From the pages of

An interview with Noel Ignatiev

by Danny Postel

"In the historical literature on race relations, there is much that safely can be ignored. However, from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called path-breaking, seminal, essential, a must-read. How the Irish Became White is such a study. Noel Ignatiev has produced that rare York of historical scholarship that, while firmly grounded in past events, also speaks forcefully to current concerns."

-- Prof. John Bracey, W.E.B. DuBois Dept. of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Q: What exactly do you mean by your book's title, Race Traitor? How did the Irish become white?

A: In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley tells a story about being with Malcolm at the airport when they saw a plane landing from Europe. The east European children getting off the plane were dressed in their traditional clothing. Malcolm turned to Haley and said, "Pretty little children. Soon they're going to learn their first English word: nigger."

What my book is about is how an earlier group of immigrants, the Catholic Irish--the first non-Protestant, non-Anglo group of European immigrants to arrive, at the beginning of the 19th century, around the period when industrialization was beginning to take place--learned the American racial set-up and found their place in it.

When I say that the Irish "became" white what I hark back to is that in Ireland the Catholics were victims of a kind of discrimination which in many respects was parallel and analogous to what we, in the United States, call racial discrimination-although there's no visible, physical type difference between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Notwithstanding this, if there were any people who were racially oppressed in Ireland it was the Catholics, who then came to the United States and found a new situation in which there was a color line--something they weren't familiar with, something they had no experience with. It was something they had to learn. They had to learn what it meant, how it operated, and how to find their own place in it.

So what I'm really talking about is how the Irish went from being members of an oppressed race in Ireland to being members of an oppressing race in the United States. The period that the book covers begins in the 1790s and closes in 1877, but the real heart of the book is the 1830s and 1840s, when I think the decisive elements fell into place.

Q: In the book you compare the situation of the Irish prior to their emigration to that of black folks in the U.S. during the same period. Just how oppressive was it for the Irish in Ireland?

A: Ireland was governed by the penal codes for most of the 18th century and into the period where my study begins. Catholics were not permitted to vote or serve in Parliament or hold public office of any kind; they weren't allowed to practice law or serve in the military or civil service; they couldn't open or teach at a school, or serve as tutors; they weren't allowed to attend universities or send their children abroad to school; they weren't allowed to manufacture or sell arms, newspapers or books, or possess them; they couldn't own a horse worth more than a few pounds; they were barred from apprenticeships in most of the trades; they were limited in the kind of land they could rent; they had no inheritance rights (a Catholic could convert to Protestantism and disinherit his father, in fact his entire family); priests were not allowed to travel in Ireland; Bishops were banned from the country; and the list goes on.

I suppose it can be captured best by citing an 18th century Anglo-Irish Protestant judge who said that "the law presupposes no such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic"--which is parallel, of course, to Judge Taney's dictum in the Dred Scott case that "a Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." In all important respects, the Irish Catholics were treated as an oppressed race in Ireland. This is the background they were coming from when they arrived on American soil.

Q: You describe in the book how this background provided a context for interaction between the Irish and the blacks they encountered in America. But things changed dramatically from the Irish initially identifying with black Americans and their situation to later violently dis-identifying with them. What was responsible for this shift?

A: During the period I examine in the book, from the 1820s onward, the Catholic Irish who came over here came from the poorer classes. Not necessarily the poorest and most desperate-that emigration didn't really begin until the famine in the mid1840s. But they certainly came from the poorer classes of society, and when they came they were, in the words of Mr. Dooley--the old Chicago columnist Peter Finley Dunn--given a shovel and told to start digging the place up as if they owned it.

They were used for dangerous, brutal labor on the railbeds and canals, sometimes working alongside black laborers. In the South, they were sometimes used in dangerous situations where it didn't make good sense to risk the life of a valuable slave. As one person put it, "Let the paddys do the work--if one of them gets thrown overboard or breaks his neck, it's nobody's loss."

As they moved into the big cities, they were thrown into the same districts with free black folks in the North, and in the South--New Orleans, the Irish channel, the rookeries. And there they socialized. They fought each other, they fought with the police, they fought with everybody--eve-rybody fought with everybody. That was the American city of the 1820s and 130s: a war of each against all.

In a lot of respects they developed a common culture, as well. There was some intermarriage. And there was a kind of "life among the lowly." In the early minstrel stage, along with the stock black characters Jim Crow and Jim Dandy, there were the Irish characters Pat and Bridget--objects of scorn and ridicule.

Q: You point out that at one point the Irish were known as "white Negroes" and black people were referred to as "smoked Irish." What did those terms reflect?

A: They reflected the scorn and disdain with which both were regarded by the better situated, by the leading elements of American society. There was speculation that there would be some "amalgamation," that is, that Irish and black would blend into each other and become one common people. That didn't happen; in fact, the opposite happened.

Q: What exactly happened?

A: Essentially what happened was the Irish became white. That is, rather than 3'olning with black people--free and slave--to overthrow the system of slavery and racial oppression which prevailed in the United States, they chose, by and large, to find a way to gain for themselves a favored position within it.

In 1841, the Irish political leader (in Ireland) Daniel O'Connell--he was something of a combination of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, the most popular figure among Irishmen throughout the world--issued an appeal--he and 70,000 others in Ireland--to the Irish in the United States, calling upon them to join with the abolitionists in America, to join the struggle to overthrow slavery. Treat the Negro everywhere as your equal, your brother, he said, and in doing so you will bring honor to the name of Ireland. O'Connell was speaking from a situation where Catholics in Ireland were members of an oppressed race. He was the leader of their movement to overturn that kind of subjugation. So he naturally reached out for alliances with the struggle against racial injustice everywhere.

The Irish in America rejected him. He went so far as to say if you don't do this, then we won't recognize you as Irish. They thought about it and concluded, okay, if you force us to choose between our love for Ireland and our attachment to the institutions of our new country, then it's South Carolina forever. What they decided to do was integrate themselves into American life as citizens, invoking the privileges of whiteness.

Having fair skin made the Irish eligible to be white, but it didn't guarantee their admission. They had to earn it.

Q: And how were they supposed to earn it?

A: There were two things they had to do. First, they had to distance themselves as much as possible from the black population of North America. They had to do whatever they possibly could to create barriers, to insulate themselves, to separate themselves from the black population.

The second thing they had to do was overcome the resistance to their own civil rights coming from the people who were better off than them--that is, the native Protestant, bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner establishment that was running the country.

There was a relationship, in fact, between these two tasks. To the extent to which they could prove themselves worthy of being white Americans--that is, by joining in gleefully in the subjugation of black people--they showed that they belonged, that they deserved all the rights of citizenship. On the other side, to the extent to which they were able to force their way into the white polity of this country, they were able to distance themselves from black people.

What my book is about, then, is how the Irish used the different institutions of American society to accomplish these tasks: the Democratic Party, early labor unions, the church, forms of urban social disorder--race riots, for example. It's about how they managed to implement and carry out an agenda which finally gained them admission into what I like to call the white race in America.

Q: Is there any one event of the several you go into in the book--a particularly explosive episode--that you would point to as a dramatic turning point in the relationship between the two communities?

A: One that I think is an especially interesting and important one was what came to be known as the New York City Draft Riots, probably the most violent urban riots in American history. They took place in July 1863. They began as a protest by the Irish and others against the social inequities of the Civil War draft--the fact that poor people had to serve while the rich could buy their way out by paying for a substitute.

But this quickly linked up with the Irish effort to exclude black workers from the docks, and from other jobs on which they felt they had a right to establish a monopoly. It led to a week of rioting in New York, in which the Irish raised the confederate flag, they cheered the name of Jefferson Davis, they attacked, lynched, burned a colored orphanage. Nobody knows for sure how many black people were killed in those riots, but the estimate has gone up as high as 1,000. In fact, Lincoln had to withdraw federal troops from Gettysburg and elsewhere in order to repress that rebellion.

What that was about, it seems to me, was, first, to establish an Irish-administered white monopoly of jobs on the docks and in the civil service. The Irish also wanted to make it clear that while they favored the Union (they did not want to see the country split; they did not support the secession of the South), they also did not want it to become a war against slavery or a war for racial justice. They were fighting to defend the white Republic and to make sure that they were a part of it--not to make it an inclusive and racially free Republic.

Let's talk about your publication Race Traitor, which you call the journal of "the new abolitionism." Appearing across its cover is the slogan "Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity." There's some pretty provocative language packed in there. What, precisely, do you mean to covey with all this? And how does the journal's purpose relate to your aims in How the Irish Became White?

A: The relationship between the two projects is this. In the book I'm studying how a group of people who were not white became white, that is, became members of the white "club." In the journal I'm trying to explore how people who now think of themselves as white, or who are white, or who act white, might become un-white. So in a sense it's a way of studying how the film might be run backwards.

Q: Of course this raises the question of exactly what you mean by "white."

A: Indeed, I'm not referring to people of fair skin, straight hair, or any of the other physical characteristics which we normally think of as white. No one has any control over how they were born, how they look, or any of that. So far as I'm concerned those things make no difference. I'm talking about what's going on in people's minds. To me, being "white" means being part of a club, with certain privileges and obligations. People are recruited into that club at birth, enrolled in that club without their consent or permission, and brought up according to its rules. Generally speaking, they go through life accepting the rules and accepting the benefits of membership, without ever considering the costs.

Q: What are the costs?

A: The cost of membership in the white club is that it requires a loyalty and conformity to official American society in a way that's making life very uncomfortable and even dangerous for all of the ordinary folk in this country--those who are called white, as well as those who are called black. The project of our journal is to break up that club. Essentially the way we think the club can be broken up is by disrupting the conformity that maintains it.

In our view, the country needs some reverse oreos: a whole bunch of folks who look white on the outside but don't act white. So many, in fact, that it will be impossible for those in power in this country to really be sure who’s white merely by looking. When that happens the value of the white skin will diminish.

Q: What sorts of things might result from this?

A: I think political issues and conflicts and divisions would take place on no-rmal bases, having to do with people's interests in terms of wealth versus poverty, for example, and questions of that kind, which would open the door for all sorts of social and political changes that haven't happened yet, la-rgel_y because some people settle for being white rather than take a chance on being free.

It seems to me that culturally, the United States is not a white country. Culturally, the United States is, at the very least, as Albert Murray once put it, "incontestably mulatto." Every American, merely by virtue of landing on these shores, becomes culturally part Yankee, part American Indian, and part black, with a little pinch of ethnic salt. In a certain sense people know this. Just think of the music we listen to, the dances we do, the sports we admire, the dress, the rhythms of speech, certain attributes of Protestantism and even, in some places, Catholicism--all of these things indicate a black influence in American life. And Americans by and large enjoy this--although they're not quite willing to admit it. They prefer to deny it. But even insofar as it's acknowledged--and this is crucial--they want to separate all of this from questions of political rights and citizenship. So what I like to say is that the United States is the largest country in the world of people who pass for white. There are a couple hundred million of them who are denying the black presence within their own souls and hearts.

The result is that people accept a lot of abuse and a lot of suffering--and I'm talking about so-called white people now. Everybody knows that black people are oppressed. I'm talking about the white people who accept a lot of abuse and a lot of mistreatment--from the government, from their employers, from their landlords, from the people in authority--because at least they have the consolation of being white, or thinking that they're white. I want to see that broken apart.