WHITENESS began not as a racial or ethnic or national identity
     emerging from a people’s shared experience, but as a legal
     construct. Whiteness was designed to distinguish between poor
     English-speaking men brought to North America as indentured servants
     (after their communal lands were privatized by law and force) and
     people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved by the wealthy.
     Neither group could vote before or after the “American revolution,”
     but the former Englishmen (and English-speaking lowland Scots) could
     eventually “earn” their freedom, buying their way into citizenship
     by acquiring land after paying off their bond. On the other hand,
     abducted Africans were doomed to spend their whole lives in slavery;
     in the rare event they were “granted” freedom by their enslavers,
     they still would not be welcomed as participants in civil society.
     The intent and effect of legislating a new division of people was to
     create an overseer class, a class of poor “white” men who believed
     that they had an interest in enforcing the enslavement of Africans
     and their descendants.  Laws granted them a degree of privilege, the
     promise of greater wealth and freedom if they made society
     (including the torture of Black people and the eradiation of
     Indigenous people) continue to run smoothly.
     Whiteness has its antecedent in the British colonial policy in
     Ireland which put displaced lowland Scots in the position of
     enforcing British rule. Ireland’s long internal conflicts are
     religious only to the degree that the Irish brand of Catholicism
     maintains elements of indigenous relationship to the land, while the
     Presbyterianism of the ethnically Scottish inhabitants of Ireland is
     sparser, more conventionally monotheistic, and bears no association
     with holy places or Pagan festivals. Many of the poor European
     people conscripted into enforcing slavery were members of this
     English-speaking Scottish diaspora, displaced again from the first
     land they were used to colonize, relocated to the American south.
     FOR LATER generations of European immigrants, becoming white was a
     privilege granted only after passing through a painful process of
     assimilation, sacrificing identity, memory, custom, and language.
     They also had to agree to participate in the enforcement of white
     supremacism. James Baldwin wrote:
         “No one was white before he/she came to America.  It took
     generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a
     white country.”
     My great-grandparents came from a colonized country where their
     language was outlawed and children were taken from their families to
     be indoctrinated in English.  My great-grandfather had taken up arms
     against the occuppiers.   My great-grandmother spoke no English even
     decades after the last other Irish speakers she knew had died.  They
     lived on the top of the highest hill in Lynn, MA, so they could
     always look down and see if anyone was coming for them.
     It was the Ku Klux Klan that did come, burning a cross at High Rock
     Tower to try to drive the Irish out.  My grandfather watched while
     my great-grandfather kept him quiet and still.  To the Klan, the
     Irish were not white. Nor were they white to the Anglo-American
     Christians, including the famously liberal Rev. Henry Ward Beecher,
     who vilified the Irish “race” a generation before.
     My grandfather spoke no Irish. He worked for General Electric. In
     his lifetime an Irish-American became President. And he cursed the
     first and second generation immigrants from Europe who were not yet
     white – the Jews whose whiteness remains contested among the
     alt-right now.
     So what is whiteness?

   Find out before the alt-right says you ain't white enough:
   [1]https://itsgoingdown.org/lie-white-identity/

References

   1. https://itsgoingdown.org/lie-white-identity/