The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union

Abstract

Categories of “race” are flexible and constructed, by no means solely determined by genetics, biology, or skin color.1 “Races” are thus constructs of the human intellect, and these acts of construction, or racialization, are subjects for legitimate academic interrogation. Racism certainly cannot be reduced to chromatism or prejudice based on skin color, and the recovery of processes of racialization is a research program of relevance to, and of increasing popularity within, the field of Irish studies.2 Some researchers, however, have gone further and emphasized the fact and power of circumlocutions adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized in spite of their lacking clear signifiers of racial otherness. For certain scholars, the inferior position of the Irish in Britain within racial hierarchies explains their long-continued invisibility or lowly status, among other features of BritishIrish history. These scholars often imply that it is either accurate or politically productive to draw substantive connections between the positions of the Irish and those of racialized nonwhite groups during phases of colonialism. After surveying some examples of this literature, this article will suggest serious historical and critical flaws in some common and often politically potent recent interpretations. First, there are those political teleologies that imply that to emphasize or exaggerate historical and contemporary verisimilitudes between the Irish and racialized nonwhite groups is to advance a politically progressive agenda. These can be faulted on both historical and theoretical grounds, in that they trivialize or misinterpret the plight of nonwhite victims of imperialism or subjugation, iron ically overstate the beneficence of the British political elite, can be inimical to wider progressive coalitions, and may even understate the culpability of individuals from certain political locations in racism. Second, historical research that posits connections and equivalences between the experiences of the Irish and nonwhite groups, often under the influence of Perry Curtis’s foundational scholarship, can unconsciously reenact partisan and unsatisfactory positions in British-Irish political debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Third, moments can be located in debates on Irish self-government, particularly discussions surrounding Erskine Childers’s The Framework of Home Rule (first published in 1911), that involved clear acknowledgments in Britain of the whiteness of the Irish, and of their distance from nonwhite groups in racial and imperial hierarchies. Since these acknowledgments can be said to have been, in the long run, more politically significant than any countervailing tendencies, I will argue that while study of the racialization of groups and individuals in and from Ireland is certainly pertinent, it is a major distortion to emphasize moments of the equivalence of the positions in racialized hierarchies of the Irish and nonwhite groups... ...Few scholars would endorse the view articulated in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments that the Irish are “the niggers of Europe.” Nonetheless, such a proposition is considered a suggestive and appropriate starting point for a number of different strands in the application of the concept of racialization to Irish studies.3