The David Lloyd reading and the idea of “The Irish Becoming White” really struck me this week. I had not considered that African Americans and Irish were similarly described in the same time period, as I had thought of the two histories as separate. Lloyd brings to light descriptions of the Irish as savages, with a distinct look of an ape. The Irish are seen as a vulgar and radical people who were not considered “white”. But, the Irish did not look much different from the British. To anyone’s eyes they are considered white. This proves that “white” and “black” are not biological labels. Lloyd writes that these labels given to describe those who are considered “ready” to take part in society and those who are “not yet ready” or “never ready”. It was only when the Irish began to integrate into important roles in society – firemen, policemen- that they were considered ready to be “white” and a full part of society.
How can society abolish these fake labels? As Lloyd writes, “Race, we may observe, is a variable set of structures not a quality” (17). Yet, race descriptions surround us everywhere. On applications, surveys, standardized tests, and government forms we are asked to check the box of our race. American history has seen lots of immigrant groups from different countries as targets of prejudice and violence – Jews, Irish, Italians – that eventually joined the big amorphous category of “whiteness” while black remains the other. How will these labels continue to change? These questions are not easy, but they are ones I will think about often as “whiteness” and “blackness” continue to transform.
I find it unlikely that society will abolish the labels of “white” and “black” in the near future. Yet I also question if society should do this. I want to piggyback on what Ryan said in his comment. Erasing these distinctions would only erase the history of racial difference in the world on an artificial level. However, these dividers have too deep a history to be fully erased. The wounds are too deep and have not healed properly. Stereotypes are deeply ingrained in the mind. The world cannot assume that racial division has not occurred and shaped our everyday experiences. Thus, I believe that the solution to this problem requires looking forward, rather than trying to erase the mistake our ancestors made of dividing the world by skin color.
I also do not believe that American society can do away with labels altogether. Like said, these labels are used on every application form and all police reports as a means of identifying an individual. If racial labels were to go away, I am unsure as to what those forms would replaced with. Perhaps they could be removed entirely, but that still seems unrealistic considering how heavily ingrained race is in American institutions, especially the police force. The racial conflicts that make the American mainstream news usually forms of violence, either physical or verbal, that involve the police. Additionally, I believe forgetting racial labels is even harder to do if American society wants to preserve the history behind those textbooks. Most African American works of literature would have to be severely edited, which in a way is forgetting the full history of racism in America.
I agree with Alexis that we are more aware and are continuing to be more aware of the labels we place on each other societally. The issue is that labels are so inherently divisive, marking things as separate or distinct such that they cannot be placed in the same category and that as a collective, the one thing we always seem to do is group people. I wonder if it’s productive to think about reclaiming certain labels, changing their connotation, to take them back and have a group make them entirely their own, or if there is too much emotional history attached to our established labels to make that a possibility.
I do not know whether I think it will be possible to altogether abolish these labels that are so ingrained into our culture and government systems. Perhaps, as we move forward into the future, we will become more aware of the labels that are forming and work to avoid using them in the negative ways that we have come to use “White” and “Black.” Many have asserted that White and Black may become terms of the past as we move towards an increasingly mixed society. I feel, however, that this may be an optimistic view, as it is just as possible that new divisions will arise and may even be used in a more harmful way than before. Admittedly, the future of labels is not something that I think we can accurately predict, but the way in which we educate ourselves and future generations will undoubtedly play a role in shaping the future of society, racial labels, and relations.