| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David R. Roediger. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White; The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books. 2005. Pp. vii, 339. $26.95.
The Oscar-feted filmic representation of racial fault lines in Los Angeles, Paul Haggis's Crash (2004), is a gripping narrative of this city's modern mosaic of diversity. Yet despite the presence of Korean Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and Iranian Americans, at the core of the film is whiteness: the characters, white and nonwhite, live in worlds structured by the legacies and preferences of white Americans. That historians and social scientists now have such a deep understanding of this enduring white-nonwhite cleavage in the U.S. racial order owes much to the flowering of studies stimulated in large part by David R. Roediger's agenda-setting book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991). Advanced in important works by such scholars as Ian Haney Lopez, Karen Brodkin, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Noel Ignatiev, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Gary Gerstle, and Thomas A. Guglielmo, among others, a whiteness framework has incalculably enriched understanding of U.S. racial orders historically and at present.	1
Roediger's new book is a fitting successor to his earlier work. In this superb and beautifully written study, Roediger absorbs and employs the scholarly literatures on whiteness, immigration, ethnicity, and work to write a masterful account of how the white-nonwhite cleavage expressed itself in the complex coagulation of immigrant identity, race, and, later, ethnicity. Roediger formulates the idea of "inbetween-ness" to describe the position of European immigrants whose identity and race were deemed neither white nor black in early twentieth-century America and shows how the confusions resulting from this status entrenched existing racial codes and practices.	. . .

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