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> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP? "White" != "WASP": Catholics

> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP? "White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white". Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones. This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"

aliqot 4y ago
When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
- skissane 4y ago
  When did people "used to say that Irish weren't white"? Only really starting in the 1990s (with Noel Ignatiev's book) – by which time anti-Irish sentiment in the US was rather long gone. Nobody called Irish people "non-white" during the heyday of discrimination against them.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    It was common post-immigration all the way until the civil rights movement.
    - skissane 4y ago
      I don't agree that it was in any way "common". Can you cite a 19th century (or even pre-1990s) source calling Irish people "non-white"?
      - karpierz 4y ago
        Benjamin Franklin[0]: > Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. tl;dr: Saxons and the English are White People. Other Europeans are "swarthy". [0]: https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/10/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/1...
        skissane 4y ago
        That source never actually mentions Irish people, even while it suggests people from a number of other European nations are not "purely white"–which is not the same as "non-white". Did Franklin mean to include Irish people in that even if he didn't explicitly mention them? That seems unlikely, because when he wrote that in the 1750s, there was very little anti-Irish sentiment in America, and I'm aware of no evidence that Franklin personally harboured any. Most 18th century Irish Americans were Protestant, and whether or not they technically count as "WASP", they were rarely distinguished from them. Benjamin Franklin visited Ireland in 1771; I'm aware of no evidence he thought he was visiting a "non-white" country. During his visit, he socialised with the wealthy Protestant establishment, although he saw the poverty of the Irish masses and was struck by it – however, rather than blame it on their race, he attributed their plight to British rule, even later suggesting that without independence, the British would reduce poor Americans to the same extreme poverty that poor Irish endured. Keep in mind that in 18th century Ireland, the Protestant establishment in Dublin viewed themselves as "Irish"; they did not see themselves as a different nationality from Irish Catholics, and would not have agreed that they were a different "race" from them.
ben7799 4y ago
WASPS have long been happy to discriminate against Catholics. They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.

aliqot 4y ago

When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.

skissane 4y ago
When did people "used to say that Irish weren't white"? Only really starting in the 1990s (with Noel Ignatiev's book) – by which time anti-Irish sentiment in the US was rather long gone. Nobody called Irish people "non-white" during the heyday of discrimination against them.
- aliqot 4y ago
  It was common post-immigration all the way until the civil rights movement.
  - skissane 4y ago
    I don't agree that it was in any way "common". Can you cite a 19th century (or even pre-1990s) source calling Irish people "non-white"?
    - karpierz 4y ago
      Benjamin Franklin[0]: > Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. tl;dr: Saxons and the English are White People. Other Europeans are "swarthy". [0]: https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/10/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/1...
      - skissane 4y ago
        That source never actually mentions Irish people, even while it suggests people from a number of other European nations are not "purely white"–which is not the same as "non-white". Did Franklin mean to include Irish people in that even if he didn't explicitly mention them? That seems unlikely, because when he wrote that in the 1750s, there was very little anti-Irish sentiment in America, and I'm aware of no evidence that Franklin personally harboured any. Most 18th century Irish Americans were Protestant, and whether or not they technically count as "WASP", they were rarely distinguished from them. Benjamin Franklin visited Ireland in 1771; I'm aware of no evidence he thought he was visiting a "non-white" country. During his visit, he socialised with the wealthy Protestant establishment, although he saw the poverty of the Irish masses and was struck by it – however, rather than blame it on their race, he attributed their plight to British rule, even later suggesting that without independence, the British would reduce poor Americans to the same extreme poverty that poor Irish endured. Keep in mind that in 18th century Ireland, the Protestant establishment in Dublin viewed themselves as "Irish"; they did not see themselves as a different nationality from Irish Catholics, and would not have agreed that they were a different "race" from them.

ben7799 4y ago

WASPS have long been happy to discriminate against Catholics. They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.