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-G. K. Peatling is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). He is the author of British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865-1925 and of a number of articles on the history of British-Irish relations. His current research interests include Ulster-Scots identity in history.

The “Irish question”: marginalizations at the nexus of sociology of migration and ethnic and racial studies in Britain

“…After this Irish migrants were included in sociological studies of certain institutional arenaseducation, mental health, the Catholic Churchbut not in sociological research that addressed the impact of migration (see Walter 2011, for a full discussion). Geographers and historians were often more inclusive in their studies of migration and racism (Walter 1986;Gilley and Swift 1989;Peatling 2005;Delaney 2013;Wills 2018). One consequence was that, within sociology produced in England, migration studies became a synomyn for studies of "race", whereby "race" meant black people.…”

Arrested in St Peter's

“…While the political context for Mannix's crusade in Rome and the Vatican exhibition suggests that imperial sins were already on view, it was the particularity of the Irish past in convict Australia that had been brought to the public eye. While colonial and imperial representations of the Irish may have been themselves racially coded, 30 Fernando was not about to express any empathy for the Irish struggle with imperial Britain. Rather, he appeared to agree with the Vatican that the negative effects of Irish convictism had corrupted Aboriginal relations with British Australia, a racial interpretation based upon the supposed differences in moral capacity between higher and lower races.…”

Examining integration of refugees in multicultural Ireland: policy, advocacy and lived experience

“…The history of poverty and exclusion as a colonial landscape has direct impacts on the local understanding of what it means to be the dominant 'White' Irish culture and how ethnic minority groups are then able to integrate with this identity (Fanning 2002;Inglis 2008;Peatling 2005;Shubin 201 0;Whelan 2007; Whelan & Maitre 201 0). Some scholars, such as Ronit Lentin, believe that Ireland has an old wound from its colonial past that has not yet healed (Lentin 2002:228).…”