So is the story of the Irish immigrants who built much of the Union Pacific. Who, interestingly, were not considered white (at the time).posted by craichead at 5:45 PM on August 6, 2011 [15 favorites]
It's interesting, but it's not true. There was a flurry of scholarship in the early '90s about how the Irish weren't white, because there's a lot of evidence that the Irish were discussed in ways that depicted them as racially inferior. But then someone realized that white was a legal category. It's all over things like census documents and naturalization records. (And it was vital for naturalization records, because until 1870 only white people could become naturalized US citizens. After 1870, only white people and people of African descent could. Asian people were formally "aliens ineligible for citizenship," a situation that didn't change until after World War II. It really mattered that Irish people were classified as white and Chinese people weren't.) I've looked at an awful lot of census records for nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, and they're always described as white.
I feel like so much of American history is told from the perspective of the east coast that it would have been much more interesting and novel to deal with the west-moving-east side of things, rather than the same old westward expansion narrative. And part of what makes that interesting is that the immigration and labor stories are different. But I'm not sure that I'm naive enough to think that a series with a predominately-Asian cast would get greenlit. I don't know if I think people would have watched it if it did. But I think in general Hollywood is probably more timid than audiences are.
So the "Irish weren't considered white" thing was scholars looking at the types of discrimination the Irish suffered and the derogatory language directed at them and coming to the conclusion that they couldn't, therefore, have been considered white because white people couldn't be treated that way?It's not quite that bad. They looked at a certain kind of source: basically things like literature and newspapers and cartoons. In those sources, there's a lot of stuff that describes the Irish as possessing a lot of innate, inherited characteristics that make them inferior to other white Americans. They describe Irishness as a race. (That, it turns out, has to do with the way that "race" was used in the 19th century, which is more akin to what we'd call ethnicity.) Some of those sources explicitly say that Irish people are like black people. So the Irish weren't white! They just didn't focus on the kind of sources that showed that the Irish were white, because they were cultural historians and didn't look at boring legal and government documents.
Maybe this has to do with the difference between the legal category of "white" and the social category of "white"?It has to do with a conflation of the idea of being racialized with the idea of being non-white: the Irish were racialized, but that doesn't mean they weren't white. It also reflects some ignorance about the power that the legal category "white" had in 19th century America. Modern Americans think of race as fundamentally a social category, and that wasn't really how it worked in 19th century America. That's particularly true for immigrants, because the ability to become a US citizen gave immigrant groups, and particularly the Irish, really important opportunities.
Do you go through daily life ready to launch on warning?
Of course, were it up to me I'd have both stories being told and ending with them meeting up, but since I thought of it so it's probably the hack way to do it.
But it seems like in the 19th century in the US, the legal categories fixated on the broad categories, while culturally there were gradations within those legal definitions (thus "white" includes the English/British race, the German race, the Italian race, etc, while Asian included the Chinese race, Japanese race, etc - all of which had different innate racial characteristics if you are a 19th cen thinker).That's exactly right.
But I'm curious about something - How much do you think the stereotyping/disregard of the Irish in the 19th century was ethnic, and how much of it was religious (Protestant Anglos & Scots reacting to their Catholocism)?That's actually a debate among historians. The short answer is that it's hard to separate the two, at least starting in the mid-19th century, when Protestant Irish-Americans decided they were "Scotch-Irish" and thus a completely different kind of person from Irish-Irish people. From then on out, when people said "Irish," they usually meant Irish Catholics. In the mid-19th century, there was some debate about whether the Irish were depraved because they were Catholic or Catholic because they were depraved. By the late 19th century, ideas about heredity were much more in vogue, and elite Americans tended to believe that the Irish were the way they were because of innate characteristics, not because of environmental factors like religion. I don't think there's been a ton of work done on the belief system of non-elite nativists, but my hunch would be that in the late 19th century they were more likely to blame religion and less likely to blame heredity. By around 1900, specifically anti-Irish prejudice was declining a lot, although there was still a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice in large parts of the country.
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posted by likeso at 1:46 PM on August 6, 2011 [23 favorites]