Assimilation is a Double-Edged Sword for Immigrants

Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants may not have identified with, or been accepted into, white society when they first arrived in the United States . But they, or more often their children, assimilated by becoming "white" and experienced upward mobility as they melded into the white majority. And part of the assimilation into whiteness meant the adoption of white racial attitudes.

Black Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas described the generational gap among Italians in his Bronx neighborhood in the 1940s: the mothers and grandmothers accepted him as one of their own while the new generation attacked him as a "spic." One of the Italian boys speculated that if Piri had a sister, they could "cover the bitch's face with the flag an' fuck er for old glory," in a graphic rendering of Toni Morrison's point.

James Loewen points out that just as European immigrants moved out of their inner-city enclaves and merged into white America, African Americans were being residentially segregated as the phenomenon of "sundown towns," which explicitly prohibited blacks from remaining in them after the sun set, spread across the country. Assimilation for people of European origin was accompanied by ongoing exclusion of people of color already in the United States .