Postwar suburbia granted previously marginal European ethnic groups full Whiteness

Evidence

While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar America became the national symbol of poverty and crime, the suburban White neighborhoods, containing the suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket fences, lodging happy White families, became the national symbol of prosperity and safety. All of the assimilationist chatter in the media, in science, and in popular culture hardly reined in the segregationist backlash to the open housing movement, but it did do wonders uniting historically oppressed European ethnic groups in White suburbia. Ethnic enclaves in cities transfigured into multiethnic suburbs, the land where the Italians, Jews, Irish, and other non-Nordics finally received the full privileges of Whiteness. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 919

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how assimilationism operates as a racial position — the ethnic-white experience is the canonical case of assimilation as a route into Whiteness, and to Kendi’s scheme in later chapters. — connects to: Southern and eastern European immigrants were racialized before entering whiteness after WWII — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227
• SHARE: A tight, counterintuitive nugget: the very groups once deemed non-White (Italians, Jews, Irish) were unified into Whiteness precisely through the segregationist/assimilationist suburban settlement.