by Eva Baylin
This public history account explores Jewish immigration and Americanization experiences from the often overlooked perspective of young Jewish immigrant women. It tells stories of life on New York’s Lower East Side: stories of bustling streets filled with pushcart vendors and cramped tenements, of working long hours in garment factories and the fight for unionizing, of wearing ready-made American clothes and going out to the Yiddish theater or dancing, of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and of learning English and the pressures felt by immigrants to become ‘Americanized.’ These stories highlight both immigrant experiences and the oppressive complexities of Whiteness’s manifestation in United States society and culture. It is a critique and contextualization of American Whiteness and identity that has created and continues to create systematic racism and inequity. In order to understand broader societal oppression and the Othering of marginalized people we have to learn from the narratives that have not yet been told and the voices who have been silenced by the dominant historical narrative, often left out of textbooks and museum exhibits, their stories unremembered. Only then can we work to unravel the engrained societal viewpoints and constructions of Whiteness that have enabled oppressions to thrive, and begin to tell the narrative of United States history in the most full and all encompassing way.
Whiteness is deeply ingrained in United States society. Its impacts on who is privileged and safe are monumental, and it has propagated systematic racism, Othering and violence. American Whiteness has created a standard against which all Other people are judged and a construction in which only those considered White are fully part of United States society and are afforded all protections offered by the United States Constitution. In her book The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter tells how Whiteness has been constructed and its complicated existence, she writes that “rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness, we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of the black/white dichotomy.”1 As Whiteness in the United States has been constructed, groups who were Othered have ‘become White’ through assimilating into American society, often through participating in American activities. The stories of ‘becoming White’ and Americanization are tied together and are also stories about adapting to and abetting the practices of White Supremacy.
1. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 201.