ENTRY
[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE by Noel Ignatiev
Happy belated May day! Solidarity forever!
I know in a fairly recent post I 'came out' as British, but that's not the end all be all of my identity. To be fair, identity is rarely so easy. My grandmother, you see, came from Cork in Ireland. My grandmother and my father, God rest their souls, were both exceedingly proud of their Irish identity, and I learnt Irish Gaelic at the same time I learnt English. I joked at my wedding that the worst thing to happen to my family was when Vauxhall started putting CD players into cars, as before my Dad got a car with a CD player, we had the chance to sample the wide variety of music on radio. After the CD player, every car ride became dominated by Irish 'folk' music. (I still hate the Irish Tenors and Celtic Women to this day). I was forced to learn the jig after River Dance made it big on Eurovision in the mid-1990s. To finish the stereotype, when I drank I tended towards Guinness, and even now that I'm sober I still enjoy 'Guinness 0.0'.
Part of growing up in the Irish diaspora, especially for those of us that close to ol' mother Ireland was hearing the stories of the historic abuses our ancestors suffered. When you're from a group that has [relatively] recently suffered abuse based on race or religion, there tend to be two ways to respond. The first is the way that one would hope everyone would respond, the healthy way, the way that sane people assume everyone responds because it is, frankly, the correct way to respond; 'What was done to my people was unforgivable, and we will use our experience and our story to ensure that this never happens to anyone, ourselves or elsewhere, ever again'.
The much less healthy, the deranged, and unfortunately, the one popular amongst people in power in many companies, countries, and industries globally is, 'this happened to my people because we were weak, so we need to get strong so we can do this to others before someone does this to us'.
Considering there simply isn't enough genetic diversity within the homo sapiens genome to view the latter as anything less than self-destructive needlessly suicidal ideology, the mental conclusions of a madman hell-bent on nothing less than the self-destruction of our very species, it is worth examining why so many come to that conclusion, and more importantly how we can break the cycle so that more people don't keep coming to that conclusion and we have to keep having the same debate once a decade where we have to reassure half of our own species that yes, genocide is wrong, no matter who the perpetrator and the victim are. God didn't make you special and grant you special permission to land, especially considering how much murder is bad and love and forgiveness are the thing.
The latter is helpful if you're the powerful sort and want to consolidate your power, but you need hired goons to do it, and you keep running into people with those pesky moral compasses. SO, what does all this have to do with the Irish?
Well, as discussed previously, the 1840s weren't a good time for the Irish. Capitalist extraction in Ireland, in the form of potato farming as cash crops, had led to the largest famine in Western Europe in the 'modern era'. Mixed with British pseudo-science around social Darwinism and the end result is a lot of dead Irish folk, and the ones who weren't dead were being pushed out, either to elsewhere in the Empire (Britain itself, Canada, Australia, Jamaica, or New Zealand) or for those that could afford it, to go outside the empire, to the relatively young United States.
Now, the United States and unhinged xenophobic, anti-Catholic anti-immigration panics, name a more iconic duo. Never mind the hypocrisy of settlers in a former settler colony, who had displaced indigenous folk being up in arms about an 'invasion' of European foreigners, the Americans had inherited a deep sense of anti-Irish sentiment from their British Puritan forefathers. The Irish, being Catholic, were dirty, lazy, superstitious, primitive, backwards, and here to steal your job and identity.
And so, the US became the land of 'No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish' signs, and the hopes and dreams of a brighter future in a land that was, allegedly, free of British influence were quickly dashed as the Irish found themselves facing the same genocidal tendencies in 'the new world' that they had faced in 'the old'. Remarkably, still Cromwell's fault, albeit more indirectly this time. (Two centuries later and across an entire ocean and still facing Cromwell's bullshit. We should really rename the entire US to 'Cromwell's Bullshit' then people would be less surprised at how frequently America gives in to their fascist impulses). Once again, this was a place wherein a formerly prosecuted people could walk away from the pain and say, 'no, no more. We will fight to help our Black and indigenous brothers and sisters as they struggle against the oppression that we ourselves have just escaped'. Alternatively, they could throw Black and indigenous Americans under the proverbial bus in order to prove loyalty to 'white America' and a few decades later when the Italian Unification Wars brought a wave of Italian immigration to the states, also double down against Italians and Mexicans fleeing their civil war. Given the rise and fall of Bill O’Reilly in the states, or the on going terror of Robert Kennedy Jr., I think it's little guess as to which path many Irish-Americans chose.
Surprisingly the people who dye the Chicago River green to celebrate the life of a saint whose traditional colour is actually light blue didn't take the time to learn the more sombre lessons from our past, and are doing little to 'break the cycle' whilst the Republic of Ireland itself stands against modern fascism. The Republic itself isn't entirely free of sin in this regard, next week I'll be reviewing Tax Haven Ireland to examine the faults of early Republican Ireland and its actual problematic relationship with the Catholic Church. But Irish Americans became prolific in extending American slavery and the ongoing genocide against indigenous Americans.
Ignatiev argues that this is because many of the early Irish-Americans chose to assimilate into the standards of 'white America' at the time. This is a symptom of buying into, even subconsciously, the racial hierarchy that the British and American Empires were building their identities around at this time. (Don't believe me, feel free to read some of Rudyard Kipling's lesser known works and report back). As such, it was desirable for the Irish to achieve 'whiteness', as whiteness was the top of the hierarchy.
As I'm writing this, it is a lovely 20 degree day in London. Uncharacteristically sunny even, and so I am writing this outdoors. That said, between my Irish, English, and Scottish ancestry, I haven't a lick of melanin, unless you count the freckles, but believe you me, the freckles don't feel like they count when I've been in the sun too long. To this end, given the reputation us of Irish stock have of being unbelievably pale (sun burn in my office pale) it might be shocking to hear that the Irish were once not considered white. Indeed, when my granddad and grand-mum married in 1940, whilst Britain was at war with Nazi Germany, my English granddad was listed on the marriage certificate as 'White/Caucasian', whilst my nan was listed as 'Irish'. Irish-Americans and Irish-Britons had to prove our 'whiteness' to the British and American ruling classes to become full and welcome members of society. Even then, in the American context, this was largely as a function of 'united against a different other'. In both Britain and America, the increasing presence of a visibly non-white 'other' as immigration increased allowed the Irish to become white.
This is because, Ignatiev argues, whiteness is entirely a political construct. Indeed, in Britain we've seen this recently with an increase in anti-Polish and anti-Eastern European rhetoric, as in order to gain power UKIP revoked the Polish and broader Eastern Europeans of their 'white' status. They also revoked the Turkish of their 'white' status, but that was already under fire as far back as 2001 when the War on Terror made Islamophobia 'okay' for the West, again in the name of neocolonial violence chiefly by Britain and America. For those of us old enough to remember the War on Terror and the War on Iraq, the Islamophobia of the 21st century bears striking similarity to the anti-Catholic panics that had occurred in Britain and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are indeed legitimate critiques of both Catholicism and Islam, as there are for every organised religion on the planet, but the bigots of the past three centuries never take the time to understand the nuance to make these critiques, and even if they stumble on them by accident, the critiques are not being made in 'good faith' (no pun intended). (Quick reminder that as this YouTube channel points out, fascists never engage in good faith debate, so don't bother). Legitimate critiques, however, never lead to genocide, as genocide, like missiles fired from drones and all other war crimes, are devoid of nuance, patience, basic human decency, and compassion.
Race is a social construct, and in its present form exists to divide the proletariat against itself to prevent class consciousness. It is better for the bourgeois class to believe that the poor migrant who has just arrived in Britain, likely fleeing their homeland because of some crime against humanity committed in their homeland by Britain, America, or one of our 'allies', is a greater threat to our 'way of life' as nebulous a phrase that is, than Richard Branson who looted our national rail system and is now looting our NHS, or Rupert Murdoch who has manipulated the British press through monopolisation into pushing far-right narratives as 'reasonable counterpoints to be considered'. It is better for the landlord class that people get angry at the homeless in the streets for making things look poorly than people realise that landlords are the reason for the homeless in the first place, as well as their own diminished purchasing power as rent and mortgage increase.
Most nefarious, it is easier to get people to vote against welfare systems and social programmes that have benefited them if they can convince them some 'evil foreigner' is also benefiting from the programme.
I guess now I'm going to have to review two more books to complete this trilogy, 'Tax Haven Ireland' as mentioned above and 'Welfare Queen' in order to really explore how Reagan's racism really hurt all Americans.
Give Ignatiev a read, this book is an excellent introduction, through the Irish Americans, of interrogating what 'whiteness' is, why there is no 'white' identity, and why 'whiteness' itself is a construct by the powerful to use as a prize for new immigration communities to conform with what the powerful want.
[Additional note: The author is Catholic, albeit a lapsed one who critiques the church constantly but does believe in God and all that, but is navigating the implications of such a belief].
Join the conversation