HISTORIOGRAPHY Flashcards

Question

Brodkin on how labouring occupations impacted the definition of whiteness Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race In America, Rutgers University Press (1999)

Answer 1

Brodkin writes that the European immigrants who "took their places as the masses of 'unskilled' and residentially ghettoized industrial workers … found that they were being classified as members of specific and inferior European races, and for almost half a century, they were treated as racially not-quite-white."

Answer 2

- Hefland suggests that Irish become white, as opposed to 'not white' was conscious effort to elevate and protect their economic status

Answer 3

"White" workers performed more skilled labor, while non-skilled, hard and dirty work was reserved for non-white workers, including "Hunkies" or "Italians" or other European groups not yet enfolded into whiteness as fully white.

Answer 4

It was by no means clear that the Irish were not white

Answer 5

Irish-Americans instead treasured their whiteness | , as entitling them to both political rights and to jobs .

Answer 6

But to go from the fact that Irish workers really fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past - If jobs were important, why stress competition with blacks and not whites?

Answer 7

Kerby Miller has written that "Often without capital or skills, unaccustomed to work practices in their adopted country, the Famine Irish usually entered the American work force at the very bottom, competing only with free Negroes or-in the South-with slave labor for the dirty, backbreaking, poorly paid jobs that white native Americans and emigrants from elsewhere disdained to perform. Even ifthey aspired to higher status, most Irish males probably worked at least part of their lives in North America as canal, railroad, building construction, or dock laborers. Those who rose later to more remunerative or respectable employment remembered bitterly that as 'Labouring men' they were 'thought nothing of more than dogs ... despised and kicked about' in the supposed land of equality." 109 Milleris right overall. Yetin spite ofthe misery to which the Irish immigrants were subjected-misery so severe that it was estimated that their average length of life after arrival was six yearsllO-no system of caste confined them to the pick and shovel in the way color discrimination kept black workers as "hewers of wood and drawers of water."

Answer 8

The pychological wages of Irish whiteness were sometimes of the sort based on rational, if horribly constrained, choices - HOW CAN ONE KNOW THAT?

Answer 9

'To become Caucasian in the 1920s and after, then, was not simply to be white; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white.'

Answer 10

- Passing of quota acts meant reduced traffic from 'undesirable' white races and less attention given to the divisions - Civil Rights movement/anti-Jim crow at mid-century made whiteness into 'a monolith of privelege' against blackness. More binary distinctions, different white races were, again, less relevant - By 1920s-1960s, Irishness not a visual trait but a cultural one.

Answer 11

He also provides an intriguing IF HIGHLY SPECULATIVE psychological argument that as the country industrialized, the increasingly controlled and disciplined white population came to view blacks as their former, uninhibited selves

Answer 12

``` Indeed, he suggests that in focusing too heavily on "class and economics," Roediger is overly deterministic and misses "the full complexity of whiteness in its vicissitudes." ``` Warranted? In chapter four, Roediger: But to go from the fact that Irish workers really fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past'

Answer 13

In an argument further developed by Ignatiev, Roediger asserts that "it was by no means clear that the Irish were white." They present little evidence, however, that most Ameri-cans viewed the Irish as non-white 'notable lack of precision'

Answer 14

- looks at how the Irish 'became white' - Oppressed race left homeland and began to engage with the system of race heirarchy in America - 'To enter the white race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society.' - To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres 'white skin made them eligible but did not guarantee them admittance' - AGREES WITH ROEDIGER

Answer 15

'potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws' 'differences of nativeness - culture, language and religion, and perceptions of race - though not necessarily whiteness, operated to keep them apart' 'by manipulating definitions and putting words into historical subjects' mouths, the Irish became white because historians, not their contemporaries, first made them 'not white' before making them 'white' to much psychoanalysis by Roediger Overall, problems make it 'a problematic category for historical analysis'

Answer 16

At another level, the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of Euro- pean descent shared a common whiteness that made them distinct from those deemed to be not white

Answer 17

“’Common knowledge’ rationales, appeal[ing] to popular, widely held conceptions of races and racial divisions”,[7] and “scientific evidence” rationales, which “justified racial divisions by reference to the naturalistic studies of humankind”

Answer 18

"whiteness did not equal sameness. Jewish, Italian, and Irish Americans continued to view the world through distinct prisms, and to interpret a range of political, social, and cultural issues differently from each other. In grafting race so tightly onto ethnicity, historians have lost perspective on the diversity among and between different white urban dwellers in midcentury America.

Answer 19

To pose the well-known question of "how the Irish became white" presupposed that the Irish did become white. But this presupposition introduced an often fatal element of circularity into the argument

Answer 20

whiteness is a valuable concept for understanding how groups considered white generally benefited in American society with regard to wage, occupational mobility, and acceptance The conclusion is that a white racial identity has been overstated but does exist, and ethnicity in the form of cultural patterns, values, and behaviours can still be relevant over generations

HISTORIOGRAPHY Flashcards

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