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It was the only path for my family—illegal immigrants in the inter-war years who served in WW2 for citizenship.

The US kept its promise to Europeans, even those not then considered white—but broke its promise to Filipinos. We have a lot of growing to do.



> The US kept its promise to Europeans, even those not then considered white

No Europeans were ever not considered white under US law. Blacks, Native Americans and Asians have all been othered racially under US law. All Europeans have always been considered white.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...


The article isn’t quite as clear on that. Jews were classified as non-white at least for a while and in the census. Italians also faced discrimination, although not by law.

Then, obviously, there are British citizens ich Indian roots, and Belgians born in Kongo. Not sure how they fit into this debate.


No Jew or Italian was ever non-white under US law. Racism and religious and ethnic prejudice was there in spades but

> No Europeans were ever not considered white under US law.

If you have any citations for Jews being considered non-white as opposed to the bad kind of white like the Irish I’d be interested to see it.


That's what the linked wikipedia article says. ("for census purposes", admittedly. But that's one aspect of law)


The string “for census purposes” does not occur in the linked Wikipedia article. The closest to anything saying Jews were regarded as non-white was that they were

> further down the Caucasian pecking order, as Semites.

The obvious interpretation of that is that they weren’t the good kind of white but bad white is still white. The Semitic kind of Caucasian.


That's very interesting to me. Do you think the statistics would show that? That whitish, for example, Eastern European recruits, would have had better luck than more brown folks?




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