so fully regarded in English cities like Manchester, Birmingham, or London. The transformative logic at work here mirrored that of the European immigrant experience to the United States, where immigrants “got caught up in this racial thing” (Barrett and Roediger 1997; 3, 15), As Malcolm X famously remarked, the first word non-black immigrants learned upon disembarking in America is “nigger.” Colonies elevated the European proletariat to the property of whiteness by making at least the semblance of privileges and power, customs and behavior available to them not so readily agreeable in their European environments. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in racial motility and constructed whiteness; also resonates with the James Baldwin/Malcolm X line about immigrants learning ‘nigger’ first, an idea familiar from Ta-Nehisi Coates and other US racial writing. — connects to: Divide-and-rule fragmented the colonized while whiteness unified the colonizers — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1481
• CANDY: Malcolm X’s quip about the first word immigrants learn is a brightly quotable, low-context line.

Related

• Colonialism advanced state formation by racially ordering the colonized exterior (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial education defined Black middle class status by cultural deracination and European fluency (similarity 0.82)
• Colonized African elites, culturally remade as European, initiated elite nationalism (similarity 0.81)
• European immigrants became white by projecting surrendered preindustrial freedoms onto blacks. (similarity 0.80)
• European racial ideology predates colonial encounters and was extended to non-Europeans later (similarity 0.80)
• European states were deeply shaped by their colonial experiences (similarity 0.80)
• Racial evaporation became harder to sustain as former colonies migrated to European metropoles (similarity 0.80)
• A colonized intellectual living in Europe acquires Europe’s racist unconscious (similarity 0.80)
• Unification of a colonizer state was achieved through racial identity rather than ethnic culture (similarity 0.80)
• Mastery of the colonizer’s language confers honorary whiteness on the colonized (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar redefinition of Whiteness shifted European differences from racial to ethnic (similarity 0.79)
• Racial-state assumptions made the colonial project conceivable in the first place (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial whites misread multi-ethnic solidarity that would someday outnumber them. (similarity 0.79)
• Postcolonial migration to metropoles made race visibly domestic by the late 1960s (similarity 0.78)