ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on race privilege, the idea that if some racial/ethnic groups experience disadvantages, there is a group that is advantaged by this very same system. It focuses on the social construction of whiteness, including how some groups have become white over time. For many groups, such as Jewish Americans, becoming white is intimately connected to social class and social mobility. Racial hierarchies, status hierarchies based upon physical appearance and the assumption of membership in particular categories based upon these physical features, exist in the United States and throughout the world, albeit with much variation. Many groups of people that are today unquestionably seen as white have not always been so. Irish, Greek, Jewish, and Italian Americans have all experienced a "whitening process" in different historical eras, when their group shifted from being perceived as nonwhite to being seen as white. Race is a fluid category, rather than fixed; the boundaries of whiteness are continually in flux.
