Book Review, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005)

by David R. Roediger
Ayşegül Yayla

Roediger builds the image of the new immigrant struggling to become white in the early
twentieth century United States. This is due to the mainstream American identity’s being
constructively white and the new immigrants face fitting in problems based on race and class.
Problems occur because of the restrictions the state applies to preserve the population to be
dominantly white. Roediger brings light to these practices in his historical study. He succeeds
in his aim of drawing attention to the biased white supremacist policy of the government in
immigration regulations. His most apparent strength is his adaptation of the “inbetween”
status to the new immigrants which means the newcomers are neither accepted as white nor
they can continue to fully identify themselves through their pre-existing racial backgrounds.
In this respect, it can be put forward that he is writing against Guglielmo’s study on Italian
new immigrants, who are termed as “white on arrival”, just two years before the publication
of Working toward Whiteness. Roediger takes one step further and claims that southern and
eastern European immigrants already had the notions of racial inequality at the back of their
minds, which he terms as “white before coming” in his book. Since white stands at the top of
the racial hierarchy and the new immigrants are not easily accepted to pass as white under the
government regulations, they become confused of their identities. This confusion situates
them somewhere in the middle ranks of the hierarchy, somewhere “inbetween” New World
whiteness and their Old World view of themselves. Another strength is that he shows the
bigger picture of the new immigrant experience in the United States and as Alba, a reviewer
of the book, says, “Making sense of this messiness requires a bird's eye national view, and
this is what Roediger presents” (2007, 234). The weakness of Roediger’s Working toward
Whiteness is that it follows the populist tradition in making use of the hegemonic forces in his
study. While positioning the new immigrants as inbetween, he focuses too much on the
disadvantageous rules and regulations of the state for example by picking up controversial
Naturalization Act cases regarding individuals’ citizenship rights. He brings these negative
images to the spotlight. However, if he argues that they were inbetween, then he should have
added some positive facts they faced relative to former immigrants or African-Americans
already present in the country. Another weakness is that he focuses too much on the Italian
experience in building up his main point. This is probably due to the materials he used were
on the Italian new immigrants to a large extent.

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The book is divided into three parts. It is possible to see that Roediger employed these parts
as layers in building his argument. In the first part, he introduces race and ethnicity at the
beginning of twentieth century site specifically in United States. He digs into the meanings of
white ethnic and immigrant in the history of race. He criticizes the American social and
intellectual attributions to the new immigrant as being ambiguous and uncertain. He defines
the “inbetween” term according to Higham and Orsi. Higham takes a nationalist view on
immigrants’ role in the States whereas Orsi shapes his argument on the Italian-American
experience of North and South Italians attitude towards each other in America. In the second
part, Roediger criticizes the view of the Supreme Court justices and political leaders. He
attacks the power of national state and describes four inbetween racial spaces of injustice and
inequality created by courts, reformers, employers and unions. He brings forth the idea of the
new immigrant racial consciousness. It is based on their diverse racial backgrounds, being
other than “white”, and their working class socio-economic status. This consciousness of
being an inbetween race, argues Roediger, helped the new immigrant communities to accept
their position in the society stronger and work harder to gain economic upward mobility in
order to achieve the white identity as a status in the hierarchy. In the last part, he outlines the
Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 against southern and eastern European immigrants and
Deportation Act of 1929 against Mexican-Americans. On this issue Desmond asserts in his
review of Roediger’s study, “restrictive immigration policy were fundamentally expressions
of state policy favoring white Americans’ preferences and categories” (2006, 1528). Later
Roediger describes the changes in the racial relations through state policy on urban settlement
and the new immigrants’ construct of neighborhoods to achieve white identity. On the issue
of the New Deal, he sees it as a “whitening” policy because it gives the opportunity to the
new immigrants to discriminate against the African-Americans through housing regulations
and to industrially mobilize as whites and exclude others. He criticizes the New Deal for
putting the new immigrants into the double bind of exclusion-based white nationalism and
inclusive efforts of economic reform.

From the perspective of nation-building, Roediger’s study serves well to the notion of
“United States as a fundamentally white nation” (Mendoza 2010, 45) which is associated with
Western civilization. There are two opposing types of nationalism: ethnic versus civic. As a
consequence of Roediger’s claim of positioning the new immigrants as inbetween, I induced
the idea of the building up parameter of the American nation to be stuck inbetween, as well,

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ethnic and civic nationalisms. Ethnic nationalism has the components of being authoritarian,
reactionary, genealogical and cultural; it is about having a unity around the commonality of
descent, language and culture; it is driven by a concern for cultural authenticity and
distinctiveness and it constitutes an organic view of the nation. American nation, through the
government policy on immigration restriction, is shaped upon genealogical whiteness. Civic
nationalism, on the other hand, is described as being liberal, progressive, political and
territorial; it is a primarily political movement to limit governmental power and secure civic
rights; it is a unity around common political ideals and institutions and it gives a synthetic
view of the nation. This civic nationalism fits more into the position of the American nation
because citizenship basically equalizes the new immigrants to the rest of the society. The
contradictory situation lived through the new immigrants gives the clue to the ambiguity of
United States’ nation-building paradigms.

Bibliography:
Akman, Ayhan. Nations and Nationalism [PDF Format]. Humanity and Society II lecture
notes. Istanbul: Sabancı University, Spring 2009.
Alba, Richard. “Whiteness Just Isn’t Enough.” In Sociological Forum, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun.
2007): 232-241.
King, Desmond. “Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White;
The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs.” In American Historical
Review, Vol. 111, No. 5 (Dec. 2006): 1528-1529.
Mendoza, Jose Jorge. “A ‘Nation’ of Immigrants.” In The Pluralist Vol. 5 No 3 (Fall 2010):
41-48.
Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White.
New York: Basic Books, 2005.