Anti-Black racism bled back to Ireland even as Irish-Americans whitened.
Evidence
So it came to pass that events transpired contrary to the way Garrison had hoped; instead of the Irish love of liberty warming America, the winds of republican slavery blew back to Ireland. The Irish had faded from Green to white, bleached by, as O’Connell put it, something in the “atmosphere” of America. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 126
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Directly pay off the chapter’s core theses and the reader’s comparative frame for category reclassification.
Related
- Irish immigrants learned anti-Black hatred upon landing in America, not at home (similarity 0.84)
- English colonial ideology toward Native Americans and blacks was recycled from its Irish conquest (similarity 0.83)
- Irish absorption into whiteness helped sustain slavery rather than vice versa. (similarity 0.83)
- The Irish were the prototype white servants later absorbed into a white racial identity (similarity 0.82)
- Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory (similarity 0.81)
- Race mattered only after Irish replaced blacks, when blacks stopped undercutting (similarity 0.81)
- Irish ascension to whiteness resulted from strategic choice, not inevitability (similarity 0.81)
- The Irish freedom cause in America allied openly with slaveholding interests. (similarity 0.81)
- Irish admission to whiteness had to be earned, not guaranteed by skin color. (similarity 0.80)
- Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism (similarity 0.80)
- Being grouped with blacks increased Irish hostility toward them. (similarity 0.79)
- Black uplift worsened rather than eased Northern racial animosity (similarity 0.79)
- The English colonial repertoire against the Irish was reapplied to Indians and blacks (similarity 0.79)
- Historians deny that English contempt for the Irish poor was itself racism. (similarity 0.79)
- Irish peasants emigrated under conditions comparable to American slavery (similarity 0.79)