Ignatiev's Book Probes Race Wound

"The reader will note that I have written a book about racial oppression without using the term 'racism,'" concludes Harvard Lecturer Noel Ignatiev in his new book How the Irish Became White. Contrary to the implication, this feat of catapulting over the single most divisive 'ism' in the English language required no linguistic acrobatics, only a careful scrutiny of the historical record. As theorists have long since suggested, the elevation of whiteness above blackness in America's northern cities originated in economic greed, developed into wage competition, and then sustained itself with bogus 'race' theories only after black degradation was already a fait accompli.

Ignatiev's heavily researched study goes beyond historicizing concepts of whiteness to locate their crystalization in the unique experience of Irish immigration. No other European ethnicity began so penniless, oppressed and spurned as the Irish Catholics did when they first arrived, or worked and languished in worse conditions. Irish considered themselves the blacks of Europe and black freedmen viewed themselves, according to some literature of the day, comfortably superior in position to that of the Irishman. Somewhere in the crucible of New England urban labor competition, the Irish forged a new white identity for themselves to ensure their place next to native born whites.

As his provocative title suggests, Ignatiev's project is explaining the process of this transformation along with the concomitant results for black as well as white America prior to the Civil War. In an effort to synthesize ethnic studies with Afro-American studies and labor history, he has also taken on the formidable task of examining the political, social and intellectual history which confirmed discrimination along color lines after blacks had begun to form a middle class. It's not enough that scholarship from the likes of Peter Wood and Kenneth Stampp established that slavery itself was market driven; Ignatiev also wants to explain how nominally free states failed to assimilate blacks in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and to do that, he insists, one must understand the role and impact of Irish Catholics.

Ireland's Catholics had long identified with and supported America's abolitionist movements with a fervor they encouraged amongst their American kin. Religious persecution under the notorious British Penal Laws had driven Irish Catholics to New England by the thousands. As virtual slave laborers, the Irish ended up in black communities. They worked the same jobs, lived in the same neighborhoods, and engendered from the close, often intimate proximity, the first recorded incidence of 'mulattoes' as a census grouping in states like Pennsylvania.

Then economic reality set in, accompanied by a strong whiff of prejudice pervading the American atmosphere. Mobs of predominantly Irish laborers charged that blacks were perpetual strike breakers who threatened to snatch up semi-skilled and skilled positions. In order to ensure themselves employment as artisans and craftsmen, the Irish organized boycotts of any firm that hired or trained blacks, thereby effectively excluding them from the trade sector and relegating them, ever downward, to more menial jobs. What prosperity New England blacks achieved between 1790 and 1830 was lost to Irish hostility, and the trend towards assimilation reversed.

Where once color distinctions had been so insignificant as to go unrecorded in, among other things, prison and labor rosters, segragation appeared, and where once uneasy competition for labor contracts had maintained a degree of tranquility, anti-black riots and violence erupted in major New England cities.

As Irish gained social and economic prominence, they also sought to codify their supremacy over blacks politically. They led campaigns to further disenfranchise black communities that had virtually no right to vote anyway, and they turned away from their abolitionist roots during the Jacksonian era to support the pro-slavery Democratic party. Irish had learned to treat their whiteness as a lever and blackness as a fulcrum, to pry themselves upwards into social and political prominence.

If there is anything impeachable about Ignatiev's argument, it's that his evidence could support an even stronger conclusion. According to his own scholarship, the Irish did more than simply become white; they adopted an already oppressive caste structure and polarized it along color lines, so that they became even whiter than native northern whites had ever been. There are also structural problems early in the book, such as a preponderance of evidence which obscures the broader arguments. Awkward syntax and glaring grammatical errors like transitive verbs left dangling without objects appear in the early chapters but vanish by the end.

In all, Ignatiev's still highly readable study is the new scholarly petard that hoists any lingering myths of white tolerance in antebellum New England. Equally exciting are Ignatiev's observations on 'race' penned as his Afterword viable for another book altogether. 'Race', he notes, not only holds no scientific or biological validity, but continuously devalues itself as a meaningful expression by amalgamating everything from supremacist theory to personal preference. Europe's ethnic divisions, which might have diverted attention from color conflicts, instead disolved into America's melting pot, and left us with the great divide.