19th century AD

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2001 by Catherine M. Eagan

OVER the past ten years, an increasing number of Americanist historians have suggested that Irish and other European immigrants, in an attempt to secure the prosperity and social position that their white skin had not guaranteed them in Europe, lobbied for white racial status in America. The success of this effort was by no means assured. While American laws concerning who could immigrate, be naturalized, and be enslaved accepted Irish people's pale skin color and European roots as evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that Irish immigrants experienced on the job, and the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, suggested that they were "racially" inferior to white Anglo-Americans and thus somehow nonwhite, perhaps even "black." (2) Many historians, focusing their attention on the Irish-American working class, have argued that Irish immigrants worked to counter suggestions of their racial affinity with African Americans and thus ensure the recognition of their whiteness through their participation in labor agitation and in popular cultural forms like blackface minstrelsy. (3) Some historians of Irish America, by contrast, have questioned whether Irish Americans actively pursued white racial status, citing desperation for jobs as the chief source of conflict with African Americans and pointing to examples of Irish opposition to antiblack racism. (4)

Be that as it may, the Irish-American novel, particularly as written by the embattled famine generation of immigrants, makes it clear that "whiteness" was an identity to which Irish Americans not only felt entitled but actively pursued. Although these novels should not be taken as exact reflections of Irish-American realities or sensibilities, they do reveal some of the modes through which Irish people argued for a white racial identity that they regarded as their entitlement, while also revealing the conflicting agendas that informed their articulations of this white racial belonging. This article will use the rarely studied Irish-American novel to offer a more complex understanding of how Irish Americans lived and lobbied for their whiteness. In doing so, I hope to bridge the gaps between Americanist and Irish-Americanist historians and between labor and cultural historians of Irish America.

Irish-American novelists, who were most often immigrant priests, journalists, and publishers, only occasionally asserted their white racial credentials by denigrating African Americans. A much stronger challenge to Irish whiteness than any ostensible link of Irish people to Africans was the Anglo-American concern that Irish Catholicism and nationalism made the Irish unfit for assimilation into the white American mainstream. For by the mid-nineteenth century many native-born Americans had come to believe that their cultural, national, and even religious and political differences with Irish and other European immigrant groups meant that the immigrants were racially inferior, despite their white skin color and European origins, and that such racial inferiority was biological and permanent. According to this logic, immigrants' undesirable characteristics would not disappear once they became accustomed to American society, but would persist and prevent assimilation into "white America" as Anglo-Americans defined it. (5) Irish-American novelists' attempts to allay concerns over Irish racial incompatibility with whiteness were usually indirect; they elaborated Irish whiteness through narrative reminders of the European, Christian, civilized, and free history of the Irish in Ireland and America. Sometimes, these reminders were articulated in the dialogues between characters or in the voice of the narrator in the form of long discourses on the sophistication of the Irish religion and culture. (6) Most often, the novelists simply assumed the whiteness of the Irish; the most positive characters speak proper English and are able to pass for Protestant, and the sentimental conventions of the novel invite Anglo readers to identify with Irish characters as equals. (7)

Irish-American novelists' pursuit of whiteness was not unqualified, however. For example, even as their novels praise the illustrious European heritage of the "Celt," they attempt to distance the Irish from whiteness as identified with "Anglo-Saxon" culture in America, for it threatens their religious and national particularity. (8) But the novels show how difficult it was to argue for white racial membership held in common with Anglo-Americans if one scorned any connection with the Saxon "race." If the literary theorist Frederic Jameson were to read these novels, he might say that one can see the novelists attempting to sustain the "political fantasy" of racial harmony between Irish-American and Anglo-American culture by engaging in complicated maneuvers to repress that fantasy's instability. (9) Though the Irish identified with whiteness and clung to the political and economic security that white racial status could bring, the sense of racial difference from the Saxon that they brought from Ireland, in combination with their antagonistic relationship with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant power structure in America, meant that their articulation of their whiteness would at times be convoluted. But the argument for Irish whiteness was nevertheless made; the specific form of that argument in literature is the subject of what follows.