Their whiteness opened the golden door

Somewhere in the journey [immigration], Europeans became something they had never been or needed to be before…

“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.

Their geographic origin was their passport to the dominant caste. “The European immigrant’s experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where Europeanness–that is to say, whiteness–was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to,” wrote the Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson. “It was their whiteness, not any kind of New World magnanimity that opened the Golden Door.”