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How the Irish became white
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ISBN: 0415918251 0415913845 Year: 1995 Publisher: New York Routledge

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'How The Irish Became White' tells the story of how the Irish immigrant went from racially Oppressed to racial Oppressor, an American Story most of us haven't wanted to hear before. Utilizing newspaper chronicles, memoirs, biographies, and official accounts, Noel Ignatiev traces the tattered history of Irish and African-American relations, revealing how the Irish in America used unions, the Catholic Church and the Democratic party to help gain and secure their newly found place in the White Republic. 'How The Irish Became White' opens with the reactions of Irish America to the 1841 appeal made to them by Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator," to join with anti-slavery forces in the new country. It then reviews the status of Catholics in Ireland and some of their ambiguous contacts with American race patterns after emigration. Ignatiev carefully explores and challenges the Irish tradition of labor protest and the Irish role in the wave of anti-Negro violencethat swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, 'How The Irish Became White' provides a provocative recounting of the roles of northeastern urban politicians in the Irish triumph over nativism, which allowed for their entry into the "white race." This is the first book to focus not on how the Irish were assimilated but how they were assimilated as "whites." Ignatiev seeks out the roots of the well-known tension between Irish and African-Americans, and draws the connection between the embracing of white supremacy by the Irish and their "success" in America. 'How The Irish Became White' convincingly explodes a number of the most powerful myths surrounding race in our society. This bold and necessary intervention should be required reading for anyone interested in the history, theory and politics of racial identity and race relations in the United States.


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Who's Your Paddy? : Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity
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ISBN: 0814744133 9780814744130 0814785034 9780814785034 9780814785027 9780814785034 0814785026 Year: 2013 Publisher: New York, NY : New York University Press,

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After all the green beer has been poured and the ubiquitous shamrocks fade away, what does it mean to be Irish American besides St. Patrick’s Day? Who’s Your Paddy traces the evolution of “Irish” as a race-based identity in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present day. Exploring how the Irish have been and continue to be socialized around race, Jennifer Nugent Duffy argues that Irish identity must be understood within the context of generational tensions between different waves of Irish immigrants as well as the Irish community’s interaction with other racial minorities.Using historic and ethnographic research, Duffy sifts through the many racial, class, and gendered dimensions of Irish-American identity by examining three distinct Irish cohorts in Greater New York: assimilated descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants; “white flighters” who immigrated to postwar America and fled places like the Bronx for white suburbs like Yonkers in the 1960s and 1970s; and the newer, largely undocumented migrants who began to arrive in the 1990s. What results is a portrait of Irishness as a dynamic, complex force in the history of American racial consciousness, pertinent not only to contemporary immigration debates but also to the larger questions of what it means to belong, what it means to be American.

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