"Too much recent scholarship 'simply ignores the long, circuitous process by which 'new immigrants' became 'white ethnics,' ' declares Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness), finding that the process in the early 20th century was slower and messier. Well-detailed examples include Greeks and Italians victimized by white mobs at the turn of the century (with the Chicago papers providing the parenthetical identification 'Italian' in crime stories just as they did 'Negro'). Jobs, Roediger finds, were often divided on lines that separated whites from European immigrants, but unions opened to European immigrants more readily than to blacks, Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans. Most significantly, he sees the oppression faced by Europeans as qualitatively different than that faced by other groups and goes into painful detail. Roediger hearkens back to the 1924 immigration restrictions, showing how they drove the 'great migration' of African-Americans northward, thus rendering immigrants less 'foreign' to some entrenched whites. Reinforcing that were the immigrant drive for home ownership, backed by New Deal — era restrictive racial covenants and laws against interracial marriage. While slow going, Roediger's book tills some major historical ground. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Roediger recounts how American ethnic groups that are considered white today, such as Jewish, Italian-, and Polish-Americans, once occupied a confused racial status in their new country.