The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control by Theodore W. Allen & Jeffrey B. Perry

Author:Theodore W. Allen & Jeffrey B. Perry [Allen, Theodore W. & Perry, Jeffrey B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historical Study & Educational Resources, Politics & Social Sciences, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Racism, Social History, Race & Ethnicity, Social Sciences
ISBN: 9781844678433
Amazon: B00I75F9P6
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2014-06-03T05:00:00+00:00

From true competition to “white” racial preference

In the context of the “white” spoils system, what began as a form of normally occurring wage labor competition soon developed on the Irish-American side into an assertion of the right of “white” preference. It will be noted that the Cincinnati Repeal Association spoke as “white” men in attacking O’Connell in 1843 for his denunciations of slavery; he, on the other hand, repeatedly called upon them as Irishmen to make the cause of the Negro their own. John Mitchel’s Citizen declared in 1856, “He would be a bad Irishman who voted for the ascendancy of principles which proscribed himself, and which jeopardized the present system of a nation of white men.”115 In January 1860, the New York paper the Irish American, taking note of a Massachusetts cotton mill disaster which took the lives of scores of young Irish women, voiced their grievance in terms of an abuse of “white” workers.116 A mass meeting made up mainly of Irish-American workers in New York in January 1861 declared labor to be the natural ally of the slaveholders, in opposition to any and all efforts “to reduce white men to a forbidden level with negroes.”117

In the riots in Brooklyn and in New York to which I have referred, the mobs made up primarily of Irish-Americans did not express their demands and aims in terms of Irishness, but in the name of “white workingmen.”

By 1863, “[a]lmost all longshoremen in New York City were Irish;” they were organized in the Longshoremen’s Association, and resolved that dock work would be limited to “such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.”118 African-Americans were driven from the trade in which they had predominated twenty years before, not in the normal course of economic competition, but by Irish-Americans operating under the immunities of “whiteness.” The African-American population had declined perhaps 16 percent between 1840 and 1860, “owing to the aroused hostility to Negroes,” as one historian put it.119 Then, between 1860 and 1865, it fell by another one-fourth, to less than ten thousand. It is sadly ironic that the Catholic proportion of the population of Belfast was reduced as a result of similar pogrom-like attacks by Protestant workers, as noted in Chapter 5.

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