Comment by skissane
4 years ago
> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
"White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white".
Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones.
This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"
When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
When did people "used to say that Irish weren't white"? Only really starting in the 1990s (with Noel Ignatiev's book) – by which time anti-Irish sentiment in the US was rather long gone. Nobody called Irish people "non-white" during the heyday of discrimination against them.
It was common post-immigration all the way until the civil rights movement.
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WASPS have long been happy to discriminate against Catholics.
They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.