Social whiteness for immigrant groups was conditional on Protestant assimilation

Evidence

The transition from race to ethnicity in identity formation prompts the question of how European immigrants’ non-Protestant religions ceased to race them as socially non-White and instead became a peripheral cultural aspect of their ethnic identity. Why didn’t coercive assimilation require religious conversion from Judaism, Catholicism, and Mormonism to Protestantism? One explanation is the social reconstruction of America’s religious identity from a Protestant to a Judeo-Christian nation. This shift in national identity that now encompassed Catholics, Jews, and Mormons was a key to opening the door to Whiteness for tens of millions of Americans. Exploring this history informs whether a shift to an Abrahamic identity is the prerequisite for some Muslims to attain first-class citizenship status. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 420 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Irish assimilation dissolved the stereotype as economic and cultural distance closed — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 161; Irish ascension to whiteness resulted from strategic choice, not inevitability — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 35; Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 400 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Religious expansion to Judeo-Christian framing was a precondition for immigrant Whiteness #corroborates (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 420