How the Irish Became White.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.

Two especially interesting and important books on race in the United States appeared in 1995--Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (Routledge) and Stephen Steinberg's Turning Back. The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Beacon Press).

Ignatiev's focus is the mid-nineteenth Century. Steinberg's focus is on the post-World War II era. Both, however, challenge a powerful but bogus orthodoxy that racism is an aberration in American political life, a cancer of regional origin or an extraneous graft onto an otherwise healthy, sound, and egalitarian body

Ignatiev examines the role that whiteness played in the political assimilation of Irish immigrants in the context of nativist and xenophobic upsurges and the militantly pro-slavery coalition that dominated the Democratic Party in the Jacksonian Era. He argues that whiteness as a politically meaningful category was consolidated during this period, and that definition of the social status of Irish immigrants was crucial to the process.

He proposes a dialectical account in which whiteness took shape partly as a way of accommodating Irish immigrants into the party's electoral coalition, a putative attribute that expressed commonality with nativist Jacksonians.

He contends as well that this definition was reinforced and propagated by Irish-Americans' efforts--as a low-status group situated between blacks and "native whites"--both to establish an ideological and institutional floor of citizenship between themselves and the bottom of the social order and to expel blacks from their niches in marginal economic sectors.

Steinberg examines how academics...