1. 1. See, for example, the conference “Reimagining White Ethnicity: Expressivity, Identity, Race,” organized by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, April 27-28, 2012, New York City.
2. 2. A number of projects rehabilitate white ethnicity. Jeffrey Louis Decker (2006) considers the work of Matthew Frye Jacobson (2006) and Thomas Ferraro (2005) as revisionist scholarship that moves white ethnicity studies beyond white privilege and its denial. Ferraro’s is seen as a “study [that] purges any lingering essentialism from the concept of white ethnicity as it was conceived during the 1970s” (1240) and Jacobson’s as a project that “go[es] beyond well-worn leftist critiques of white ethnicity by locating progressive currents in its revival” (1241).
3. 3. Immigrants from southeastern Europe (and their offspring) were listed in the 1960 census, which Weed draws on for his analysis, under the category “foreign white stock” (4). The official inclusion of all Europeans into whiteness creates an objective category that obscures the diverse and contradictory ways in which racialized people experience the instabilities and contradictions of racial ascriptions. Though the Census included Mexicans under “foreign white stock,” Weed refrains from discussing this demographic, though hinting at the prospect of non-European whiteness: “Are racial minorities part of the ‘white ethnic’ category?” he asks (3). Conflating Europeanness with whiteness excludes non-European experiences of whiteness, as Alastair Bonnett points out (1998). The following definition of white ethnicity by a Chinese American in Chicago underlines this point:” ’What’s a white ethnic? Me!’ says Daisy Cannatello, who is pure Chinese-American… . ’I’m white ethnic. Why? My skin is light. I was born here’” (Keegan 1989).
4. 4. Social science writing still construes "white ethnicity" in this contradictory manner. It is discussed as an ideological construct (di Leonardo 2004) but also, until recently, as a universal referent to "European ethnicity among whites" (McDermott and Samson 2005, 245
5. see Bonnett 1998) and middle-class "whites of European extraction and Roman Catholics" (Waters 1990, 12). David Roediger (2002) problematizes the equation between Europeanness and whiteness when he defines "white ethnicity" as both self-ascription and social classification, as "the consciousness of a distinct identity among usually second- or third-generation immigrants who both see themselves and are seen as racially white and as belonging to definable ethnic groups" (328). This formulation allows space for whiteness outside Europeanness. Fault lines emerge, however, in the potential dissonance between self-ascription and an individual's "ethnoracial assignment" (Brodkin 1998, 1) by the collective. An unstable category of fluid boundaries, "white ethnicity" does not easily yield to any single definition. Open to appropriations and contestations, it invites analysis of contextual boundary-making rather than fixed meaning. For example, how does scholarship account for those who may not see themselves as white but are seen as white (or the reverse)? A new recognition of whiteness as situated identity now gains currency, away from reified whiteness (Hartigan 1999