But the Irish, Germans, Poles, Slavs, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans who came to the United States underwent a process of attaining whiteness, an identity created in contrast to the blackness of unfree and degraded labor. As immigrants, these groups had an opportunity to ally themselves with abolition and, later, equal rights and to fight for better social and economic conditions for all workers. They chose instead, with few exceptions, the wages of whiteness.
