1. According to historians of "Whiteness," World War II marked the final stage in the transformation of European "ethnics" into White people. Whether or not these scholars exaggerate the degree of race-based hostility that ethnics suffered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it seems clear that European immigrants became less noticeable-and more "White"-in the World War II era. Dialogues on race concentrated almost exclusively upon two supposedly undifferentiated populations, "Negroes" and "whites." Jacobson Matthew Frye Whiteness of a Different Color (Harvard University Press, 1998), 247, 258
2. Gleason Philip "Americans All," in idem., Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 155
3. Arnesen Eric "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2002): 3-32, esp. 13-14.
4. See, e.g. Gitlin Todd The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Schlesinger Arthur M. Jr. , The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1998); and Lasch-Quinn Race Experts, 194–228. Stressing the 1960s quest for African-American identity, other scholars see continuity—not divergence—between the civil rights movement and present-day multiculturalism. See, e.g., Sleeter Christine E. Multicultural Education as Social Activism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Nieto Sonia “From Brown Heroes and Holidays to Assimilationist Agendas: Reconsidering the Critiques of Multicultural Education,” in Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sleeter Christine E. and McLaren Peter L. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 191–220, esp. 192; and Grant Carl A. “Reflections on the Promise of Brown and Multicultural Education,” in Brown v. Board of Education: The Challenge for Today's Schools, ed. Lagemann Ellen Condliffe and Miller Lamar P. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 107–21.
5. “Vice President Humphrey Advocates the Study of Negro History by All Americans,” 113 Cong., 1 sess., Feb. 15, 1967, p. 3488. Published in Negro Digest, a popular African-American periodical, Humphrey's remarks were read into the Congressional Record by Michigan lawmaker John Conyers.