Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

by Dorothy Roberts

The wave of immigrants who arrived from southern and eastern Europe from the 1840s to the 1930s were included among the undesirables targeted by the exclusionary immigration laws passed by Congress in 1924. They threw off their native customs, accents, and names not only to become assimilated into American culture, but also to be granted entrance to the privileged rank of whiteness. Obviously, their ancestry did not change to make them whiter; their racial transformation occurred as a result of changing political qualifications for inclusion in the ruling class. There is no biological test for whiteness. White means belonging to the group of people who are entitled to claim white privilege.