Legal Whiteness once coexisted with social racial inferiority for European groups

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. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the MOC thread: legal category (explicitly White) versus material social race — the same gap the reader suspects between Title VII holdings and adjudicated outcomes for Muslims. — connects to: Pressure to pass into whiteness acted on all racialized groups; Whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked for non-Western groups — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 48