European immigrants proved Whiteness by joining anti-Black subordination

Evidence

Another prerequisite for becoming socially White was disassociation from Blacks. Thus when Booker T. Washington in 1906 condemned lynching by comparing it to pogroms, some Jewish Americans refuted the comparison by praising the freedoms available in America and pointing out the criminality of the Negro. Similarly, some Jewish Americans’ support for disenfranchisement of Blacks in the first half of the twentieth century was a means of proving their racial loyalty to Anglo-American normativity, into which they sought acceptance. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 388

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Undercuts the simple ‘assimilation = progress’ narrative: assimilation into Whiteness is purchased through participation in anti-Black hierarchy, which frames what ‘assimilation’ would cost Muslims who are read as non-White.
• XREF: connects to: Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227; European immigrants became white by projecting surrendered preindustrial freedoms onto blacks. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1283; Anti-black animus taught European Catholic immigrants that they could be white — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 208