For a while jokers like Noel Ignatiev have been promulgating “whiteness studies” claiming that groups like the Irish were not initially considered “white”. My comment no longer appears at Reason, but I tried pointing out to Ron Bailey that even turn-of-the-century racialists who embraced the concepts of “Nordic”, “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” still considered European immigrants to be white. Lothrop Stoddard’s notorious book “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” (which you can read for free online) is quite explicit on that point. At the same time, what we consider salient depends on the context. So if the only people who can effectively vote are white men (an important legal distinction inclusive to these supposedly non-white immigrants), intra-white distinctions are going to be salient in politics. In other situations where people are homogenous in race and language they might divide over religion, as in Northern Ireland.
Recently I came across one of the rarest of things, an anonymous comment at the iSteve blog which is actually worth reading. It links to the American Journal of Sociology paper Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945 by Cybelle Fox and Thomas A. Guglielmo. The paper is unfortunately gated, but anonymous provides an excerpt:
In stark contrast [to the black-white boundary], there was essentially no SEE-white boundary [SEE=Southern and Eastern Europeans]. Contrary to the arguments of many whiteness studies historians and the social scientists who have drawn on their work, we contend that wherever white was a meaningful category, SEEs were almost always included within it, even if they were simultaneously positioned below NWEs [=Northern and Western Europeans]. Some individuals and an occasional institution questioned—or appeared to question—the whiteness of SEEs and other Europeans, blurring the boundary in limited contexts. But the categorization of SEEs as nonwhite was neither widely recognized nor institutionalized. In fact, quite the opposite. Federal agencies including the census, the military, the immigration service, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and others all counted by race and placed SEEs firmly within the white category. No court ever denied Europeans the right to naturalize as free white persons at least in part because race scientists and the “common man” placed SEEs within the boundaries of whiteness. Furthermore, when SEEs saw Whites Only signs in movie theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, playgrounds, buses and streetcars, and at places of employment, they could—with near certainty—be confident that those signs were not meant to exclude them. Similarly, when housing covenants restricted the sale of homes to whites, when unions declared that their membership was restricted to white workers, when schools declared that their doors were open to white children only, and where marriage laws prohibited miscegenation, SEEs quickly learned that the category “white” included them, too.
So yes, Jim Crow really existed, and it did apply to blacks and not European immigrants. This also came up when a bunch of people got irritated at Fabio Rojas for writing about our “post-racist society“. It would be understandable if he said something extreme like “racism doesn’t exist”, but nobody says that (although if race didn’t exist, that’s what you’d expect). He was quite clear in his original post that he was saying that the end of legal sanction for explicit racism was a significant change, which I’d think would be hard to dispute. But perhaps for reasons of “mood affiliation” (and a better example than most of the time Tyler Cowen uses the phrase now), people got upset for him saying positive things about what improvements had happened rather than focusing what bad things exist now. Further back Mencius Moldbug and his acolytes tried to claim that after the civil war slaves were still sharecroppers, so their lot was not meaningfully different. Economic historians actually gather data on what folks earned back then, rather than relying on mere assertion, so I was able to point out that was false.
February 24, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Click to access 2012-fox.pdf
February 24, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Northern Ireland is not a case of “people [who] are homogenous [sic] in race and language”. The Ulster protestants were deliberately brought in over three centuries ago from English speaking areas of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, often from either side of the Scottish borders, in order to crowd out the (then) Gaelic speaking Celts, and there has only been a little inter-marriage and/or cross over between the communities since then. There was a little overlap in their ancestry, but only a little and you have to go back several more centuries to find it.
February 25, 2013 at 8:19 pm
Thanks for the link, gwern.
I chose to use the term “language” rather than “ethnicity” because the Irish speak english, even if they previously spoke Gaelic (the Scottish also spoke a variant of Gaelic if you go far enough back). Wikipedia claims that by the time British rule ended in the republic of Ireland, less than 15% of the population spoke Gaelic. Steve Sailer has used the northern irish dispute as an extreme example of his definition of “races” as partially inbred extended family, but that’s highly non-standard. Can the northern irish tell a prod from a taig by appearance?
February 25, 2013 at 9:26 pm
That’s dodging. I was very careful to point out that:-
– when the grouping was set up, there was indeed a language separation; and
– you have to go a lot further back to find a time when those Scots “also spoke a variant of Gaelic if you go far enough back” (and, actually, “the Scottish” didn’t; rather, the Scots formed from the assimilation of various ethno-linguistic groups in various proportions, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Norse, Brythonic, Goidelic, Pict, Flemish, etc.; the highlander-lowlander distinction reflects this to some extent, and those Scots who were brought into Ulster were largely selected from among the non-Gaels, for this very sort of reason).
That’s not the point. The point is whether that was part of the separation mechanism. The fact that dialects have converged doesn’t make the two communities formerly one that just happened to separate from religious pressures. Naturally, too, many marker expressions carried over from earlier speech even once it had changed on a larger scale.
Actually, to a surprisingly large extent though not infallibly, yes (and not just the northern Irish, though no doubt their sensitivity is heightened), especially if you count mannerisms and expressions (it doesn’t have to be as extreme as “Och, Donald, whaur’s your troosers?”) – some behaviours may perhaps come easier because of underlying physical structure, too. Physically, skull shape and the contrast between skin and hair colours are strong if not certain indicators. Even I, of mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry and some generations removed, have done it and received it on occasion. Some anecdotes, purely as illustration rather than formal proof:-
– I spotted that a boss, from a family some generations settled in northern England, was a catholic from how he spoke – but only when the give away came up, some months after we met.
– A speaker group I attended here in Australia introduced a young Irish woman as a speaker, then proceeded to say various nationalist things by way of being friendly. I thought of raising the point of information that “that young lady is a protestant”, which seemed so obvious to me, but I thought better of it; she raised that herself later anyway, much more diplomatically than I could have done, so clearly I hadn’t made it up.
– Someone I had done my MBA with once introduced me to someone who asked if I was Irish, as he thought I looked it; the person I knew told him wrongly that I was English, based on my accent and her long acquaintance with me, and I had to tell her that that only reflected my boarding school education and that the other person was close to right.
Oh, and I once struck up a conversation with a young lady by bringing out the fact that she was Church of Scotland and where she was from, and suggesting that we must have met somewhere – even though I had got all that just by looking at her (I couldn’t tell you how).
By the way, also giving the lie to the “religion as separator” thing, my (southern) Irish ancestors converted to protestantism generations back but remained associated with Irish nationalism and its analogues anyway, becoming active about as soon as that became realistic in the nineteenth century. (My great uncle Leopold even made it into footnotes and more in the history books.)
February 25, 2013 at 10:10 pm
Some good points, particularly about the linguistic difference existing at the time of settlement.
I know gaelic persisted more in the highlands of Scotland, but I had thought the lowlanders were also gaelic-speakers who just assimilated quicker to speaking english.
March 2, 2013 at 11:27 pm
You were misinformed about the lowlanders, but that is anyway not the issue that was involved in the “Ulster Plantation”.
First off, when the Gaels started coming into what became Scotland, in Argyll in the Dark Ages, there were already Brythonic Celts (Welsh type) as far north as the Glasgow-Edinburgh line, with Picts north of that, although there was no hard and fast boundary. The Picts may or may not have been Celts themselves.
By the time the wars of independence with England rolled around, things war far muddier. The Gaels had wiped out or assimilated the Picts, but not the Brythonic Celts. However, the Saxon invasions had got as far north as Edinburgh (which they founded), and pushed the Brythonic Celts in the region west into Galloway and adjacent parts. Also, Norman knights had settled and supported the Scottish kings, much of the north-east and many islands (Orkney, Shetland and even some of the Hebrides) were Norse (partly assimilating some Gaels), and merchants from across the North Sea had helped build up towns along the east coast.
When the Plantation happened, a few hundred years later, the lowlanders north of Edinburgh and south of the Norse areas had gone through the process you mistakenly supposed applied everywhere, of being de-Gaelised. However, the Galwegians had been de-Welshed (so to speak) and the Saxons of Lothian (south and south-east of Edinburgh) had acquired a distinctly Scottish identity, i.e. thinking of themselves as Scots rather than descendants of inhabitants of an English kingdom in the heptarchy of the Dark Ages. A highlander-lowlander division emerged, and also a border division (before Edward I, the border had been fairly peaceful and free of raids etc.).
As part of a programme of pacification, James I and VI moved a lot of people from either side of the border – where they had provided fuel for feuds, raids, etc. – to the troublesome province of Ulster, where the local people had just lost their leadership in the “Flight of the Earls” after being subdued. That killed two birds with one stone, by reducing the pool of potential trouble-makers on the borders and by refilling a partly depopulated trouble spot with outsiders unrelated to the potential trouble-makers there. They were mostly never Gaels, nor had their ancestors been, and it was no coincidence that people of that sort were chosen.
So, no, Ulster isn’t a case of one people splitting along religious lines, but of religious differences further hindering the mutual assimilation of two quite distinct peoples.
March 3, 2013 at 12:31 am
Interesting. I had thought the fiefdom of Normandy was created a very long time after the Picts disappeared (perhaps that’s a result of Robert Howard making them seem more ancient). And it seems a bit odd that the Anglo-Saxons would come to identify as Scots distinct from their English cousins just to the south, but if the “Scots” identity didn’t include the Gaels/Highlanders it makes more sense. I’m not sure what other historical events are comparable. Sectional identities around the time of the American civil war?
I’m also surprised to hear that the highlander/lowlander distinction took that long to emerge. I’m used to thinking of it as a fairly universal dichotomy a la James Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed”. Were there just not that many people in the highlands before?
March 3, 2013 at 1:17 am
In that description, I covered two milestones in the history leading up to the Plantation of Ulster:-
– The Dark Ages, when the Gaels started spreading out from the Kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll (roughly), beginning to obliterate the Picts.
– The wars with Edward I and his immediate successors, which consolidated Scottish identity (the last of the Norse rulers had only recently been driven out of nearby territories, and they still owned Shetland). These wars were fought by knights of continental origin on each side, as well as by the common people; the Scottish knights were descendants of those who had made their way north after the Norman Conquest of England and pledged fealty to the King of Scots for lands, well after the Dark Ages; they were still mostly Norman, though England had absorbed more others from later waves of knights arriving from all over to seek their fortune in a similar way. Robert the Bruce was one of these, like most of the contenders for the Scottish throne when the throne fell vacant (opening the way for English intervention). The Declaration of Arbroath – the Scottish “Declaration of Independence”, one of the earliest such in the world – rests part of its claim to Scotland on having wiped out the Picts, along with much fanciful history of varying reliability.
In terms of the life style needed, what with different kinds of agriculture working and that, the highlands were always different from the lowlands, but the very fact that the Gaels had only spread east in recent generations meant that a division took time forming. When it did, it was indeed by the process of the Gaelic lowlanders detribalising and adopting the ways of their neighbours from somewhat similar landscapes – and a cultural gap grew too, but only after about the time when Scotland first pulled together as a whole. Lowlanders in Sutherland (Norse) and Lothian (Saxon), for example, were among those neighbours themselves and never went through that, of course.
March 30, 2013 at 1:55 pm
[…] Anonymous chimed in to defend Fabio, suggesting the rest of us missed his point and were inappropriately irritated: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out […]
September 24, 2014 at 8:11 pm
Just in case that dropbox link ever dissappears, I should point out that the article is also available at PhDTree.
May 3, 2021 at 5:49 pm
That link is long dead, but gwern uploaded it again to his own site:
Click to access 2012-fox.pdf
He also chided me for not hosting it myself and linking to scihub:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-170#comment-1882364
The best I can say in my defense is that I was busy at the time I wrote that comment and just did a quick search to see if I could find it elsewhere before putting the url in scihub to post.
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