Redefining Irishness within a mixed-race society

There are two critical problems confronting contemporary Ireland. One is the task of making a peace settlement in Northern Ireland and of building a pluralist democracy and an open society beyond it. The other is finding our place in the world now that the Republic of Ireland has joined the wealthy elite of the world. We have become rich by riding the tiger of globalisation. Now we are discovering that globalisation works both ways and that the global economy that brings foreign investment also brings migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.

Slowly and inevitably, Ireland will, over the coming years, begin to develop as a multiracial and multicultural society. Yet already there are ominous signs of xenophobia and intolerance, not least from the Minister for Justice in his Immigration Bill.

In a fundamental sense, these are not two problems but one. Both the Northern peace process and the ability of our society to handle its transition to ethnic and racial diversity are essentially about the challenge of taking a relatively monolithic culture and making it accommodate the Other. The essential mechanism of racism, what the historian David Roediger calls the "empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back", operates very obviously in the ethnic sectarian conflict of Northern Ireland.

Slightly less obviously, it relates also to the new strain of national pride which suggests that, since Ireland has managed to scramble into the prosperity of the West, it is time to pull up the ladder. While there are undoubted reasons for pessimism in the history of Irish racism, there are also richer, more elusive ambiguities in Irish identity, and they can provide grounds for some sober hope.

In recent years historians, especially in the US, have devoted a great deal of time to examining the relationship between Irishness and racism. That view can be summed up in the title of Noel Ignatiev's brilliant book, How the Irish Became White. The argument put forward by Ignatiev, by Theodore Allen in The Invention of the White Race and by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness runs roughly as follows.

The Catholic Irish were, until they got to the US in large numbers in the mid-19th century, effectively black. They were, within the British imperium, an oppressed people, discriminated against on essentially racial grounds. But when they reached a critical mass in the US, the Irish as a group integrated into American modernity largely by distinguishing themselves from the blacks. They didn't start out as "whites", but that's what they became.

Initially, Irish immigrants in New York, Boston and other American cities were equal to or even lower than blacks in the social order. Tenement landlords often preferred black tenants whom they regarded as cleaner and more respectable than the Irish. The black leader Frederick Douglass complained that the Irish were replacing the blacks as servants, waiters and flunkeys, because they were more servile and willing to endure worse treatment.

The Irish were often referred to as "niggers turned inside out". Blacks, for their part, were called "smoked Irish". In this context, racism was the easiest way to prove that you were white. The Irish forced their way into white society by turning on the blacks, often, as in the New York draft riots of 1863, through attacks of appalling savagery on the black population.

At the same time, through their growing influence in the theatre and particularly in blackface minstrelsy, they helped to popularise and sustain racist stereotypes of blacks and, incidentally, of Chinese.

Thus, it was only in the second half of the 19th century, and only through fierce struggle, that the Irish began to be accepted as white. But there was an innate connection between the inclusion of the Irish in the democratic polity and the exclusion of the blacks from it. As David Roediger has put it, "The idea that all blacks were unfit for civic participation could be transmuted into the notion that all whites were so fit." The Irish acquired a vested interest in the expansion of the word "white" to include themselves. But of course that expansion could only be at the expense of blacks.

As usual with Irish stories, however, the narrative is a bit messier and more complex than it might seem. To say that the Irish became white is to suggest that they were one thing and were transformed into another. But we are dealing with cultural constructs, with ideas and feelings and identities. And where cultural constructs are concerned, there is seldom a clear point at which one thing becomes another. Things are not, as it were, either black or white.

It seems to me that what's missing from the standard account of Irish racism is a sense of the openness of Irish identity. Both before and after the tumultuous transformations of 19th-century America, Irishness was (and still is) characterised by a deep ambiguity about race.

The real point about the last 150 years of Irish history is that it is seldom either/or and often both/and. Mass emigration meant that the Irish were dealing with different societies, operating within different frames of reference, being pushed and pulled by different social and cultural dynamics. But, to make things still more complex, those different societies didn't operate in isolation from each other. Ideas and aspirations moved back and forth between Britain and the US, between the Irish in Ireland and the Irish abroad.

The Irish as a whole were subjected simultaneously to competing impulses. As immigrants they were attempting to assimilate into a dominant Anglo culture. As nationalists they were attempting to extract themselves from a dominant Anglo culture.

In one context, they were pushed towards a desire to be seen as part of "the white race" which also included the English. In another they were pulling against that very notion, attempting to establish, through for instance the revival of Irish language, the creation of a national literature and the codification of national sports, a distinct identity in which the possession of a white skin was not in itself a unifying factor sufficiently strong to override differences of culture, religion and race.

Those contradictory impulses don't exclude the notion of the Irish becoming white, but they do suggest that it does not do full justice to the ambiguity of modern Irishness. For most of the last 200 years, ambiguity has been something that the Irish have fled from, seeking a clear, stable, timeless sense of who we are and where we fit in. But perhaps, as we face the difficult tasks of developing a genuinely pluralistic society on this island, it may be our salvation. How and why that may be the case is a subject I will return to next week.