Irish absorption into whiteness helped sustain slavery rather than vice versa.

Evidence

In the combination of Southern planters and the “plain Republicans” of the North, the Irish were to become a key element. The truth is not, as some historians would have it, that slavery made it possible to extend to the Irish the privileges of citizenship, by providing another group for them to stand on, but the reverse, that the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery. The need to gain the loyalty of the Irish explains why the Democratic Party, on the whole, rejected nativism. It also explains why not merely slavery but the color line became so important to it. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Core connection to reader’s category-reclassification comparison project — the mechanism of a group buying protection by enforcing exclusion of another. — connects to: Irish ascension to whiteness resulted from strategic choice, not inevitability — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 35; The Irish freedom cause in America allied openly with slaveholding interests. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 75; Slavery functioned as the formal mechanism maintaining white racial hierarchy even for poor whites. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 382 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: This inversion — that admitting the Irish to whiteness was the load-bearing move for maintaining slavery — reframes the whole category-reclassification question: ascension into protection can itself be the instrument of deepening another group’s exclusion.

Broader Connections

• Slavery functioned as the formal mechanism maintaining white racial hierarchy even for poor whites. #complicates (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 382