Whiteness expanded in the 1930s through geopolitical and demographic pressures

Evidence

Starting in the 1930s, however, the religious identities and ancestry of Mormons, Catholics, and Jews no longer axiomatically excluded them from social Whiteness. This social reconstruction (and expansion) of Whiteness arose from three phenomena. First, the transition from biological race to cultural ethnicity as a marker of difference among legally White groups allowed secondand third-generation Southern and Eastern European Americans to assimilate into Anglo-American normalcy. Second, a Judeo-Christian American religious identity countered domestic White Protestant nativism and Fascism and Nazism abroad. Finally, US competition with the Soviet Union for global hegemony during the Cold War required the United States to put into practice its rhetorical commitment to religious pluralism. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 355

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that US Cold War competition forced genuine religious pluralism — a geopolitical cause reshaping the boundaries of a racial category — is a dense, multi-causal mechanism worth sitting with.