Ethnicity replaced race for European immigrants by the 1940s

Evidence

The usage of race and ethnicity began to diverge in the 1940s. The influential anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s division of people into three races—Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasian—shaped policy and public perceptions. Ethnicity, instead of race, distinguished the differences among Caucasians of European ancestry, who were deemed superior to the other two races. The loss of a separate racial classification was a gain in social status. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 397

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the cultural shift from European races to a unified Caucasian ethnicity was a deliberate status gain.
• XREF: connects to: Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien; Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227; After 1945 the label race gave way to ethnicity in scholarly usage — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 696