How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says about Race in America
The history of Jews in
the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights
on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned
Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white
racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have
shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their
ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an
analysis of her own family's multigenerational experience. She shows how
Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial
middleness: on the one hand, marginality wit regard to whiteness; on the
other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.
Class and gender are key elements of race-making in America. Brodkin suggests that racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, a key element in misguided public policy and a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien "others" have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles- is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.
(less)FROM..http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229466.How_Jews_Became_White_Folks
Class and gender are key elements of race-making in America. Brodkin suggests that racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, a key element in misguided public policy and a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien "others" have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles- is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.
(less)FROM..http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229466.How_Jews_Became_White_Folks
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