Irish immigrants achieved whiteness through working the auto assembly lines

Evidence

John’s ancestors were immigrants too. They arrived from Ireland, with many pulled to the Greater Detroit area to work for the booming auto industry. On the assembly lines, they worked for their families and “worked toward whiteness,” which they achieved while pursuing the American dream. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 182

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘worked toward whiteness’ frame — labor as the purchase price of racial belonging — pairs Irish auto workers and later Muslim exclusion in one economy. Could anchor an essay on which immigrants may labor their way into whiteness and which may not.
• XREF: Connects to the whiteness-studies scholarship of David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White), and to the racial triangulation framework in Kim’s work on Asian Americans. Also resonates with the reader’s stated goal of reading the domestic case as representative of a global condition. — connects to: The Democratic Party taught Irish immigrants the meaning of whiteness. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 286; Early unions operated as schools teaching Irish whiteness — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 412; The Irish actively pursued their own reclassification as white — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 38