Whiteness is contingent on class, and disprivileged whites are marked as non-white

Evidence

Clearly, the racial powers and privileges of whites are magnified or tempered by class position, gender, even the standing of and within a nation-state. Thus those otherwise considered as white in the scheme of common sense and who occupy social positions of disprivilege or disempowerment become referenced precisely as less or other than white. They are characterized with the likes of “white niggers” or “half-niggers,” as “temporary Negroes” (Dollard, 1988), “hunky” (Hungarian), “dago” (Italian and Spanish), “polak” (Poles), “spicks” (Spanish) and “kikes” (Jews). The characterization in an 1898 debate over the disenfrachisement of Italians in the USA exemplifies the power and (dis)privilege at work in racial identification: ”… according to the spirit of our meaning when we speak of ‘white man’s government,’ [the Italians] are as black as the blackest negro in existence” (quoted in Cunningham, 1965:34; Barrett and Roediger, 1997, esp. p. 9). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1699

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the immodesty article’s thread on how class/identity signaling shapes racialized labels — the slurs here (‘hunky,’ ‘dago,’ ‘white niggers’) show whiteness itself being stratified by class, paralleling how dress norms encoded class and identity.
• XREF: Connects to David Roediger’s ‘Wages of Whiteness’ thesis and to how racial categories historically absorbed European immigrant groups, echoing the current scholarship on Italian/Irish ‘becoming white.’ — connects to: Whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked for non-Western groups — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 48
• SHARE: The 1898 quote about Italians being ‘as black as the blackest negro’ would land well with anyone studying US immigration or the historical construction of whiteness.