{"id":52824,"date":"2017-03-24T01:22:35","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T01:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52824"},"modified":"2017-03-25T00:29:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T00:29:15","slug":"sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-italians-jews-and-so-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52824","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, but the Irish were always \u2018white\u2019 (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sorry, but the Irish were always \u2018white\u2019 (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2017-03-22<\/p>\n

David Bernstein<\/strong><\/a>, George Mason University Foundation Professor
\nGeorge Mason University School of Law, Arlington, Virginia<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nImmigrants after their arrival in Ellis Island<\/a> by ship in 1902. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u201cWhiteness studies<\/a>\u201d is all the rage these days. My friends who teach U.S. history have told me that this perspective<\/a> has \u201ccompletely taken over\u201d studies of American ethnic history. I can\u2019t vouch for that, but I do know that I constantly see people assert, as a matter of \u201cfact,\u201d that Irish, Italian, Jewish and other \u201cethnic\u201d white American were not considered to be \u201cwhite\u201d until sometime in the mid-to-late 20th\u00a0century, vouching for the fact that this understanding of American history has spread widely.<\/p>\n

The relevant scholarly literature seems to have started with Noel Ignatiev\u2019s<\/a> book \u201cHow the Irish Became White<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cwhiteness,\u201d which means either \u201cfully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock,\u201d or, in the more politicized version, \u201can accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhiteness studies\u201d is all the rage these days. My friends who teach U.S. history have told me that this perspective has \u201ccompletely taken over\u201d studies of American ethnic history. I can\u2019t vouch for that, but I do know that I constantly see people assert, as a matter of \u201cfact,\u201d that Irish, Italian, Jewish and other \u201cethnic\u201d white American were not considered to be \u201cwhite\u201d until sometime in the mid-to-late 20th\u00a0century, vouching for the fact that this understanding of American history has spread widely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,20],"tags":[26655,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-52824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-david-bernstein","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52824"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52859,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52824\/revisions\/52859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}