happy 4th of july everybody

I am reading Working Towards Whiteness. How America's Immigrants Became White by David R. Roediger, and I came upon this gem regarding the term English-speaking races, used in the early 20th century:

[...] the term "English-speaking races" - so at odds with presumed connections of race and biology - recurred again and again. Theodore Roosevelt, social reformers, steel mill workers, immigration officials, and sociologists regularly used it. Warne's jeremiad against the "invasion" of new immigrants denominated the "foreign-born from [northern and western European] countries supplying the earlier immigration as English-speaking" and the arriving "Slavs and Italians" as not "English-speaking." In fact, as Isaac Hourwich showed at the time, data from the Dillingham Commission suggested that, controlling for length of U.S. residence, immigrants from Poland may have been more "English-speaking" than those from Germany. Warne was thus right to admit a certain absence of "scientific precision" in terming the Germans, French, Dutch, Swiss, Norwegian, and Swedish as "English-speaking", but the idea that a language change could announce a racial transformation spoke profoundly to the biosocial definitions of race. Peter Robert's revealing teacher's manual, English for Coming Americans (1912), counseled an alternative strategy for teaching Scandinavians, Germans, and Finns as against the "wholly different problem" of laborers from southern Italy, Slavs, Hindus, Chinese, or Japanese. Those born in "favored nations" should not, he warned, be mixed with new immigrants and Asians as both of the latter groups suffered from "a heritage of inefficiency and sloth... which will take more than a generation to slough off". (p 52-53)

It's all a matter of creatively defining "us" and "them". Let's define you as "English-speaking", because that means you are one of us, irregardless of whether you actually speak the language or not.