[jasonwatkinspdx]

Haven't read this book, though it's on my list now.

You can go back and find writing from the USA's so called Founding Fathers that makes quite clear most of them didn't view the Irish, Spanish, or Italians as white. Then if you look at the history of immigration waves in the US, you see a clear pattern where the definition of whiteness was expanded to groups previously discriminated against as a form of solidarity against the newly arriving group.

This is what all the rhetoric about being colorblind misses. Whiteness is not the same as other ethnicities, and policy that pretends it is will have problems as a result.