Customer Reviews

How the Irish Became White

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Wow. When the best argument your reviewers can come up with for disliking your book are "[the author] is a Jew" and "blacks weren't discriminated against [even at the time covered in the book, during which black people could legally be bought and sold in the South, disenfranchised and barred from most jobs in the North; apparently being legally defined as property doesn't qualify as discrimination], the Irish just worked harder," you know you've struck a nerve.

As a Canadian of Scots-Irish ancestry, I found this book fascinating. The history of the Irish in Canada is a bit different from the history of the American Irish; overall I'd say it's less painful. This book shed a lot of light on issues that I didn't expect it to touch, like black-white relations, abolitionism, and the contrast between the antebellum North and South (now I understand a little better why Southerners say they have been unfairly demonized; the Philadelphia and Boston described in the book were hardly freemen's paradise).

When the author says he wants to get rid of the "white race," he doesn't mean that he wants to get rid of white PEOPLE; he means that he wants to get rid of the category, "white," which is neither traditional nor especially meaningful. (I note that the reviewer below refers to the pale-skinned author of the book as "a Jew" rather than as "white" - demonstrating the author's point about race quite handily. "White" clearly refers to something beyond skin colour.) What the author is trying to point out is that blacks were enslaved before the theory of white supremacy came about; people with white skin (in this case the Irish) were not necessarily treated or regarded as "white" automatically; white isn't just a colour, it's a social position that the Irish had to struggle very hard to get, and which was more or less defined by separation from the people who could NOT get that position no matter how hard they tried, i.e. blacks.

I do not see this book as an attempt to smear or blame the Irish. It's not really about the Irish so much as it's a study of American immigration and assimilation to racial ideals, using the Irish as an example. Others could tell and have told similar stories about the Italians, the Jews, etc. In an atmosphere of scarcity, disorder, and brutal competition, people do what they need to do to get by. When there is an upper class and an underclass, people will do their damnedest to get into the upper class, or at least not to fall in with the underclass - this is a matter of survival as well as pride. It's sad to read about disadvantaged people fighting over scraps; it would be nicer to read that blacks and poor immigrants had banded together to fight for freedom, more rights, better pay and working conditions, etc. - but if this is not what happened, it's not Noel Ignatiev's fault, is it?

I would have liked to see a few more chapters - the book ends rather abruptly around the time of Reconstruction, and clearly the assimilation of the Irish into "white" society was not finished at that point. I also think a few of the earlier chapters are a bit unfocussed, but I may just need to re-read.

This is a hard book to read, not because of any overdose of erudition or inaccessibility of the text, but due to the emotional reaction it can evoke from the reader. (This is easily demonstrated by a look at the other reviews.) If one has Irish ancestry, it's hard not to take personally. However, a historical retrospective of the social perceptions of Irish-Americans over the last 150 years is well worth reading. The shift in Irish-American image over time is fascinating; it's pleasing to see a group pull themselves out of disfavor and disturbing to see it happen at the expense of others in similar disfavor. Ignatiev illustrates the context of this perception shift well, with illustrative examples from events and news sources of the time. The book is moderately well documented, allowing the reader to search out further references at will. While there are a few points where the author oversimplifies for length and cohesiveness of narrative, overall it's an interesting read, and a reasonable treatment of a painful and complicated issue.

This was a difficult book for me. The author says much the same thing in the Introduction; yet, as an American whose grandparents came from Ireland in the 60s to escape crushing poverty, it had a personal sting.

Nobody likes to hear criticism of his own race or people, which is why we all, whether Irish, black, Jewish, Italian, etc., react strongly to critiques of our peoples, and try to point out the minute flaws in critics' reasoning, or justify these flaws in light of oppression suffered. I certainly don't believe Ignatiev to be an anti-Irish bigot, especially as such bigotry now rarely exists outside the UK.

Yet we Irish-Americans need to face up to the facts. We, like any other group, are far from perfect, and, sad as it is to say, many of our blood perpetuated the crimes against us by becoming cruel toward other peoples whom we could, unconsciously or not, trample to step higher. It is understandable that Irishmen would do so, in light of the circumstances, but that does not make it excusable. Ignatiev presents a solid case, showing how this process worked historically.

[One sentence in the conclusion struck me in particular. The author notes that in his research, he realised that "nobody gave a damn for the Irish," observing that even slaves had abolitionists and religious groups caring for them. Though I, like most of Irish decent, do not care much for self-pity, it has irked me somewhat that almost nothing is taught of the plight of Irishmen in Ireland and abroad; perhaps a sentence or two on the "famine"--which was, of course, closer to a genocide than a famine--and that's that. This simple, one sentence acknowledgment of the way America and especially England have swept under the rug (unnoticed) their crimes against Ireland, certainly helped alleviate that feeling. We hear incessantly about the crimes of other civilisations--the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians--and rightly so, but scarcely a word about those of ever-fortunate England.]

There is, nonetheless, something in this work that makes me feel it is incomplete, perhaps even that it is a rough draft. As another reviewer noted, it stops around Reconstruction, which seems hardly an appropriate starting point. I also wish the author had carried these points about Irish development of bigotry to other groups, even other disadvantaged groups like Jews and--dare I say?--blacks. This would certainly help undercut those, especially my understandably-offended fellow Irish-Americans, who argue some sort of bias on the author's part.

Of course, such a connection would be as politically incorrect as they come, but I suspect it would ultimately do a lot of good, and if anybody has the guts to do it, Ignatiev is the man. One must first find the particular problems and seek to understand their causes before they can be healed: if we wish to abolish racism in all its forms, EVERY group, including the Irish, needs to take a long look at its history and mistakes.

I read this book with great anticipation. I am a student of Irish American history and this book stood out as one that had great potential, but never really got off the ground. Ignatiev, in my opinion, never got to his point. The book rambled on about fire fighters and Philadelphia but never equated how this made the Irish "white." It really more argued about how Irish and Blacks lived together for a long time and then all of a sudden the Irish started to hate Blacks--but never went into any detail about why or how; instead it talked about Irish labor strikes--against other whites--and the political career of an opportunistic Irish politician/fireman. The book also glazed over the St Patrick's Brigade in Mexico and never mentioned anything about the role the Irish played in the Civil War, national elections, or the draft riots. This study is not "path breaking" as the back cover says but is instead incomplete at best. Shannon's "The American Irish" is a more complete and better told story.

Unlike the other reviewer who apparently missed the entire point of the book, I found this book powerful and enlightening. The opening pages of the book delineate the plight of the Irish in their homeland and uses this as a basis for their evolution as citizens in the US. What is more, they are not the only ones who go through this evolutionary process of "becoming white", the Poles, Italians, Jews and others after them would have their own journey to assimilation into US culture as well. As this book clearly describes, immigrants had the possibility to become white, African Americans did not. Further, the Irish had to choose: conform to the native-born culture or be forever shut out of opportunity just like the Blacks. It is an illuminating look at our society and one which truly does help us understand today. I read this book as part of a 13-book cirriculum for a graduate history seminar whose topic was the history of Racism in the US after 1870. It was one of the best-written texts and provided an excellent foundation for cultural studies. I highly reccomend it to anyone who seeks a better understanding of social history and today's US culture. Rather than placing blame, the author provides the facts and understanding of what happened, good and bad, so that we see the complexity and ultimately, the uselessness of blame. It is only with this understanding that we can start to make changes.

I don't understand some of the negative critiques listed by other readers (or who I presume read the book, it's hard to tell). I recently read the book and heard a speech by Mr. Ignatiev and the label of "racist" doesn't apply. Pointing out how 'whiteness' became a major part of the Irish-American identity and a method of securing a better place for themselves in America vis-à-vis free Blacks and slaves, he introduces a very useful analytical tool for looking at labor, politics, and immigration in the U.S. The hardships of the Irish aren't glossed over and neither are the consequences of their support of slavery and race-based politics - a choice that many other groups have seemingly made in coming to the United States.

Most importantly, this book helps us to see how much we take for granted the social construction of ‘whiteness.’ The reviewer who commented that the Irish were already white might not have paid close attention to the history of Catholic Irish in Ireland (especially Ulster). They were treated as a distinct race and this oppression is depicted concisely, but effectively, in "How the Irish Became White."

Overall, it is a well-written history book that promotes serious thinking.

Noel Ignatiev. How the Irish Became White

Ignatievs stated purpose, in the broadest sense, in writing this work, was an attempt to examine immigrant assimilation and the evolution of an American working class. On a narrower level he sought to divine why the Irish Catholics, an oppressed race in their own land, became part of an oppressor race in the United States. His thesis is that the Irish immigrant made a conscious decision to adopt Anglo-Saxon racism in order to gain a foot up in a competitive society -- to the disadvantage of Afro-Americans and the frustration of the formation of a united working class in America. He failed in his attempt on both accounts.
Eric Foner is a Marxist historian. Ignatiev is a wannabe. Foner marshals his evidence, ignores the irrelevant, and analyses the meaningful from a leftist prospective. Ignatiev amasses a great deal of stuff, is unable to cull the meaningless and, without any sense of organization, tries to cram the results into his fevered preconceptions of racial relations in the nineteenth century. The result would be comical if in doing so he had not slandered an oppressed people striving to enter the American working class against all odds. 
Ignatiev created a racial construct -- the Irish  that fails to account for the substantial differences and interests between the Irish in America and those in Ireland, between Irish-Americans and native-born Irish, and between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. Much of Ignatievs evidence relates to events prior to the Great Famine and the mass migration of destitute Irish Catholics to America. The net effect of this conglomeration is to obscure and to trivialize the struggle of Irish Catholics to climb out of the depths of poverty while burdening them with the racial and religious bigotry of their former oppressors. He criticizes the Irish for not taking up the abolitionist cause and labels them as racists for their failure to do so. Ignatiev seems unaware that a substantial number of abolitionists were white supremacists who believed that the superior Anglo-Saxon race abased itself by enslaving the inferior black race. It never occurred to Ignatiev that the apparent indifference of the Irish immigrants to slavery was not motivated by racism but that these people, engaged in a hand to mouth struggle for survival, were trying to avoid the stigma of No Irish Need Apply. 
Ignatievs publisher makes the claim that the author reveals how the Irish used labor unions, the Catholic Church and the Democratic party to help gain and secure their newly found place in the White Republic. This assertion raises the question of whether or not the publisher ever read this work for there is not one reference to the Catholic Church and its myriad institutions of charity and education which the Irish Catholics both established and exploited in order to raise themselves from poverty to membership in the working class and beyond. 
It is said that the empty drum resonates the loudest. Ignatiev at every opportunity, in this work and elsewhere, proclaims his abhorrence for racism. Racism, that is, as demonstrated by others. Indeed he is so busy berating others he fails to note the mote in his own eye. Witness Ignatievs stereotyping of the Irish. Huck-Finn must have been Irish because his father was the town drunk. [p. 58.] Witness Ignatievs belittling of the contribution of Irish born volunteers fighting for the Union in the Civil War.  The number of Irish who took part in the [New York draft] riots was not less than the number who wore the blue uniform. [p. 88.] According to official records more than one hundred thousand native born Irish fought for the North in that war, thousands of whom died in combat. According to Iver Bernstein in The New York City Draft Riots, a source favorably cited by Ignatiev, there was far fewer people engaged in those riots, Irish immigrants, German immigrants and native-born Americans combined. 
In summation the book fails both as a work of history and social commentary. It adds nothing, save confusion, to what Theodore W. Allen had already written in 1994, about Irish Catholic immigrants in the final two chapters of his work The Invention of the White Race.

History is best written if it retells the story of the past to explain how we all got to where we are now. Noel Ignatiev's, "How the Irish Became White", is one of those books where the present is illuminated by the past. He attempts to explain how Irish Americans embraced the privileges of their "whiteness" in the United States over against the plight of their African-American urban neighbors and against the cause of the abolitionists, in order to cast off the scorn of their oppressed existence in Ireland and as despised emigrants in the New Republic. Ignatiev draws from a host of primary resources from writings of key Irish-American political leaders, labor leaders, journalists, and even religious leaders to press his point. Stringing together letters, literature, lithographs, and lyrics with this theme, Ignatiev does seem to get somewhat jumbled with the abundance of resources packed into his book. However, his work makes this book indispensable as a researcher's platform for further historical analysis on the subject. Of notable importance is Ignatiev's extensive analysis on race and labor relations in the Philadelphia area in this book. Ignatiev's book is best read as a historian's attempt to fill in where other historians have been silent: how Irish-Americans ignored or participated in the oppression of people of color in the United States to their own advantage. As an American with an Irish heritage living in Philadelphia, I would highly recommend this book to supplement other more mainstream histories of our difficult past.

One thing that infallibly determines the quality of a book is the idiocy of those inclined to negatively review its content. This book proves that rule with particular emphasis, as can be seen right here. Noel Ignatiev's book "How the Irish Became White" uses the methods of the new historians of labor in America, who acknowledge as must be done that race segmented class and became part of it, and that the unity of the working class in struggle against capital in America is a historical lie. To the best extent possible given the often scant material, he applies this methodology to the case of the Irish, in particular in Philadelphia.

As Ignatiev shows, race is a social construct, and it was therefore at the time by no means 'obvious' that the Irish were white, as would be the case now according to these classifications. On the contrary, the Irish were especially from the time of the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1855) on desperately poor laborers, which at the time meant they were not likely to be seen as white. So the Irish had to become white, through struggle of their own. This was only possible by participating in the oppression of the class automatically put on the lowest rank of the urban ladder, the black workers. Whether slave or freeman, the Irish hated, despised, and persecuted them, and in the cauldron of this racial antagonism, the Irish working class was bleached white in the eyes of the ruling class.

The usual arguments about the relations of race and class in America are shown to be fallacious. Black workers were not strikebreakers per se, but had to become strikebreakers because they were systematically excluded by the Irish unions. Whenever the black population organized itself and formed its independent spheres of power, the Irish attempted to destroy these. The Irish vigorously supported slavery and the Southern cause, only going so far as to reject secession, which would leave them on their own facing Northern capital. When the Civil War increasingly turned toward the cause of abolition, the Irish of New York City revolted in one of the 19th Century's greatest riots. No black worker was even permitted to work alongside an Irish one by the latter, or they would strike on the spot or leave their job.

This is not because the Irish were or are inclined to evil or prejudice more than anyone else. It is precisely because the Irish were the most despised of all 'free' labor, and yet were exalted above the blacks. As Ignatiev showed, in late 18th Century Ireland itself, even very poor Protestant Irish considered themselves racially superior to the Catholic Irish. Their feelings of superiority were precisely all they had, and the British did all they could to encourage it, since division within a class greatly eased their occupation. The same phenomenon prevailed in America, only there unity was actually impossible, since the blacks had been brought to America involuntarily whereas all others were voluntary settlers. This incompatibility of viewpoint made the citizenship status of blacks dubious from the very start of the existence of the American Colonies, and as a result, the blacks were not opportunistically, but permanently consigned to the lowest rank within American labor (with Native Americans for the most part excluded from these ranks altogether). For any settler to prove himself 'white', it then became necessary to partake in and support this system.

Not so therefore the popular social-democratic myth that capital managed to conspire to divide the workers, or confused them to their 'true' interests. Although they would have been better off united, the very foundations of the American state were laid on the basis of this racial division. As long as America was and remains founded upon it, original African-American workers as a racial class could and can never advance beyond the lowest rung of the ladder, nor could and can Hispanics or the original Asian immigrants. Conversely, no settler or his descendant could or can fall to that level unless they are willing to reject the mess of pottage called 'whiteness' for which they have exchanged their birthright of equality and solidarity among the working class. As Ignatiev shows, in the 19th Century, the number of such workers was very few indeed. Are there more now? Then let them show themselves.

Ignatiev tells the tangled, tattered history of Irish-black relations in America in the 30 years or so leading up to the Civil War. It shows how the Irish used labor unions and the Democratic Party to elevate themselves in the stratified American republic. At first, the white protestant majority in America made little distinction between Irish immigrants and free blacks -- it scorned them both. But by emphasizing racism, leaders of the Irish-American community were able to swing themselves over to the side of the dominant class, to the horror of their brethren in Ireland, who identified the slaves' struggles for emancipation with their own battles against English rule.