European immigrants became white by projecting lost freedoms onto racialized others.

Evidence

Recently this idea has been taken up and reworked by historian David Roediger (1991, 1994) in his account of the transformation of European immigrants (including Jews and Irish) into the standard bearers of a “new white race in the USA.” Roediger argues that Native Americans and African Americans came to unconsciously represent the sexual and social freedoms of the preindustrial world which the white populations of the American frontier towns were being forced to surrender in making the transition into the work disciplines of capitalism and modern times. The racial ambivalence of the Irish in particular stemmed from the fact they belonged in both worlds; their love/hate relation to blacks was part of a historical “return of the repressed” (Roediger, 1991). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1283

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Dovetails with the reader’s book on white identity formation and with work on Irish racial ambivalence in the reader’s library.
• SEED: Article angle: whiteness as a discipline-imposed identity — the psychic cost of joining the capitalist work order, paid in projected envy.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘return of the repressed’ and projection of lost freedoms parallels how moral panics over immodesty encode anxieties about class and modernity.

Related

• European immigrants became white by projecting surrendered preindustrial freedoms onto blacks. (similarity 0.95)
• European immigrants held an intermediate racial status and were induced to become white (similarity 0.83)
• Anti-European nativism recycled emotions first aimed at nonwhite groups (similarity 0.81)
• Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory (similarity 0.81)
• European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-black animus taught European Catholic immigrants that they could be white (similarity 0.80)
• Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar redefinition of Whiteness shifted European differences from racial to ethnic (similarity 0.80)
• The Irish were the prototype white servants later absorbed into a white racial identity (similarity 0.80)
• Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien (similarity 0.79)
• European immigrants were racially stratified despite sharing legal Whiteness (similarity 0.79)
• European immigrants proved Whiteness by joining anti-Black subordination (similarity 0.78)