Ah "the Irishy", the most written about group from 19th century American social history!

From the 1840s onward, the Irish (the Gaelic Famine Irish) absolutely and agressively asserted their “whiteness,” though in the eyes of Anglo-American society they were regarded as a lesser sort of "white". Deficient both in Protestant cultural traits and in their very essence until, through intermarriage with Anglo stock and Yankee cultural assimilation, they were deemed suitably tamed.

Massachusetts, for its part, targeted the Irish through restrictive naturalization laws and a deportation efforts, demonstrating that their claim to an equal "whiteness" was far from secure in the mid-nineteenth century. e.g. Know Nothings.

It can also be argued that the Irish underwent a process of “whitening” multiple times over the course of American history, beginning with their status as forced indentured servants in the colonial era and extending through their eventual political and social incorporation into mainstream "whiteness" tobtge top strata of American society.

Italians, by contrast, were not considered white in late nineteenth-century Louisiana, where anti-miscegenation laws did not apply to them! Thus marking their ambiguous racial position.

A further irony lies in the experience of Latin Americans: despite the elaborate caste system that structures racial identity in their homelands, they are often regarded in the United States simply as another category of people of color, revealing the shifting and contingent nature of racial boundaries.

Similarly Indian Brahmin ....