Frequently Asked Questions About Race
https://keithwoods.pub/p/frequently-asked-questions-about
My college professor told me there was a time when Italians and Irish weren’t considered White. This shows how amorphous the term is. Maybe we will eventually include other groups that we don’t think of as White now.
It’s worth noting that many of the narratives people accept on this topic came from the highly ideological field of Whiteness studies. The book that really ignited the “Irish weren’t White” narrative, for example, was Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White. Harvard professor Ignatiev was editor of the journal Race Traitor, whose stated goal was to “abolish the white race.” The Whiteness studies narrative is that “Whiteness” is an oppressive, racist social construct, and up to the 20th Century European ethnic groups like the Italians and Irish weren’t admitted into the fiction of the White race. Only when they learned to hate Black people and adopt the colonial, supremacist ideology of Whiteness did American WASPs allow them entry to the club, and by extension into the ruling, White supremacist caste of the United States.
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. While it is true that ethnic identity was much stronger in America when these groups were first emigrating there, Irish and Italians had no problems being accepted to the US as fellow European stock. The first citizenship law of the United States, passed in 1790, limited naturalisation to “free white persons”, and immigration laws were similarly designed to keep the country White until they were repealed in the 1960s. Neither Irish nor Italians were considered as distinct for laws passed banning racial intermarriage, or for any other kind of official segregation. There was no question of barring Italians and Irish from White-only labour unions. While interracial marriage was highly taboo right up to the mid-20th Century in the United States, there wasn’t a similar taboo against WASPs or Germans marrying Irish or Italian-Americans. This isn’t to say there wasn’t distinction and often enmity between these different European ethnic groups within the US – there was – but there was never a sense that any of these groups were a racial other like Blacks or Asians.