Sparknotes Inbetween People Race National Identity

James R. Barrett and David Roediger, the authors of the book: Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the “New Immigrant” Working Class. Barrett and Roediger analyzes the racialization of immigration during the development of America, and how issue of immigration became a matter of race rather than a matter of national identity. In today’s society, even the word immigrant causes the displacement in the perceptions of many in American culture. In America, when we hear the term ‘immigrant’ we tend to think of Mexican or Hispanic, because of immigration has been an issue of racialization for many years, we normally wouldn’t think of a Canadian man crossing the American border as an immigrant, especially since the predominant race in Canada is White. In their analysis, Barrett and Roediger express how immigration became a matter of race, even when European immigrants entering the country did not meet the “white” status at first, but as generations passed, white immigrants gained a slight social and economic advantage over immigrants of color. “Joseph Loguidice’s reminiscence of the temporarily “colored” coal hauler compresses and dramatizes a process that went on in far more workday settings as well.
Often while themselves begrimed by the nation’s dirtiest jobs, new immigrants and their children quickly learned that “the worst thing one could be in this Promise Land was ‘colored.’” But if the world of work taught the importance of being “not black”, it also exposed ner immigrants to frequent comparisons and close competition with African Americans (Barret & Roediger,