This is really poorly argued, to the point where it's clear you don't really know what you're talking about.
Yes, there was generally no legal category that distinguished between "settler-descended whites" and later European migrants. (Though it really depends on the time period.) But the point that Roediger et al make is that there were social gradations within a broad "white" category. "White" was understood to mean "not black and not red [i.e. American Indian]." Uner the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexican-Americans were classified as white. In fact the "white" category was so ambiguous in the nineteenth century that the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, who were not European at all, were legally classified as white in antebellum North Carolina, married white women, and owned slaves.
On your intermarriage argument that "'these laws were never applied to bar marriage between European ethnicities, like the Irish and settler-descended Anglo-Americans'." Yes, and in many Northern states there were no laws against the intermarriage of whites and blacks either! But obviously whites and blacks were considered separate races in the North regardless. Whatever the law unions of whites and blacks were exceptionally uncommon, just as in 1880 unions of Jews and WASPs or Italians and WASPs were exceptionally uncommon. (They occasionally occurred, obviously, because many things occur. There were also occasional white-black unions.) The existence or non-existence of laws prohibiting marriages between two groups doesn't really tell us if a group is considered white or not.
Your lynching evidence is extremely unconvincing. Lynching was overwhelmingly a Southern phenomenon but you don't have any data for immigrant/non-immigrant differentials in the South, so you look at the Midwest ... where the number of lynchings was so minuscule that making any point about the status of Irish/Italians/Jews etc from that data is extremely stupid. (The Tuskegee data source you cite says that in the entire 86-year period they cover, there were a total of 93 lynchings of white people total across the core Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, so in the entire Midwest about one lynching of a white person per year for that period. How can you possibly reason off of that? I thought you were a statistician of some kind!)
I could go on but this is just a terribly argued post. Irish/Italian/Jewish immigrants to the US really were in a liminal category between white and non-white. Anyone who's studied US history can tell you that! Read primary sources, like the Southern travelogues of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (who talks about how slaves often got better treatment than Irish laborers). There was a popular joke among slaves in the South: "My master is a great tyrant. He treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman."
You seem to take issue with pieces of extremely strong evidence such as legal classification as White, but you never articulate why, you just suggest they're poor for reasons you've left unstated. You also lie for some reason, as if we don't all have access to Google. In The Lives of Chang & Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America, we're told they were not classified as White, they were classified as non-White, even if they were treated well.
"Anyone who's studied US history can tell you that!"
Then why did you type up all these paragraphs without mentioning literally any evidence to believe your point? I provided tons of information that showed groups like Italians, the Irish, etc. were considered White and linked to sources in which this is argued cogently. Perhaps you could try doing the same instead of handwaving and lying.
Chang and Eng naturalized as U.S. citizens at a time when under the Naturalization Act of 1790 it was expressly limited to "free white persons." They appeared in the Census as white and married white women. So yes, they were classified as white. I appreciate that you just looked that book up but I encourage you to actually read it! Look at page 5. (Also, you should be a lot more careful about accusations of lying.)
The Chang and Eng thing is exactly why legal classification isn't very helpful in the nineteenth century context. You could be classified as white but not be considered white by anyone. Chang and Eng were classified as white but not considered white (though they were indeed treated as white). Same with most Mexican-Americans, mostly the same with Sephardic Jews in the South.
My point is simple: you don't have much domain knowledge here so think that "legally categorized as white" means "considered white." But that's not the case. Irish, Italians, Jews, and other ethnics were legally classified as white along with Mexicans, Syrians (Dow v. United States), and weird cases like Chang and Eng. But they were always treated as something between white and black.
Since you asked for some proof that they were considered something other than white in practice, I would just cite the following:
* There was exceptionally little intermarriage between ethnics and whites; Jews, Italians, and Irish were all highly endogamous in the nineteenth century US, intermarriage rates tended to be in the low single digits. (See for instance "The Incidence of Jewish Intermarriage in Europe and America.") Religion is part of this, of course.
* Restrictive covenants were widespread in restricting Irish and sometimes Jews from buying homes; there were also plenty of No Irish Need Apply rules. Relatedly American cities were extremely residentially segregated by immigrant group. There were push and pull factors here (whites didn't want to be with ethnics and ethnics didn't want to be with whites), but clearly neither saw the ethnics as "white."
* Famously quotas were placed on Jewish entrance into medical schools and into elite colleges for much of the twentieth century. See "The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940" for more on this.
* The 1924 immigration law which set quotas on immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Not something you see southern and eastern European migrants as generically "white."
You're a pretty smart guy and should focus on the things you know about. You just don't know much about this area.
> Chang and Eng naturalized as U.S. citizens at a time when under the Naturalization Act of 1790 it was expressly limited to "free white persons."
If you make one more comment that indicates you're ignorant of something you can Google, then you will just be banned from commenting. You can Google and, in about five seconds, find that they were given a special privilege, but still noted to be Asian.
"They appeared in the Census as white"
No, they did not. This is a matter of historical record that you're just lying brazenly about.
"and married white women"
Yes? Again, you seem to be intentionally ignorant. North Carolina's miscegenation law restricted marriage between Whites and Blacks—not Whites and Asians. If you want to see a miscegenation law that restricted marriage between Whites and Asians, look at one like Maryland's, which specifically forbade marriage between Whites and either of Blacks or Filipinos, or Nebraska's, which barred marriage between Whites and either of Blacks or Asians.
The simple fact is that you don't bother to even think about history, you just make sweeping assumptions about how laws worked, were interpreted, etc., and each easily debunked comment you make provides more evidence that you are intentionally lying. Your supposed evidence is laughable, as I've already preempted it in the essay you're commenting under; in fact, your comments are self-defeating! A NINA sign clearly indicates a *separate* discrimination regime beyond the White vs. non-White one.
Make one more easily debunked comment showing that you know nothing about this area and you are incapable of nuance, and you will be banned.
I don't know why you keep on accusing me of "intentionally lying." I cited the page number in the book that you brought up (The Lives of Chang & Eng). On page 5 it says that Chang and Eng were listed in the Census as white. If you don't believe me, here is the 1870 Census where Chang Bunker appears as a white male: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chang_Bunker_1870_census.png
It's OK to admit that you were wrong about something! In fact, it's good epistemic practice.
These were conjoined twins, but that doesn't mean they were one person. When I refer to Chang & Eng, the ampersand means something. You were materially wrong on the miscegenation point (and the book notes that they were regularly condemned in the press for their marriages on the basis of race!), and you remain materially wrong on the census and naturalization points, and I am tired of you thinking you can get away with lying.
On the Census point, before 1870, there was no "Chinese" category, and it was only added that year. At that time (due to the novelty of it) and before then, Chinese were regularly listed as White in records, but were still considered to be non-White persons. Before 1849, there were so few Chinese in America, that they were just an oddity. In Yunte Huang's Inseparable, he notes this, stating that the Chinese were just considered White for the Census, even if they weren't thought to be White.
After lots of Chinese came in, people got serious about the distinction and they were restricted and demarcated. You should know that if you read the referenced sources, so I can only conclude that by suggesting you've read them, you are indicting yourself as a liar.
The very first chapter of the book I referenced before notes that DESPITE naturalization nominally being reserved for "free white persons", it was de facto given out however locals wanted. It also notes that Chang & Eng were neighbors with the man who gave them their oaths and that they circumvented the law, not by being considered White, but by being friends with the people locally in charge of the matter.
That you decided to ignore all this in favor of saying that they were just considered White when they were explicitly noted to be considered non-White—as the book states repeatedly!—proves to me that you are a liar. You were warned, so you are now banned from commenting here.
20 men (outlaws) were lynched in 6 weeks in Montana territory in 1864, I believe. I don't think it was an isolated thing, though I just happen to recall it (with Wikipedia assist) from reading a book called "Empire of Shadows", that had a sidelight about vigilantism on the last frontier.
The author specifically mentions the Midwest as the place where he compares immigrant to non-immigrant white lynching rates. Montana is not in the Midwest, and there were also practically no "ethnic" whites (Irish/Italians/Jews/Slavs) there. So can't really be used to make a point about ethnic vs. non-ethnic white lynching rates.
There were lynchings in the West, though of a very different type than in the South – coterminous with all the other acts of vigilante justice that occurs in disorderly societies like the Wild West. Overall though, of the lynchings covered in the Tuskegee data about 85 percent occurred in former slave states in the South.
I think too, if I were hanging from a tree, maybe waiting for a horse to bolt out from under me, I’d find it difficult to consider that I was at least being lynched in a very different way …
Perhaps you mean that guilt was always known in the West but rarely or never? - in the South.
No, I more mean they were different social phenomena, Southern lynching was a key part of an absolutist racial order and thus was overwhelmingly directed against black people, while Western lynching was classic vigilante justice and didn't have much to do with race.
"Southern lynching was a key part of an absolutist racial order"
Can you avoid using nonsense terms like this? Stay in the real world in my comments section, not in the world of "absolute racial order[s]".
Lynching was something overwhelmingly done to people believed to be criminals, and given the known Black-White murder, rape, and rioting participation differences, coupled with poor state capacity in the recent past, it's frankly shocking that it didn't happen more.
Judging by the comments this post seems to have triggered a lot of really unintelligent people. I can see why, it's one of those pop-history factoids they've probably gone around smugly quoting to other people and now to see that it isn't actually true might come as a shock to them.
A few years ago a forty year old liberal Oregon white woman told my wife that her high school was not 100% white but was actually quite diverse because she had classmates of Italian and Greek descent.
"... this belief has no basis in reality; it is, at best, wordplay, and at worst, a lie."
It is a lie. I assume the motive for the lie is to dishonestly advocate for greater sympathy for black people, by promoting a false shared history of "blackness". Of course it is a lie.
Your entire argument rests on an error of conflating domains. As your own quotes demonstrate, the various European ethnicities were clearly considered to be at certain times to be wholely separate categories, with some in a shared "white" super category and others decidedly NOT (such as "tawny" instead). In a time when businesses could and did post signs like "No Blacks. No Dogs. No Irish", it's blatant that there was a SOCIAL equivalence made in the culture where Blacks and Irish occupied the same super category with Irish very much EXCLUDED from the dominant conception of "White". That there was still hierarchal ranking and differences in discrimination WITHIN that othered super category is NOT evidence that Irish were in fact instead in the White super category. Bluntly, when "Whites only" and "No Irish" signs existed simultaneously it's logically necessary to conclude that the Irish were excluded from being considered White in those contexts.
It is only logical however that LEGAL standards, which are more dependent on the ability to prove a fact in court, would be more reliant of observable gross physical characteristics rather than cultural subtleties. It is relatively easy to argue before a jury that someone of dark skin is not White and a reasonable person might conclude such based solely on sight, but it would have been much more difficult to establish based solely on sight to all members of a jury that a reasonable person could have the same level of confidence in guessing the exact ethnicity of someone of European descent. That courts ever had to actually issue rulings on whether a particular European ethnicity should be considered White or not legally rather proves that such a conclusion was very much in contention at the time and said ethnicity was in fact considered non-White by enough people that it was necessary for the law to overrule the existing practices of a substantial number of people. Your argument in that regard is rather like citing Hodges as proof that homosexuals were never considered sexual deviants and socially treated as sharing the same super category as pedophiles.
"Blacks and Irish occupied the same super category"
There is no reason to believe this. Again, I already noted, being a target for discrimination does not mean you're considered part of another race. The fact that there was separate White vs. non-White discrimination and anti-Irish discrimination speaks to the fact that they *were* considered White, not against it.
I'm not engaging in "wordplay", semantics are the core of analyzing meaning in written text and expressing arguments with precision and accuracy.
That the Irish were excluded under both whitelist and blacklist versions of exclusionary business policies ("Whites only" and "No Blacks, No Irish") clearly demonstrates that Blacks and Irish both occupied the !White set. I am not arguing that Irish ARE Black, but that Irish AND Black were at the time considered NOT WHITE. Your premise is FALSE, the historical fact is that discrimination against non-Whites INCLUDED discrimination against Irish, they were NOT separate discriminations.
That the courts were ever called upon to have to formally rule on whether any particular European ethnicity should be legally considered White or not, BY DEFINITION demonstrates that there WAS a significant social perception on both sides of that particular argument at that time and that both of those sides had sufficient legal basis for acting upon their differing social perception to enjoy some expectation of winning that case.
I repeat myself since you failed to address the point: you are essentially arguing that homosexuals eventually winning the legal right to marry somehow proves that they were never socially or legally regarded as belonging to the same "sexual deviants" category as pedophiles rather than sharing the "normal, socially acceptable sexuality" as heterosexuals that they (mostly) do now. You would be laughed out of the room if you wrote an article that "Gays were always Normal" upon such an argument, but you are using exactly that argument to insist that Irish were always White. Your premise is FALSE and your argument is logically invalid, even using only the information you have presented here as evidence.
Irish were not excluded under "Whites only" rules. This is the only relevant fact.
"you are essentially arguing that homosexuals..."
Nope. You can't substantiate this claim. If you want a better analogy, you could say that what I'm arguing is like arguing that gays were always considered to be human beings, because that's true. Similarly, the Irish have always been considered White, even if many disliked them.
Make another comment that indicates you cannot make a proper analogy and you're banned.
I'll save you the trouble. It's your Substack, if you want an echo chamber badly enough to ban people politely disagreeing with you, you can have one. Unsubscribed.
The discrimination against Irish is vastly overblown. The "No Irish need apply signs" were extremely rare at the time. Richard Jensen wrote an article about it (https://archive.is/MAfdo)
The index of job segregation in Philadelphia for Irish was roughly comparable to British immigrants and far below that of blacks. I wonder if he would say that British were also considered non-white
The business did not often post sings like "No Irish need apply" that's a myth. The whole discrimination against Irish is overblown. Read this article https://archive.is/MAfdo
And no, it does not logically follow that "Whites only" and "No Irish" existing simultaneously means Irish were excluded from the white category. It could be that the reasons for their exclusion were not related to their whiteness. They could be related ti Irish being catholic or being poor, rowdy immigrants for example. Meaning that someone who wants their business open only for whites, thinks that Irish are white but dislikes catholics would still have a "No Irish" sign.
Just a little lecture in logic there. But no, the discrimination against Irish wasn't as pervasive as you think and not comparable to blacks. In fact, the job segregation for Irish was roughly on par with the British.
There were even some cases classifying Indians as White (though I'd suspect an Indian who made it to American in the 19th or early 20th century is more likely to be upper-caste).
Irish certainly faced defacto discrimination in the 1850s and 1860s that was close to that of free blacks even though I concede your points on de jure prejudice. Even when my father got off the boat from Cobh in 1928 at Ellis Island, there certainly were jobs and boarding houses closed to him along with blacks and dogs. However I agree he was considered white. But he was, at least in name, Roman Catholic. FYI, my wife is Asian and I realize there certainly was a time we could not have married in much of the USA.
A famous lynching of ethnic whites with a "Italians, especially Sicilians, aren't exactly white" dimension took place in New Orleans.
“However, even though on a legal level both Northern and Southern Italians were considered to be white,[60] between 1890 and 1910, Sicilian-Americans made up less than 4 percent of the white male population, yet were roughly 40 percent of the white victims of Southern lynch mobs.”
I noted that in the article: "There were definitely notorious lynchings of Europeans, such as the 1891 New Orleans lynchings, in which eleven Italians were lynched for the alleged murder of the city’s Irish Catholic police chief, but there was no sustained regime of lynchings aimed at Europeans as a racial class."
Good article for summarizing the overreach regarding "mistreated" being equated to "treated as nonwhites" for Irish, Italians, etc.
That said, the Arab exception is pretty major. They aren't really considered white in any social sense today. Do you think any white nationalist is excited to welcome their fellow white Middle Eastern refugees?
Especially if you take Europe into account, they're definitely considered socially quite far removed from "normal" everyday European whites whereas Indians, Chinese, etc. are more integrated.
I think it depends heavily on the Arab in question and certain groups of Arabs will be much more likely to be treated as White than others. Most Syrians I personally know have blue eyes. I doubt they'd be thought of as non-White, but I also have a Persian friend who's a quarter Black, and I think he'd be visibly classified as Indian or something like that.
Yeah visually a lot of Arabs (and a nontrivial chunk of North Indians/Pakistanis) can pass for European but socially "white" is strongly associated with "European origin" and anecdotally people find it hilarious when I tell them that MENAs are classified as white.
If you asked people what race the 9/11 hijackers were, no one except US Census pedants like us would say "white".
I’m a white nationalist living in Europe and yes, I would welcome Middle Eastern Christians whites, such as Christian Lebanese with crusader ancestry or Egyptian Copts, though better still would be to liberate their homelands from Muslim invaders.
See the likes of Raymond Ibrahim and Justin Amash for Middle Eastern Christian people that both normal everyday Europeans and many white nationalists would consider to be white.
The racial separation between “Arabs” such as Syrians is really a religious separation , since these “Arabs” were religiously and culturally arabised by muhamadan conquests from the Arabian peninsula. Before that , the rest of Asia Minor, the Levant, greater Syria and much of North Africa was part of Christendom and the Eastern Roman Empire . Were it not for muhamadanism cutting off the Eastern Christendom from the rest of Christendom in Europe, the grouping of white would naturally extend further east and parts of North Africa.
It is muhamadanism that causes Middle Eastern people to act as enemies towards Europeans .
Furthermore , both normal mainstream Europeans and many white nationalists would consider there to be separation and disassociation between Bosnians and Muslim
Albanians and other Europeans, since though the former two groups are white by racial ancestry they have chosen to ally themselves with the foreign, hostile, non-white civilisation of Islam and thus have disassociated themselves from white civilization. So most white nationalists would not welcome Bosnians or Muslim Albanians , despite welcoming Greeks and Romanians and Bulgarians as their white brothers.
Of course some white nationalists reject Christianity due to the mistaken belief that Christianity forbids racial or ethnic in-group preference, but this is not true and was not believed by Christian leaders and theologians before liberalism as shown by statements from Aquinas and Calvin and several church fathers quoted in “Who is my neighbour” by Thomas Achord and this can also be seen from the Bible Matthew 15 : 20-28 and 1Timothy 5:8.
I had the same reaction as Steven to your citing of court cases affirming the whiteness of certain ethnicities as evidence that these were socially considered white – the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time. From your representation of the opposing view, in the opening paragraph: "Therefore, at some point, they must have 'become White'". Could these court cases, which are all from the early 20th century, not be seen as examples of these ethnicities 'becoming White'?
The quote from Benjamin Franklin was published in 1751. It is the only piece of evidence in your essay where a historical figure directly circumscribes the boundaries of Whiteness. In my view, this is the strongest evidence you provide in either direction, and absent other sources I can only assume it to be representative of the opinions of Franklin's contemporaries.
I want to make sure I'm interpreting you correctly. The claim you're disputing is not that some Europeans were considered non-White in the mid-1700s. Rather, that the Irish, Italians etc. were considered non-White at the time they began immigrating to the US. Do you believe that there was a point in history where these groups were largely considered non-White? From the rest of your essay, I suspect your answer will be no. If that's the case, I would need to see evidence that the Benjamin Franklin quote is not representative of broader societal perceptions of Whiteness at the time. The court cases from 150ish years later only serve to strengthen my belief that the definition of Whiteness has undergone some change over time.
"absent other sources I can only assume it to be representative of the opinions of Franklin's contemporaries."
It's clearly not, given what naturalization laws the Founding Fathers enacted in 1790.
"the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time."
The decisions regarding Europeans all very strongly affirmed that they were White. That the courts had a question doesn't make it so that the status is dubious. In cases involving Europeans, the witnesses were always completely unambiguous about the people in question being White, whether they were from racially-exclusive groups like Masonic lodges or were anthropologists, biologists, etc.
"Do you believe that there was a point in history where these groups were largely considered non-White?"
No. And even Franklin calling them swarthy is being very literal about skin color. He didn't regard them as another totally separate race.
>I had the same reaction as Steven to your citing of court cases affirming the whiteness of certain ethnicities as evidence that these were socially considered white – the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time.
The relevant point is that European ethnicities DIDN'T have to contest their legal whiteness status in court.
Great piece. Very insightful and well articulated!
As someone who is white and has experienced being called “not really white” or “not white white” due to my European heritage I’ve thought about this a lot. I think this all boils down to definitions. It makes a difference whether we’re defining and thinking of whiteness as a cultural label or a geographical label. For the latter, white is everyone who is indo-European. That has an added convenience as it ties to language (as all European languages come from one proto Indo European language). And if you’re going with geographical definition then your skin tone will vary, but you’ll still be white. An Armenian will be darker than a Swede, but doesn’t matter and they’re both white. Hell, a Sicilian will be darker than a Lombard, but not only are they both white, they’re both Italian! So it has this additional convenience on top of linguistic heritage. So this one is much more sensible definition.
If you go just by skin colour, then you’re obviously narrowing down to a smaller subset of people which will make this a much more complicated exercise and lead to some silly results where people from the same region or even city might not all be the same thing. That might be more normal in post-nationalist countries (like Brazil for e.g. where there are milk white Brazilians and black Brazilians) but in European countries where identity is rooted in ethnicity, language and blood, it’s very odd.
That "geographical" definition doesn't make any sense, as there are plenty of whites who don't speak an IE language, e.g. Finns, Basques, Turks and Assyrians, and also plenty of IE speakers who aren't white, e.g. the African diaspora in the Americas.
The skin-colour definition also makes no sense, as no reasonable person would consider a Swedish albino and a Zulu albino to belong to the same race. People just refer to race as "skin colour" because they want to pretend that it's skin deep.
If we want to have an objective definition that makes sense, we can just run a clustering algorithm on a bunch of human genomes and pick a cluster that matches our ideas of whiteness most closely. But we don't really need that, as in most cases it's obvious who is white and who isn't.
Language I said was an additional convenience to geography; you’re right that it only covers like 97% of speakers/languages. I should add that another label for white peoples is Caucasian, which implies everyone from the caucuses to the end of the Iberian peninsula. Also geographical.
All that to say geographical is best we have as skin colour varies even within small regions as I said, and we don’t have genetic info as you said.
Why would the African diaspora of the americas be considered white? They’re obviously not.
I mean yes there are and had been people who are believers of non-whites of slaves,Irish and/or eurosoutherners, semitic (jewish) race, etc... but it was never a legal doctrine of the U.S. also appealing to disconsensus to say race doesn't exist is a fallacious argument, the important thing are genetics and the differences that arise from it in individuals and groups in order to truthseek this issue
Hey, love reading your work, I know you covered ' Race, IQ and Nations', but I feel that it would be more useful to go through the specific talking points and the I'll use of data
This is really poorly argued, to the point where it's clear you don't really know what you're talking about.
Yes, there was generally no legal category that distinguished between "settler-descended whites" and later European migrants. (Though it really depends on the time period.) But the point that Roediger et al make is that there were social gradations within a broad "white" category. "White" was understood to mean "not black and not red [i.e. American Indian]." Uner the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexican-Americans were classified as white. In fact the "white" category was so ambiguous in the nineteenth century that the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, who were not European at all, were legally classified as white in antebellum North Carolina, married white women, and owned slaves.
On your intermarriage argument that "'these laws were never applied to bar marriage between European ethnicities, like the Irish and settler-descended Anglo-Americans'." Yes, and in many Northern states there were no laws against the intermarriage of whites and blacks either! But obviously whites and blacks were considered separate races in the North regardless. Whatever the law unions of whites and blacks were exceptionally uncommon, just as in 1880 unions of Jews and WASPs or Italians and WASPs were exceptionally uncommon. (They occasionally occurred, obviously, because many things occur. There were also occasional white-black unions.) The existence or non-existence of laws prohibiting marriages between two groups doesn't really tell us if a group is considered white or not.
Your lynching evidence is extremely unconvincing. Lynching was overwhelmingly a Southern phenomenon but you don't have any data for immigrant/non-immigrant differentials in the South, so you look at the Midwest ... where the number of lynchings was so minuscule that making any point about the status of Irish/Italians/Jews etc from that data is extremely stupid. (The Tuskegee data source you cite says that in the entire 86-year period they cover, there were a total of 93 lynchings of white people total across the core Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, so in the entire Midwest about one lynching of a white person per year for that period. How can you possibly reason off of that? I thought you were a statistician of some kind!)
I could go on but this is just a terribly argued post. Irish/Italian/Jewish immigrants to the US really were in a liminal category between white and non-white. Anyone who's studied US history can tell you that! Read primary sources, like the Southern travelogues of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (who talks about how slaves often got better treatment than Irish laborers). There was a popular joke among slaves in the South: "My master is a great tyrant. He treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman."
You seem to take issue with pieces of extremely strong evidence such as legal classification as White, but you never articulate why, you just suggest they're poor for reasons you've left unstated. You also lie for some reason, as if we don't all have access to Google. In The Lives of Chang & Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America, we're told they were not classified as White, they were classified as non-White, even if they were treated well.
"Anyone who's studied US history can tell you that!"
Then why did you type up all these paragraphs without mentioning literally any evidence to believe your point? I provided tons of information that showed groups like Italians, the Irish, etc. were considered White and linked to sources in which this is argued cogently. Perhaps you could try doing the same instead of handwaving and lying.
Chang and Eng naturalized as U.S. citizens at a time when under the Naturalization Act of 1790 it was expressly limited to "free white persons." They appeared in the Census as white and married white women. So yes, they were classified as white. I appreciate that you just looked that book up but I encourage you to actually read it! Look at page 5. (Also, you should be a lot more careful about accusations of lying.)
The Chang and Eng thing is exactly why legal classification isn't very helpful in the nineteenth century context. You could be classified as white but not be considered white by anyone. Chang and Eng were classified as white but not considered white (though they were indeed treated as white). Same with most Mexican-Americans, mostly the same with Sephardic Jews in the South.
My point is simple: you don't have much domain knowledge here so think that "legally categorized as white" means "considered white." But that's not the case. Irish, Italians, Jews, and other ethnics were legally classified as white along with Mexicans, Syrians (Dow v. United States), and weird cases like Chang and Eng. But they were always treated as something between white and black.
Since you asked for some proof that they were considered something other than white in practice, I would just cite the following:
* There was exceptionally little intermarriage between ethnics and whites; Jews, Italians, and Irish were all highly endogamous in the nineteenth century US, intermarriage rates tended to be in the low single digits. (See for instance "The Incidence of Jewish Intermarriage in Europe and America.") Religion is part of this, of course.
* Restrictive covenants were widespread in restricting Irish and sometimes Jews from buying homes; there were also plenty of No Irish Need Apply rules. Relatedly American cities were extremely residentially segregated by immigrant group. There were push and pull factors here (whites didn't want to be with ethnics and ethnics didn't want to be with whites), but clearly neither saw the ethnics as "white."
* Famously quotas were placed on Jewish entrance into medical schools and into elite colleges for much of the twentieth century. See "The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940" for more on this.
* The 1924 immigration law which set quotas on immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Not something you see southern and eastern European migrants as generically "white."
You're a pretty smart guy and should focus on the things you know about. You just don't know much about this area.
> Chang and Eng naturalized as U.S. citizens at a time when under the Naturalization Act of 1790 it was expressly limited to "free white persons."
If you make one more comment that indicates you're ignorant of something you can Google, then you will just be banned from commenting. You can Google and, in about five seconds, find that they were given a special privilege, but still noted to be Asian.
"They appeared in the Census as white"
No, they did not. This is a matter of historical record that you're just lying brazenly about.
"and married white women"
Yes? Again, you seem to be intentionally ignorant. North Carolina's miscegenation law restricted marriage between Whites and Blacks—not Whites and Asians. If you want to see a miscegenation law that restricted marriage between Whites and Asians, look at one like Maryland's, which specifically forbade marriage between Whites and either of Blacks or Filipinos, or Nebraska's, which barred marriage between Whites and either of Blacks or Asians.
The simple fact is that you don't bother to even think about history, you just make sweeping assumptions about how laws worked, were interpreted, etc., and each easily debunked comment you make provides more evidence that you are intentionally lying. Your supposed evidence is laughable, as I've already preempted it in the essay you're commenting under; in fact, your comments are self-defeating! A NINA sign clearly indicates a *separate* discrimination regime beyond the White vs. non-White one.
Make one more easily debunked comment showing that you know nothing about this area and you are incapable of nuance, and you will be banned.
I don't know why you keep on accusing me of "intentionally lying." I cited the page number in the book that you brought up (The Lives of Chang & Eng). On page 5 it says that Chang and Eng were listed in the Census as white. If you don't believe me, here is the 1870 Census where Chang Bunker appears as a white male: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chang_Bunker_1870_census.png
It's OK to admit that you were wrong about something! In fact, it's good epistemic practice.
OK, I've had enough.
These were conjoined twins, but that doesn't mean they were one person. When I refer to Chang & Eng, the ampersand means something. You were materially wrong on the miscegenation point (and the book notes that they were regularly condemned in the press for their marriages on the basis of race!), and you remain materially wrong on the census and naturalization points, and I am tired of you thinking you can get away with lying.
On the Census point, before 1870, there was no "Chinese" category, and it was only added that year. At that time (due to the novelty of it) and before then, Chinese were regularly listed as White in records, but were still considered to be non-White persons. Before 1849, there were so few Chinese in America, that they were just an oddity. In Yunte Huang's Inseparable, he notes this, stating that the Chinese were just considered White for the Census, even if they weren't thought to be White.
After lots of Chinese came in, people got serious about the distinction and they were restricted and demarcated. You should know that if you read the referenced sources, so I can only conclude that by suggesting you've read them, you are indicting yourself as a liar.
The very first chapter of the book I referenced before notes that DESPITE naturalization nominally being reserved for "free white persons", it was de facto given out however locals wanted. It also notes that Chang & Eng were neighbors with the man who gave them their oaths and that they circumvented the law, not by being considered White, but by being friends with the people locally in charge of the matter.
That you decided to ignore all this in favor of saying that they were just considered White when they were explicitly noted to be considered non-White—as the book states repeatedly!—proves to me that you are a liar. You were warned, so you are now banned from commenting here.
In old books, everything’s a race. Can can’t see that this has much to do with a binary divide.
Poles too
20 men (outlaws) were lynched in 6 weeks in Montana territory in 1864, I believe. I don't think it was an isolated thing, though I just happen to recall it (with Wikipedia assist) from reading a book called "Empire of Shadows", that had a sidelight about vigilantism on the last frontier.
The author specifically mentions the Midwest as the place where he compares immigrant to non-immigrant white lynching rates. Montana is not in the Midwest, and there were also practically no "ethnic" whites (Irish/Italians/Jews/Slavs) there. So can't really be used to make a point about ethnic vs. non-ethnic white lynching rates.
There were lynchings in the West, though of a very different type than in the South – coterminous with all the other acts of vigilante justice that occurs in disorderly societies like the Wild West. Overall though, of the lynchings covered in the Tuskegee data about 85 percent occurred in former slave states in the South.
I think too, if I were hanging from a tree, maybe waiting for a horse to bolt out from under me, I’d find it difficult to consider that I was at least being lynched in a very different way …
Perhaps you mean that guilt was always known in the West but rarely or never? - in the South.
No, I more mean they were different social phenomena, Southern lynching was a key part of an absolutist racial order and thus was overwhelmingly directed against black people, while Western lynching was classic vigilante justice and didn't have much to do with race.
"Southern lynching was a key part of an absolutist racial order"
Can you avoid using nonsense terms like this? Stay in the real world in my comments section, not in the world of "absolute racial order[s]".
Lynching was something overwhelmingly done to people believed to be criminals, and given the known Black-White murder, rape, and rioting participation differences, coupled with poor state capacity in the recent past, it's frankly shocking that it didn't happen more.
Oh, I see. Yes, a significant percentage in the South were that.
Though I would argue it was not a place of order after the war.
Jews were certainly in Montana territory as throughout the west, albeit necessarily not in great numbers.
Cremieux coming in hot with the receipts. Excellent essay and research.
Fantastic article. I'm very jealous that you can write something of this quality in <1 hr.
Judging by the comments this post seems to have triggered a lot of really unintelligent people. I can see why, it's one of those pop-history factoids they've probably gone around smugly quoting to other people and now to see that it isn't actually true might come as a shock to them.
A few years ago a forty year old liberal Oregon white woman told my wife that her high school was not 100% white but was actually quite diverse because she had classmates of Italian and Greek descent.
"... this belief has no basis in reality; it is, at best, wordplay, and at worst, a lie."
It is a lie. I assume the motive for the lie is to dishonestly advocate for greater sympathy for black people, by promoting a false shared history of "blackness". Of course it is a lie.
Your entire argument rests on an error of conflating domains. As your own quotes demonstrate, the various European ethnicities were clearly considered to be at certain times to be wholely separate categories, with some in a shared "white" super category and others decidedly NOT (such as "tawny" instead). In a time when businesses could and did post signs like "No Blacks. No Dogs. No Irish", it's blatant that there was a SOCIAL equivalence made in the culture where Blacks and Irish occupied the same super category with Irish very much EXCLUDED from the dominant conception of "White". That there was still hierarchal ranking and differences in discrimination WITHIN that othered super category is NOT evidence that Irish were in fact instead in the White super category. Bluntly, when "Whites only" and "No Irish" signs existed simultaneously it's logically necessary to conclude that the Irish were excluded from being considered White in those contexts.
It is only logical however that LEGAL standards, which are more dependent on the ability to prove a fact in court, would be more reliant of observable gross physical characteristics rather than cultural subtleties. It is relatively easy to argue before a jury that someone of dark skin is not White and a reasonable person might conclude such based solely on sight, but it would have been much more difficult to establish based solely on sight to all members of a jury that a reasonable person could have the same level of confidence in guessing the exact ethnicity of someone of European descent. That courts ever had to actually issue rulings on whether a particular European ethnicity should be considered White or not legally rather proves that such a conclusion was very much in contention at the time and said ethnicity was in fact considered non-White by enough people that it was necessary for the law to overrule the existing practices of a substantial number of people. Your argument in that regard is rather like citing Hodges as proof that homosexuals were never considered sexual deviants and socially treated as sharing the same super category as pedophiles.
"Blacks and Irish occupied the same super category"
There is no reason to believe this. Again, I already noted, being a target for discrimination does not mean you're considered part of another race. The fact that there was separate White vs. non-White discrimination and anti-Irish discrimination speaks to the fact that they *were* considered White, not against it.
Try to avoid engaging in wordplay.
I'm not engaging in "wordplay", semantics are the core of analyzing meaning in written text and expressing arguments with precision and accuracy.
That the Irish were excluded under both whitelist and blacklist versions of exclusionary business policies ("Whites only" and "No Blacks, No Irish") clearly demonstrates that Blacks and Irish both occupied the !White set. I am not arguing that Irish ARE Black, but that Irish AND Black were at the time considered NOT WHITE. Your premise is FALSE, the historical fact is that discrimination against non-Whites INCLUDED discrimination against Irish, they were NOT separate discriminations.
That the courts were ever called upon to have to formally rule on whether any particular European ethnicity should be legally considered White or not, BY DEFINITION demonstrates that there WAS a significant social perception on both sides of that particular argument at that time and that both of those sides had sufficient legal basis for acting upon their differing social perception to enjoy some expectation of winning that case.
I repeat myself since you failed to address the point: you are essentially arguing that homosexuals eventually winning the legal right to marry somehow proves that they were never socially or legally regarded as belonging to the same "sexual deviants" category as pedophiles rather than sharing the "normal, socially acceptable sexuality" as heterosexuals that they (mostly) do now. You would be laughed out of the room if you wrote an article that "Gays were always Normal" upon such an argument, but you are using exactly that argument to insist that Irish were always White. Your premise is FALSE and your argument is logically invalid, even using only the information you have presented here as evidence.
Irish were not excluded under "Whites only" rules. This is the only relevant fact.
"you are essentially arguing that homosexuals..."
Nope. You can't substantiate this claim. If you want a better analogy, you could say that what I'm arguing is like arguing that gays were always considered to be human beings, because that's true. Similarly, the Irish have always been considered White, even if many disliked them.
Make another comment that indicates you cannot make a proper analogy and you're banned.
I'll save you the trouble. It's your Substack, if you want an echo chamber badly enough to ban people politely disagreeing with you, you can have one. Unsubscribed.
Interesting choice! Instead of trying to support your point, you jumped ship.
This guy is wrong anyway.
The discrimination against Irish is vastly overblown. The "No Irish need apply signs" were extremely rare at the time. Richard Jensen wrote an article about it (https://archive.is/MAfdo)
The index of job segregation in Philadelphia for Irish was roughly comparable to British immigrants and far below that of blacks. I wonder if he would say that British were also considered non-white
The business did not often post sings like "No Irish need apply" that's a myth. The whole discrimination against Irish is overblown. Read this article https://archive.is/MAfdo
And no, it does not logically follow that "Whites only" and "No Irish" existing simultaneously means Irish were excluded from the white category. It could be that the reasons for their exclusion were not related to their whiteness. They could be related ti Irish being catholic or being poor, rowdy immigrants for example. Meaning that someone who wants their business open only for whites, thinks that Irish are white but dislikes catholics would still have a "No Irish" sign.
Just a little lecture in logic there. But no, the discrimination against Irish wasn't as pervasive as you think and not comparable to blacks. In fact, the job segregation for Irish was roughly on par with the British.
Good post, and just as further evidence look at this list of naturalisation cases and note what *isn't* on there - any cases related to European immigrants like Irish or Italians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#Racial_prerequisite_cases
There were even some cases classifying Indians as White (though I'd suspect an Indian who made it to American in the 19th or early 20th century is more likely to be upper-caste).
Irish certainly faced defacto discrimination in the 1850s and 1860s that was close to that of free blacks even though I concede your points on de jure prejudice. Even when my father got off the boat from Cobh in 1928 at Ellis Island, there certainly were jobs and boarding houses closed to him along with blacks and dogs. However I agree he was considered white. But he was, at least in name, Roman Catholic. FYI, my wife is Asian and I realize there certainly was a time we could not have married in much of the USA.
America is basically White Germans and Irish, with some English and a little of Italians.
A famous lynching of ethnic whites with a "Italians, especially Sicilians, aren't exactly white" dimension took place in New Orleans.
“However, even though on a legal level both Northern and Southern Italians were considered to be white,[60] between 1890 and 1910, Sicilian-Americans made up less than 4 percent of the white male population, yet were roughly 40 percent of the white victims of Southern lynch mobs.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
I noted that in the article: "There were definitely notorious lynchings of Europeans, such as the 1891 New Orleans lynchings, in which eleven Italians were lynched for the alleged murder of the city’s Irish Catholic police chief, but there was no sustained regime of lynchings aimed at Europeans as a racial class."
It was Sicilians and Southern Italians only. Italians as a whole, not really. You need to be specific.
Good article for summarizing the overreach regarding "mistreated" being equated to "treated as nonwhites" for Irish, Italians, etc.
That said, the Arab exception is pretty major. They aren't really considered white in any social sense today. Do you think any white nationalist is excited to welcome their fellow white Middle Eastern refugees?
Especially if you take Europe into account, they're definitely considered socially quite far removed from "normal" everyday European whites whereas Indians, Chinese, etc. are more integrated.
I think it depends heavily on the Arab in question and certain groups of Arabs will be much more likely to be treated as White than others. Most Syrians I personally know have blue eyes. I doubt they'd be thought of as non-White, but I also have a Persian friend who's a quarter Black, and I think he'd be visibly classified as Indian or something like that.
Yeah visually a lot of Arabs (and a nontrivial chunk of North Indians/Pakistanis) can pass for European but socially "white" is strongly associated with "European origin" and anecdotally people find it hilarious when I tell them that MENAs are classified as white.
If you asked people what race the 9/11 hijackers were, no one except US Census pedants like us would say "white".
Yep. Some Persians are White too
Persians aren't Arabs. Full Persians may be classified as White but quarter blacks no.
I’m a white nationalist living in Europe and yes, I would welcome Middle Eastern Christians whites, such as Christian Lebanese with crusader ancestry or Egyptian Copts, though better still would be to liberate their homelands from Muslim invaders.
See the likes of Raymond Ibrahim and Justin Amash for Middle Eastern Christian people that both normal everyday Europeans and many white nationalists would consider to be white.
The racial separation between “Arabs” such as Syrians is really a religious separation , since these “Arabs” were religiously and culturally arabised by muhamadan conquests from the Arabian peninsula. Before that , the rest of Asia Minor, the Levant, greater Syria and much of North Africa was part of Christendom and the Eastern Roman Empire . Were it not for muhamadanism cutting off the Eastern Christendom from the rest of Christendom in Europe, the grouping of white would naturally extend further east and parts of North Africa.
It is muhamadanism that causes Middle Eastern people to act as enemies towards Europeans .
Furthermore , both normal mainstream Europeans and many white nationalists would consider there to be separation and disassociation between Bosnians and Muslim
Albanians and other Europeans, since though the former two groups are white by racial ancestry they have chosen to ally themselves with the foreign, hostile, non-white civilisation of Islam and thus have disassociated themselves from white civilization. So most white nationalists would not welcome Bosnians or Muslim Albanians , despite welcoming Greeks and Romanians and Bulgarians as their white brothers.
Of course some white nationalists reject Christianity due to the mistaken belief that Christianity forbids racial or ethnic in-group preference, but this is not true and was not believed by Christian leaders and theologians before liberalism as shown by statements from Aquinas and Calvin and several church fathers quoted in “Who is my neighbour” by Thomas Achord and this can also be seen from the Bible Matthew 15 : 20-28 and 1Timothy 5:8.
Albanians and Bosnians aren't White. Spaniards aren't either.
The only White groups are : Brits, German, French, Northern & Central Italians, Poles, Dutch/Belgians/Flemish, some Irish, and Scandinavians.
I had the same reaction as Steven to your citing of court cases affirming the whiteness of certain ethnicities as evidence that these were socially considered white – the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time. From your representation of the opposing view, in the opening paragraph: "Therefore, at some point, they must have 'become White'". Could these court cases, which are all from the early 20th century, not be seen as examples of these ethnicities 'becoming White'?
The quote from Benjamin Franklin was published in 1751. It is the only piece of evidence in your essay where a historical figure directly circumscribes the boundaries of Whiteness. In my view, this is the strongest evidence you provide in either direction, and absent other sources I can only assume it to be representative of the opinions of Franklin's contemporaries.
I want to make sure I'm interpreting you correctly. The claim you're disputing is not that some Europeans were considered non-White in the mid-1700s. Rather, that the Irish, Italians etc. were considered non-White at the time they began immigrating to the US. Do you believe that there was a point in history where these groups were largely considered non-White? From the rest of your essay, I suspect your answer will be no. If that's the case, I would need to see evidence that the Benjamin Franklin quote is not representative of broader societal perceptions of Whiteness at the time. The court cases from 150ish years later only serve to strengthen my belief that the definition of Whiteness has undergone some change over time.
"absent other sources I can only assume it to be representative of the opinions of Franklin's contemporaries."
It's clearly not, given what naturalization laws the Founding Fathers enacted in 1790.
"the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time."
The decisions regarding Europeans all very strongly affirmed that they were White. That the courts had a question doesn't make it so that the status is dubious. In cases involving Europeans, the witnesses were always completely unambiguous about the people in question being White, whether they were from racially-exclusive groups like Masonic lodges or were anthropologists, biologists, etc.
"Do you believe that there was a point in history where these groups were largely considered non-White?"
No. And even Franklin calling them swarthy is being very literal about skin color. He didn't regard them as another totally separate race.
>I had the same reaction as Steven to your citing of court cases affirming the whiteness of certain ethnicities as evidence that these were socially considered white – the fact that this had to be settled in court suggests rather that this was contested at the time.
The relevant point is that European ethnicities DIDN'T have to contest their legal whiteness status in court.
Great piece. Very insightful and well articulated!
As someone who is white and has experienced being called “not really white” or “not white white” due to my European heritage I’ve thought about this a lot. I think this all boils down to definitions. It makes a difference whether we’re defining and thinking of whiteness as a cultural label or a geographical label. For the latter, white is everyone who is indo-European. That has an added convenience as it ties to language (as all European languages come from one proto Indo European language). And if you’re going with geographical definition then your skin tone will vary, but you’ll still be white. An Armenian will be darker than a Swede, but doesn’t matter and they’re both white. Hell, a Sicilian will be darker than a Lombard, but not only are they both white, they’re both Italian! So it has this additional convenience on top of linguistic heritage. So this one is much more sensible definition.
If you go just by skin colour, then you’re obviously narrowing down to a smaller subset of people which will make this a much more complicated exercise and lead to some silly results where people from the same region or even city might not all be the same thing. That might be more normal in post-nationalist countries (like Brazil for e.g. where there are milk white Brazilians and black Brazilians) but in European countries where identity is rooted in ethnicity, language and blood, it’s very odd.
That "geographical" definition doesn't make any sense, as there are plenty of whites who don't speak an IE language, e.g. Finns, Basques, Turks and Assyrians, and also plenty of IE speakers who aren't white, e.g. the African diaspora in the Americas.
The skin-colour definition also makes no sense, as no reasonable person would consider a Swedish albino and a Zulu albino to belong to the same race. People just refer to race as "skin colour" because they want to pretend that it's skin deep.
If we want to have an objective definition that makes sense, we can just run a clustering algorithm on a bunch of human genomes and pick a cluster that matches our ideas of whiteness most closely. But we don't really need that, as in most cases it's obvious who is white and who isn't.
Language I said was an additional convenience to geography; you’re right that it only covers like 97% of speakers/languages. I should add that another label for white peoples is Caucasian, which implies everyone from the caucuses to the end of the Iberian peninsula. Also geographical.
All that to say geographical is best we have as skin colour varies even within small regions as I said, and we don’t have genetic info as you said.
Why would the African diaspora of the americas be considered white? They’re obviously not.
Very true. I agree. Lombards aren't really Italian tho, we are Celtic/Germanic and thus more French and Swiss.
Lombards are Germanic in terms of ancient ethnicity, yes. Italian as far as citizenship or statehood.
I mean yes there are and had been people who are believers of non-whites of slaves,Irish and/or eurosoutherners, semitic (jewish) race, etc... but it was never a legal doctrine of the U.S. also appealing to disconsensus to say race doesn't exist is a fallacious argument, the important thing are genetics and the differences that arise from it in individuals and groups in order to truthseek this issue
Hey, love reading your work, I know you covered ' Race, IQ and Nations', but I feel that it would be more useful to go through the specific talking points and the I'll use of data
I recently came across this smug race denialist
https://youtu.be/CntemqZAvEs?si=8YOCYBsz4k65ZpRm
Could you make a post debunking him, it would be beneficial for future race realists imo, thanks.