The Irish were the prototype white servants later absorbed into a white racial identity

Evidence

However, in the lower orders, where the mist was thickest and where received wisdom has taught us to expect Blackness, the contemporary spectrum was more complex: the natives of the New World obtained a savage red, European labor a mottled gray. Above their heads it was a simpler matter: the ruling classes stood in dramatic, white relief. But between ourselves and the specter of that American past are the historical and racial fables that obscure the related exploitations and oppressions of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian peoples during the intervening 200 years. As a means of obliterating these events, the myth of white solidarity arose and came to dominate American sensibility. It was for the most part a lie but a terribly seductive one. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racism against Europeans like the Irish predated color-based slavery; The Negro and whiteness were invented in Europe through scholarly effort; English colonial ideology of savagery extended from the Irish to Africans and natives (+4 more)

Related

• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations (similarity 0.86)
• Racial ideology developed to obscure the true class origins of white laborers (similarity 0.85)
• White racial solidarity was an ideology masking the origins of the white working class (similarity 0.85)
• Irish whiteness required excluding blacks from any shared occupation and erasing memory (similarity 0.84)
• English colonial ideology of savagery extended from the Irish to Africans and natives (similarity 0.84)
• English racialism predated and shaped the proletarianization of the Irish (similarity 0.82)
• European immigrants became white by projecting surrendered preindustrial freedoms onto blacks. (similarity 0.82)
• English employers explained Irish wages through racial hierarchy beliefs. (similarity 0.82)
• White Trinidadian elites misread cross-racial solidarity emerging beneath their rule (similarity 0.82)
• Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism (similarity 0.81)
• Irish peasants emigrated under conditions comparable to American slavery (similarity 0.81)
• Early unions operated as schools teaching Irish whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• European immigrants became white by projecting lost freedoms onto racialized others. (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Black racism bled back to Ireland even as Irish-Americans whitened. (similarity 0.81)
• European racial ideology predates colonial encounters and was extended to non-Europeans later (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Racism against Europeans like the Irish predated color-based slavery #corroborates (0.75)
• English colonial ideology of savagery extended from the Irish to Africans and natives #expands (0.75)
• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427
• Sugar’s labor demands drove England from Irish to West African slavery #complicates (0.55)
• The Negro and whiteness were invented in Europe through scholarly effort #expands (0.50)