How the Irish Became White

How the Irish Became White
Noel Ignatiev

"The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave" (2).

"To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres instead of being confined to certain work; to Irish entrepreneurs, it meant that they could function outside of a segregated market. To both of these groups it meant that they were citizens of a democratic republic, with the right to elect and be elected, to be tried by a jury of their peers, to live wherever they could afford, and to spend, without racially imposed restrictions, whatever money they managed to acquire" (3).

These are the assertions that Ignatiev makes in the introduction to his historical study of Irish immigrants to America, primarily focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While he provides a solid historical grounding for his study of laborers and their intra- and interethnic relationships and hostilities, if one a little too heavily focused on Boston and Philadelphia, Ignatiev provides a less clear theoretical grounding for his claim that the Irish became white. I generally tend to feel that Amazon reviews, particularly one-star reviews, are of dubious worth, I do feel at least some sense of sympathy with the reviewer who suggested that the title was chosen more for its value in catching the eye than for its connection to the topic of the book.

This might seem like an accusation of deliberate misdirection on the part of Ignatiev, but I would suggest that it is instead a possible, and difficult to avoid, pitfall of attempts to remedy the pre-existing blindness to race in the bulk of labor studies. The problem, as I (possibly incoherently) attempted to suggest in my discussion of Are Italians White?, is that whiteness and citizenship are conflated while blackness, oppression, slavery, and poverty are tied together. Thus, the story of how the Irish "became white" is really the story of how the Irish became American, at a point in time when "American" absolutely meant "white." Perhaps this seems like a minor quibble with an otherwise worthwhile, interesting, and thought-provoking study.

It's not.

Consider the first quotation above, the one that suggests that the conditions for Irish Catholic peasants were comparable to those of an American slave. Comparable: similar, equivalent, proportionate, commensurate, equivalent.

What is equivalent to slavery?

This is a serious question.

It is the corollary to the question I would ask of every white person who makes a declaration about "reverse racism": If you think that white people really have it worse, then why don't you switch? You don't need proof to be black. You just need to say you are. Nobody goes around double-checking to make sure that black folks are really black. You know why? Because people don't pretend to be black. For all the claims that suburban white kids are "acting black," not a one of those claims suggests that anyone is actually claiming to be black. I can assure you from personal experience that if you say you're black and people didn't think you were, they will say things like, "Oh, looks like you got lucky in the gene lottery!"

So, in this case, let's look at slavery in America versus Catholicism in Ireland under British Protestant rule; which of them wins in an oppression death match? Well, Catholics couldn't "open or teach in a school…take part in the manufacture or sale of arms, newspapers, or books…own a horse worth more than five pounds," and suffered beneath myriad other laws—laws which were undoubtedly oppressive, no question about that (40). But they were not bought and sold. They were not chattel. I see nothing indicating that Catholic women were regularly raped by Protestant landlords so as to produce more property to sell, or anything suggesting that families were forced apart by the sale of some of their members, or anything showing that literacy was a crime in and of itself.

Please note: by and large, I don't think that oppression Olympics are helpful. When it comes down to it, that's the very reason I object to phrases like "comparable to slavery." Oppression appears in many forms, and it is terribly unlikely that many of them are comparable except insofar as they are all oppression, and as Andrea Smith points out so eloquently, attempts to "rank" oppressions generally silence at least one group and usually more. Each of us is placed differently within the set of hierarchical structures that frame American society and culture, and attempting to compare everything to slavery is about as useful as accusing all possessors of privilege of being like Hitler.

Leaving the issue of comparable/equivalent aside, I'd like to consider what Ignatiev is really saying in the second quotation I began this post with. There, he equates whiteness with privilege, self-ownership, and citizenship, without ever questioning the connection there. It's not that I'm arguing whiteness and citizenship are not confluent and dependent; in America, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were, and to a large extent, still are. The problem is that if what we are studying is the creation of the conditions that helped institute and continue to support the connection between whiteness and citizenship, then we have an obligation to examine our language and assumptions.

In this instance, and throughout the book, Ignatiev uses whiteness as a shorthand for citizenship, as when he conflates nativism and racism, concluding that "strong tendencies existed in antebellum America to consign the Irish, if not to the black race, then to an intermediate race located socially between black and white" (89). However, there is very little to support this claim. Were the Irish perceived as lesser than "Americans"? Yes. Were they perceived as better suited for dirty, unpleasant, back-breaking (in some cases literally) jobs than "Americans"? Yes. Does this mean that they were not white?

Only if you see "white" and "American" as synonymous. And that's the idea that Ignatiev's unexamined choice of language perpetuates (while also, at many points, presuming that the history of labor is the history of men).