White supremacy could expel Italians from whiteness when useful.

Evidence

“Suggesting that ‘white supremacy’ would otherwise be in jeopardy, and identifying the reasons for the lynching of these five Sicilians as comparable with the motives behind the lynchings of African Americans,” Jackson explains, meant “that Italians could be, when necessary, consigned outside a larger category of whiteness.” In other words, white supremacy was willing to sacrifice a few nonblack people in order to maintain the racially inferior status of black Americans. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 141

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise account of whiteness as a conditional, revocable category — being subject to expulsion defines the boundary, which the reader can pit against ‘Italians counted as white’ objections.
• XREF: Pairs with the author’s earlier Whiteness of Wealth argument — whiteness as fungible, movable property. — connects to: Bank officials racialized Italians as descendants of Roman slaves — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1406; Italians were denied whiteness through the Dago epithet before racial-nativist ideology hardened — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 392