LogFAQs > #972495773

ellis123 posted...

Because the difference in whiteness rarely has to do with the color of someone's skin. The Irish weren't considered white for a long time, and one look at an Irishman will tell you how absurd that is.

The Irish have always been considered white. That whole "the irish used to not be white" concept is a modern one made up by people trying to push the idea that "whiteness" is completely divorced from skin color:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/

The relevant scholarly literature seems to have started with Noel Ignatievs book How the Irish Became White, and taken off from there. But what the relevant authors mean by white is ahistorical. They are referring to a stylized, sociological or anthropological understanding of whiteness, which means either fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock, or, in the more politicized version, an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States.

Those may be interesting sociological and anthropological angles to pursue, but it has nothing to do with whether the relevant groups were considered to be white.

Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered white in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to whites-only schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that whites went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage passed as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose whiteness has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.

You can also get a sense of who was thought to be white by considering whether Americans considered a particular marriage to be an interracial marriage; only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage as late as 1958. Yet Anglo-American whites were not ostracized by polite society for marrying Irish Americans or Italian Americans. Famous Jewish Hollywood stars such as George Burns not only married Gentiles, but openly partnered with them in their careers. We know that light-skinned Cubans were considered white at least as of 1950 because (despite the trepidations of the studio) the public accepted Lucy and Ricky, in a way they would never have accepted a black-white or Chinese-white couple. American Indians were considered non-white, but if they assimilated and married whites their children were generally accepted as part of white society. Did you know that Will Rogers was 9/32 Cherokee?