← Back to context

Comment by skissane

4 years ago

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.

8 comments

skissane

Reply
aliqot  4 years ago

It was common post-immigration all the way until the civil rights movement.

  • skissane  4 years ago

    I don't agree that it was in any way "common". Can you cite a 19th century (or even pre-1990s) source calling Irish people "non-white"?

    • karpierz  4 years ago

      Benjamin Franklin[0]:

      > Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.

      tl;dr: Saxons and the English are White People. Other Europeans are "swarthy".

      [0]: https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/1...

      3 replies →