Working toward Whiteness: how America's immigrants became White : the strange journey from Ellis Island to the suburbs
(Book)

In Working Toward Whiteness, David R. Roediger brings the history of his now-classic The Wages of Whiteness, foward into the twentieth century. Roediger recounts how American ethnnic groups considered white today -- including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans -- once occupied a liminal racial status in their new country, and only gradually received the status of "white" Americans. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants -- the racist real estate agreements that keep immigrants out of white neighborhoods -- Roediger explores the murky realities of race in twentieth-century America. Working Toward Whiteness charts the strange transformation of these new immigrants into the "white ethnics" of American today.