Gugliermo, Thomas A. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890 – 1945. New York: Oxford, 2004.

Summary
This book looks at how Americans and institutions (federal government, newspapers, and race science) both questioned Italians’ racial desirability (as Italians, South Italians, Sicilians, and Latins) and accepted them as “white on arrival” in the United States. Naturalization laws and courts, the U.S. census, race science, newspapers, unions, employers, neighbors, realtors, settlement houses, politicians, and political parties largely accepted Italians. Although “undesirable” in some Americans’ eyes, Italians were on the better side of the colorline: white. They were not excluded like African Americans, Orientals, and sometimes Mexicans. Yet, it’s not necessarily the fact that Italians identified as white. Italians were more concerned with being “Italian” (a race, not a nationality). Gugliermo thus argues: “For much of the turn-of-the-century and interwar years… Italians were white on arrival not so much because of the way the viewed themselves, but because of the way '''others viewed and treated them'''.” (6) Guglielmo is interested in the construction process of race (the intricacies), and the place of groups (white, black, red, yellow, etc.) within a “racialized social system.” His analysis rests up a '''race/color conceptual framework''', where race is could mean many things (Nordics and Mediterranean’s, Celts and Hebrew) and color, which roughly coincides with today’s census categories. Italians were thus either North or South Italian (race) and white (color). This distinction was key. Thus, Guglielmo summarizes: “While Italians suffered greatly for their putative racial underdesirability as Italians, South Italians, and so forth, they still benefited in countless ways from their privileged color status as whites.” (9) This distinction, however, changed, especially after the 1924 immigration restriction, the influx of African Americans into northern cities (great migration) and the rise of Nazi racialism. Americans lost interest in delineating the racial distinctions and the color line became the primary concern. By World War II, race and color came to mean the same thing and terms like ethnicity and old ones like nationality emerged to explain difference previously based on race. Italians, as a result became to be referred to as an ethnic or nationality group and race referred to larger groups like “whites “negroes” and “Orientals.”

Example: Racialist Lothrop Stoddard could “condemn southern and east Europeans as ‘lower human types’ and at the time type concede” that these white immigrants were not as bad as the “colored” immigrant

See also: Vivek Bald, Lara Putnam, Matthew Jacobson