Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2017-03-24 01:22Z by Steven |
Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
The Washington Post
2017-03-22
David Bernstein, George Mason University Foundation Professor
George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, Virginia
 Immigrants after their arrival in Ellis Island by ship in 1902. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images) |
“Whiteness studies” is all the rage these days. My friends who teach U.S. history have told me that this perspective has “completely taken over” studies of American ethnic history. I can’t vouch for that, but I do know that I constantly see people assert, as a matter of “fact,” that Irish, Italian, Jewish and other “ethnic” white American were not considered to be “white” until sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century, vouching for the fact that this understanding of American history has spread widely.
The relevant scholarly literature seems to have started with Noel Ignatiev’s book “How the Irish Became White,” and taken off from there. But what the relevant authors mean by white is ahistorical. They are referring to a stylized, sociological or anthropological understanding of “whiteness,” which means either “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock,” or, in the more politicized version, “an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States.”
Those may be interesting sociological and anthropological angles to pursue, but it has nothing to do with whether the relevant groups were considered to be white…
Read the entire article here.