Legal whiteness did not protect Jews and Catholics from social racialization

Evidence

These communities were legally White, similar to Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa today; however, their religions socially raced them as a threat to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant national identity. Consequently, the arrival of millions of Jews and Catholics coupled with international events—World War I, the rise of Communism, and World War II—paradoxically resulted in both their systemic discrimination and their entrance into Whiteness. I now turn to the racialization of Jews, Catholics, and Mormons to illustrate the troubling similarities between an era of blatant White Protestant nativism over a century ago and the current rise of White Judeo-Christian nativism racializing Muslims today. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 247

These communities were legally White, similar to Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa today; however, their religions socially raced them as a threat to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant national identity. Consequently, the arrival of millions of Jews and Catholics coupled with international events—World War I, the rise of Communism, and World War II—paradoxically resulted in both their systemic discrimination and their entrance into Whiteness. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 247

Although European Jews were legally White, the US government treated them as a distinct race on account of their religion and their mixed origins from North Africa and the Middle East. The American scientific community in the late nineteenth century described Jews as “Hebrews,” a separate racial type with different biological characteristics. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the framework of racialization from earlier chapters on Muslim identity being legally White but socially raced. — connects to: Christianity itself functioned as a core element of legal whiteness — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 156; Whiteness for the Irish meant labor, legal, and residential rights, not wealth or status — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 36
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the historical throughline from White Protestant nativism over a century ago to today’s ‘Judeo-Christian’ framing that codes Muslims as outsiders despite citizenship.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 247; Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 256