Policing the Irish

Abstract

The Irish presence in England has been invoked in a range of recent accounts of ‘race’, ethnicity and immigration. However, Irish migrants were largely obscured in cultural studies’ turn to ‘race’ and ethnicity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite the fact that England’s Irish were the country’s largest migrant minority and intrinsically relevant to the work of cultural studies. This article explores the absence of an Irish dimension in British cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity, focusing on the landmark texts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. The article illustrates the salience of the Irish to these accounts, and shows how Irish ethnicity (despite being invoked in the formative work of E.P. Thompson) was erased at key moments. Finally, the article maps the emergence of an Irish dimension in cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity since the 1990s.

Scripts of Whiteness in engineering: An analysis of the literature

“…Several entities have expounded upon the concept of proximity to Whiteness and how people of other skin tones will kowtow to Whiteness-even if against their own self-interests-as a response to racial trauma and protection against racism [40][41][42]. The concept of Whiteness exceeds skin tone and manifests itself in pillars of our society as systemic and institutional racism such as policing [43,44], the healthcare system [46][47][48], and education [48][49][50][51]. Whiteness is at the center of racist ideas and frameworks, and upholds white supremacy [52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”