Protestant Irish in America coined ‘Scotch-Irish’ to distance themselves from Famine Catholics.

Evidence

From the time they began emigrating to about 1850, Irish Protestants were known in America simply as Irish. As Wittke notes, “The sharp distinction between Irish and Scotch-Irish developed in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century for reasons that were primarily American. After the great influx of Irish immigrants and the problems created by this sudden boiling over of the melting pot, the Scotch-Irish insisted upon differentiating between the descendants of earlier immigrants from Ireland and more recent arrivals.” Thus, as a portion of the Irish diaspora became known as “the Irish,” a racial (but not ethnic) line invented in Ireland was recreated as an ethnic (but not racial) line in America. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Compare to Naqvi’s Home Boy and the Mumbai category dynamics — but more relevantly a clean model of how in-group boundary-drawing follows migration waves, connects to the reader’s category-reclassification comparison.