How White Americans Became Irish (Part 1)

Stories of Irish-American history and identity share a common narrative root: the story of immigrant hardship, of a downtrodden people fleeing famine, colonial oppression and religious persecution; that the Irish in America suffered historic injustices and trauma in their passage from home country to host and in making a new identity as Americans. The interpretation of the political and moral meanings of that passage sharply diverge though and signify a historical bifurcation.

On the one hand, there is the liberal progressive story of how the Irish learned from and remembered the injustices they encountered and used this as the lodestone of a liberal politics of empathy. On the other hand, there is the reactionary nationalist story that takes its historical compass from a closed history of immigrant victimisation that distinguishes its descendants’ Americanness as authentic and earned.

Today, these contesting histories are animated and mobilised as progressive and reactionary strands of Irish-American culture and politics clash on the grounds of white privilege, immigration and what it means to be American in the era of Trump.

A Nation of Immigrants

The origin stories of Irish America have been core narratives within the “making of America” discourse of the nation’s founding and development and were especially potent in the cementing in the mid-twentieth century of the idea of the US as “a nation of immigrants” – an idea promoted by the Irish-American President John F. Kennedy.

It was an idea widely taken up and channelled through the cultural politics of white ethnicity at a time when engrained forms of structural racism were under assault by the civil rights movement. The ethnic revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s in the US saw a revalorisation of ethnic memory and history as America’s immigrant past was celebrated anew and the term “ethnic” shed its alien emphasis.

The idea of America as a nation of immigrants has done significant psychological as well as cultural and political work for white ethnics in the US for over half a century, glossing important elements of whiteness as a racial formation, mystifying its oppressive qualities and its particularistic claims to identity and values. Promotion of this ideal reflects and has informed the complex ways in which Irish-Americans have reconciled their identities in the present with prejudice and discrimination in the past.

The story of “how the Irish became white”- famously articulated by Noel Ignatiev - has been popularly glossed as an ethnic achievement, periodically reclaiming otherness, while eliding the politics of racial power and privilege. The story has fresh potency today at a time of renewed crisis in US race relations, when whiteness is reconstituting itself politically and culturally, and Irish identity has become a marker of this transitioning. As ethnonationalism surges through the mainstream of politics and culture, unsettling the hegemony of liberal whiteness, Irishness becomes a mobile register of white anger and angst.

Perhaps the story we need to tell now is not how the Irish became white but how white folks in the US have become Irish.

Late Generation Ethnicity

The new mobility of Irishness is congruent with the disappearance of an ethnic habitus, of collective social and material environments conditioning identity. It may be understood as a form of “late generation ethnicity,” which sociologist Herbert Gans posited to designate an ethnic formation that reaches back many generations in the US and is not being significantly replenished from the country of origin. 

This is not to say that Irish ethnicity is ceasing to exist in the US, rather it is taking on more overtly symbolic forms. While Irish ethnicity does not principally exist today as a political block or sociological formation, it persists as a realm of cultural and political signification and psychological investments – as “Irishness”. The untethering of Irishness from its ethnic habitus has facilitated it being claimed in multiple contexts to signify diverse forms of identification; it is consumed and performed and suffuses American popular and media cultures.

White ethnicity in the US has long registered shifts in the racial-political environment and the move to late-generation ethnicity over the last half-century indicates how whiteness has become more marked and insecure in political terms. With respect to Irish America, a focus on late ethnicity sharpens our understanding of the cultural and political narratives that support it as an identity formation, reminding us that Irishness is at once a relatively privileged narrative of identity in the US today – often signalling personal resilience and tribal success – but also diffuse and conflicted. It also allows us to consider how Irishness encodes both liberal and conservative forms of racialised ethnicity.

To be continued…

In the following parts of this story we will consider how Irish-American identity is taken up in the current politicisation of white racial identity in the US, and how it is implicated within broader dynamics of identity politics.

(Note – this text draws from “How White Americans Became Irish: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Whiteness,” Journal of American Studies (November 2021)).

Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin.