Jewish and Catholic Whitening entrenched Black subordination in American racial hierarchy

Evidence

Americans who identified as people of faith called for national unity against Fascism in Europe. Invoking religious freedom allowed Jews and Catholics to both retain their religious identities and claim a stake in American national identity. When challenging the American racial-religious hierarchy, Catholics sought equality with Protestants without connecting their subordination to that of Black Protestants or Latino Catholics. The Whitening of Jews and Catholics only entrenched the Black-White dichotomy that permanently subjugated African Americans. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 432

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, non-obvious claim: the very religious-freedom frame that lifted Jews and Catholics came at the structural cost of strengthening the Black-White binary — the inclusion of some minorities reinforces the exclusion of others.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the logic of the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece — how marginalized groups win inclusion by asserting sameness with the dominant class while disavowing ties to more subordinated groups.
• XREF: connects to: A racial hierarchy can be vertically ordered without collapsing into a flat white-versus-Black binary — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 66