European immigrants were racially stratified despite sharing legal Whiteness

Evidence

Not all citizens, however, could attain the full socioeconomic benefits of Whiteness. Immigrants of European origin were divided into different races normatively even if they were all legally White. For example, Scandinavians, Dutch, and Celtic Protestants were eligible to assimilate into Whiteness, whereas Southern and Eastern Europeans were socially ascribed racial inferiority. In addition to their different cultural practices, these new immigrants’ non-Protestant religions were pointed to by Protestant Americans as evidence of inferior racial difference. Catholics’ loyalty to the pope or Jews not believing in Jesus Christ marked Eastern and Southern Europeans as uncivilized and unfit for self-governance. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Directly builds on the racialization dynamics in the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article about how visible difference marks identity hierarchies. — connects to: Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien; Southern congressmen framed southern European immigrants as racially impure — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 984; Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how the legal/social distinction between White races fed into modern anti-Muslim racialization in American law.