Image from Brent Staples: How Italians Became White.

BOOKS

Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race.

Jennifer Guglielmo: White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945.

Jennifer Guglielmo & Salvatore Salerno (editors): Are Italians White?

Grace Elizabeth Hale: Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940.

Noel Ignatiev:

• How the Irish Became White.
• Race Traitor.

Matthew Frye Jacobson:

• Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.
• Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America.

Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People.

David R. Roediger:

• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
• Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs.
• Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White.

ARTICLES

Robert P. Baird: The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea.

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of White Folk.

Katharine Gerbner: Most people think ‘whiteness’ is innate. They’re wrong: It was created to keep black people from voting. When slaves got close to voting rights, slaveowners changed the rules of the game.

National Museum of African American History & Culture:

• Historical Foundations of Race: The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” is a human invention.
• Whiteness.

Nell Irvin Painter:

• White identity in America is ideology, not biology. The history of ‘whiteness’ proves it. The idea of one big white race did not just spring to life full-blown and unchanging, which is what most people assume — and white supremacists rely on.
• A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves.
• What is White America? The Identity Politics of the Majority.
• What is Whiteness?
• What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era.

Brent Staples: How Italians Became White.

David Roediger: see collections of his writings here and here.

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

Matthew Frye Jacobson:

• The Quest for Equality: European Immigration, Part I.
• Race in America.
• Changing Perceptions of Race.          
• Degrees of Whiteness.
• Irish Immigration. 
• The Naturalization Law of 1790       
• The 1924 Immigration Act (Part One)
• The 1924 Immigration Act (Part Three)
• The 1924 Immigration Act (Part Two)

Nell Irvin Painter:

• Author Examines ‘The History Of White People’.
• The History of White People.
• ‘A new phase of American whiteness’: A complex history and an uncertain future.