Reddit reviews How the Irish Became White

Relevant: http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1048-the-invention-of-the-white-race

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white11.htm

Everyone repeat after me: Race is socially constructed. "White" as a racial identity was manufactured by the ruling classes following Bacon's rebellion in the late 1600's in order to divide lower class whites/blacks, the former who were eventually freed of indentured servitude, the later who went from being indentured servants to chattel slaves.

Wait, they're not white, they're Irish!

Dagfari has just finished reading "How the Irish became White"

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

I was going to ask a pretty similar question re: just how well these ideas apply to an African context. (Basically I think they're lacking in nuance).

On the Irish front, I suspect that /u/jazzarchist will bring up the idea that the Irish weren't always considered "white"

You should read this book called How the Irish Became White

May I suggest Jared Diamon's "Guns, Germs and Steel" to you? Good book that in very clear, detailed and well-sourced way address how Sociohistorical factors explain differences between groups/cultures in their development and why the genetic explanation is wrong in many levels.

Just briefly, and only as it pertains to modern U.S. history, the very same concerns you bring up are the ones that have been brought up about basically every immigrant group to the U.S. since its inception and people who today consider themselves "white" were once upon a time not considered so, and they were feared and seen as an existential threat to the nation. Ben Franklin fretted about the "swarthy" Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes and Germans. The Irish were considered subhuman and decidedly not "white' by their English overlords and the stigma continued in America for at [least three generations] (https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251). Don't have to tell you about the negative views about Jews but many did not make it to America as the holocaust unfolded because of restrictive quotas and fears of "miscegenation" with all sort of eastern Europeans coming to America. Hell, the "Polish" joke is not about how intelligent they are, is it? The Chinese were literally excluded from the country because their supposed inferiority was a "yellow peril." The Japanese were considered so alien that we rounded 12,000 into internment camps during world war II. And yet, all of these groups through time and assimilation became "white" or a model minority.

The supporters of genetic differences in IQ measures, including the creators of such measures, would go though some interesting intellectual acrobatics to explain how these Southern Europeans who had scored so low on their tests, after only 10 years had caught up to the average of the "native" Anglo-Saxon(another made up term after deciding Germans counted as white in America). They went through even more acrobatics when trying to explain why these Italian, Polish, Jewish, Spanish, Greek, kids whose parents' inferior genes would create hordes of inferior Americans, did not differ once they had access to same education as those of the dominant culture of time. Might there be lessons for our present in how we consider managing our current immigration anxiety?

Finally, there is a real danger in equating scores on IQ measures with intelligence. We owe much of what we know of science and math to civilizations and empires that are not "white" in the Anglo-saxon sense in the least. The Maya had a concept of the number zero 1700 years before Europeans, and they had to receive it from Arabian scholars. There are many reasons for the differences you ask about, but inherent genetic factors linked to intelligence do not appear to be it. Still don't believe me? The measured IQ of American born Mexican-Americans has been steadily increasing in the past 30 years, and at a much faster rate than that of "white" Americans which will put it at parity probably in 5-8 more. Has some mutation made just Mexican Americans be on track to be our intellectual overlords? Is Tex-Mex the ultimate brain food? Or might the same phenomenon of assimilation that happened to the Germans et al be at play? I'll let this lengthy column from American Conservative fill you in on the Flynn effect for further contextualization.

Best wishes,
A part "white"(Swarthy Southern and Northern), Part Asian, Part Native brown guy.

EDIT: Added a line for clarity.

"Black" has a specific ethnic and socio-cultural meaning. White does not except insofar as it means "not black" or, more specifically, "not other" where other has sometimes meant people once not thought of as white, e.g. Irish (see How the Irish Became White).

Technically, the accomplishments of, say, the Irish cannot be considered "white" accomplishments until well into the 20th century. Similarly, Jewish (although the Jewish ethnic identity is a whole nother kettle of fish) accomplishments could not be considered "white" accomplishments until even later.

It is fine to be proud of who you are as a person, but due to their history and continued oppression, black people have a special interest in holding some pride in their identity, and, mostly due to Racism (with a capital R, i.e. structural racism) that identity coincides with the color of my skin. 99.9% of the time I don't think of myself as white because I don't even have to think about it. If I buy something that is "flesh colored" it is going to match my skin. If I am not hired for a position I can be sure my skin color had little to do with the decision. If I am stopped by the cops (which is statistically less likely to happen) they will treat me with less suspicion, consciously or unconsciously.

Being white affords me a considerable amount of privilege but does not, in my opinion, confer any kind of cultural identity.

I just have to mention that the Irish weren't really traded as slaves. That's become a weird meme amongst white nationalists in the states. There's an amazing academic on twitter who's doing his PhD on slavery who works very hard to disprove the "Irish slavery" myth. Definitely worth a read, it's interesting stuff.

Regarding the question of how we climbed up the racial/social ladder in the US, the book "How the Irish Became White" covers it well. Long story short, we cuntishly threw black people collectively under the bus to distance ourselves from them, and worked hard to be more WASPy than the WASPs themselves (see: Lace Curtain Irish).

It's not a nice history.

Regarding race relations in Ireland now, they're not bad. Definitely better than most of Europe. To be honest, having an Irish accent is better than a passport, regardless of skin colour. If someone grew up here, they're unquestionably Irish.

Related: How the Irish Became White

A seriously good read if you're interested in this sort of stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

Quite a good book. I highly recommend it.

Um... this

The American underclass has always been defined by lack of wealth. Race was just an excuse to maintain an underclass. The difference now is that we're all being primed to join the underclass. We are the 99%.

>Slaves didn't have to worry about starving constantly which doesn't make a lot of sense in reality, but instead were subject to brutality...They chose to go to a strange country ... They had no political presence but could VOTE (1850 Property ownership and tax requirements eliminated by 1850. Almost all adult white males could vote ) before Native Americans

FTFY

You clearly aren't familiar with the black codes of the South. Not to mention those events in Irish-American history is a mere dustup. You don't have the entire South identifying itself with locking up Irish and abusing the Irish. You also don't have the Northeast trying to secede to preserve their "peculiar" institution of subjugating the Irish.

Here is the rub, the Irish eventually became WHITE, thereby shedding all of the negative status connotations held by their forefathers. Assimilation works best when you look like the dominant group.

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

we are now apparently http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

If you haven't read them, you may also be interested in some of this author's previous work... specifically, The Wages of Whiteness and Working Toward Whiteness.

Also, Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White.

PS The promotional flyer for the new book includes a code for 20% off preorders from the Oxford University Press website.

Maybe you just don't notice it. There are also a lot more Irish-Americans here. People identify strongly with it because it used to be something that was discriminated against. Many people still eat food from 'the old country' and follow cultural traditions, even if they don't recognize them as such. I am from California and got a bit of culture shock going to Boston as there is a 'UK' food aisle in the grocery store, and many pubs that play Irish music and serve Irish breakfast, which are well populated with non-tourists who've probably never been to Ireland in their life, yet think people playing fiddles in bars is 'normal'.

People aren't forced to assimilate in America. Go to the midwest and watch people eat perogi and lutefisk (EW) and go to polka dances without shame. Where do you think the Minnesotan accent came from? German was the second most widely spoken language in the United States and you could go to school in German until WWI and II, when people felt they had to cover up their German heritage.

I get a bug up my ass about it because I honestly prefer it when white people in this country recognize that they too have something 'different' about them, rather than thinking of themselves as 'normal' and 'American' and thinking of us brown and black people as upsetting the order of things by not conforming, whether by having a different cuisine or religion or cultural tradition. The bringing together of all these things is what makes America, not their obliteration.

Edit: I know you're probably like 'why won't this woman shut up' but here is a really fascinating book on Irish American culture and their acceptance into American society/white privilege.
http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251

Haha really? I've got Irish heritage and a rather Irish name and have been interested in the Irish as Non-White thing for a while and read this, which was pretty interesting.

Apart from coming across a few people from time to time who dislike the Irish, I've rarely heard people discuss it in terms of whiteness. I find that quite interesting. I assume this has to do also with Anti-catholic sentiment among evangelicals?

here

>Irish, Italian, or Jewish

All of whom went through an extended period of not being considered white.

How is that not what they're talking about? Race is a social construct, and for a long time, the Irish and Italians (among others) weren't considered white enough.

Catholics have only been white since the 60s.
Read this.
http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0415918251