The question of “how the Irish became white” really caught me this week. It brings up and questions the dynamics of difference and the changeability of our cultural categories, highlighting the fallacy of biological race and its ascribed hierarchies. What particularly struck me was the almost simultaneous ability for the Irish to be oppressed by and yet still participate, seemingly willingly, in these racial hierarchies. Maybe it’s a function of the difference between Irish identity and Irish American identity, but the whiteness of the Irish, particularly in America, seemed to hinge on their assimilation into the hierarchy as a source of labor above that of Black laborers and their willingness to occupy that space. It underlines an interesting and significant gap in experience between these two groups, groups that are paralleled even as the basis of our course. I wonder how that distinction will come across in the consciousness of the literature we read or if we will sense a change in the literature over time as the Irish became more white. I also think it is pertinent to realize that racial categories are changeable and think about the ways we may or may not participate in those ongoing systems ourselves.
As an aside, but in conjunction with these ideas about whiteness and who defines these categories, the categories we divide ourselves by phenotypically don’t even make sense. We ascribe these delineations largely based on skin color groups that don’t even play out in real life. Those whose skin is darker we call Black, when in reality their skin is many varied and luminous shades of brown. Those who we classify as white aren’t white at all, but shades that range from sand to peach. And so it goes for the other major “racial” categories. Human skin color, or rather skin tone, is not a binary, but a gradient. Brazilian photographer, Angélica Dass, has a beautiful project called Humanae that points out exactly that. Taking swatches of skin from photos of thousands of participants, she matches their tone to that of an industrial color index to create the background of their portrait — demonstrating clearly the wonderful variations of human skin and it’s lack of distinct or even similar groups (after all, melanin only comes in black or brown). Phenotypic populations are no more jarringly distinct than the cultures of the Circum-Atlantic. So even as the Irish “became white” it bears thinking about the categories themselves and how a cultural need for differentiation veers away from what’s actually before our eyes.
In reading this, I was most struck by the concepts of the construction of racial “other”ing by some majority faction. The first theme which came to mind was the caricatures of both apelike Irish and black profiles, deliberately shown to be beastly and ugly, especially in relation to the symmetrical and “proper” appearance of the English face, which the British used to assert racial dominance in their country and expanding territory. Especially when viewed in hindsight, in which the Irish entered into the modernity of “whiteness” not very long after images such as these were published, I was struck at the blatantly fictionalized nature of race and any sort of major biological differences between the British and supposedly uncivilized Irish. Despite the close proximity to the Irish, including many aspects of its culture and the appearances of its citizens, the British and their quick disparaging of the Irish speaks volumes to the dangers of both racial oppression and imperialism. Each of these concepts relies upon the discrediting of the “other”‘s humanity in order to maintain superiority, all the while claiming the other group is unready to entire fully into civilization, primarily because the majority does not provide the necessary means for uplift, creating a perpetual cycle of inequality and injustice.