He might not, for example, consider Jews "white", or Italians "white." White to Tom means people who are just like him. He is therefore expressing fear -- fear that those people who have so far been confined to the working class will move up from the ghettoes and displace him socially. Newman and Tallack add that "The phase of mass immigration from south-eastern Europe which had begin in the 1890s [was] superseded by the Great Migration of blacks from the South which had begun in 1914 with the war boom so that [Fitzgerald's] reference to 'short upper lips' and 'the yolks of their eyeballs' does not necessarily signify an endemic racism but a historically specific fear. In the case of immigrants, the fear provoked Congress in 1921 and then again in 1924 to pass acts establishing quotas for immigrants. These acts hit would-be immigrants from southern and eastern Europe particularly hard. In the case of blacks the fear manifested itself in an increasing ghettoisation in Harlem, Chicago"s South Side and other urban areas as half a million blacks moved north between 1914 and 1919" (Newman and Tallack, context.htm).

             Isn't it ironic, then, that Tom's "got some woman in New York", whom herself is of the working class? Not really, because Tom sees a man's sexual relationship with a woman as being one of dominance and submission -- just like one's relationship with one's butler. Tom would not have a problem with having a black man as his butler, because he would unquestionably be in charge. Similarly, Tom doesn't have a problem having an unquestionably socially-inferior woman as his mistress, because there is no confusion about who's running this situation. .

             Just as Tom's choice of books indicates that he fears "uppity" minorities, his choice of mistresses shows that he fears "uppity" women. Fitzgerald says of Tom that "There was something pathetic in his concentration [on the topic of the racist book] as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more" (Fitzgerald,17).