Book summary “How the Irish became White”: summary

Introduction

You live in a society where racial categories feel permanent, yet history shows these divisions are constantly constructed and contested. When you look at the nineteenth-century United States, you encounter a historical paradox that defines modern racial politics. An oppressed nation of Catholic immigrants, fleeing starvation and British tyranny, arrived in America only to become enthusiastic participants in the oppression of Black people.

Noel Ignatiev investigates this transformation in How the Irish Became White. Race is not a biological category but a socially assigned system of oppression. This system uniformly reduces all members of an oppressed group beneath the dominant class while offering conditional upward mobility to those willing to police the boundary.

You will see how Irish nationalists abandoned their abolitionist hero Daniel O'Connell to align with the Democratic Party and defend white supremacy. The book traces how Irish laborers used militant secret societies to gain job control on canals and railroads while trade unions enforced racial solidarity by excluding Black workers. You will examine the role of urban riots, political machines, and the psychological wages of whiteness in forging a new American identity.

• How did Irish immigrants transition from victims of British colonialism to agents of American racial domination?
• Why did radical exiles discard their revolutionary ideals once they reached the shores of the republic?
• What mechanisms allowed the white working class to exchange class solidarity for racial privilege?
• How did the state and the Catholic Church facilitate the Americanization of the Irish through the acquisition of whiteness?

1. Introduction to Racial Oppression

Race lacks a valid biological definition and functions instead as a socially assigned category tied to systems of oppression. Attempts to define race biologically lead to absurdities such as mixed-race families where parents and children fall into different categories.

Race is not a biological category but a socially assigned system of oppression that uniformly reduces all members of an oppressed group beneath the dominant class.

The Hallmark of Racial Oppression

The core mechanism of racial oppression is the reduction of all members of an oppressed group into a single, uniform social status located beneath every member of the dominant group. Because of this uniform reduction, even the most impoverished members of the white race share a higher social standing in certain respects than the most exalted individuals who are excluded from it.

Irish Immigrant Transformation

Irish immigrants escaping severe caste oppression and landlordism in Ireland rapidly adapted to the color-based hierarchy they encountered in America. Fleeing material conditions comparable to those of American slaves, the Irish arrived in a society where color determined social position. Without bearing responsibility for this pattern, you can see how they quickly adapted to it to advance their standing.

Upon arriving in American cities, Irish immigrants were crowded into poor districts alongside free Negroes, where they shared a common culture of the lowly before diverging. Irish- and Afro-Americans fought, socialized, occasionally intermarried, and both suffered scorn from the upper classes. Stock stage characters of the period lumped the drunken Pat and Bridget together with Jim Crow and Jim Dandy, raising speculation about racial amalgamation between them.

Becoming White as Strategy

The entry of the Irish into the white race was not an inevitable historical or biological outcome, but a deliberate strategy chosen to secure advantages in a competitive society. By entering the white race, the Irish ceased to be Green, gaining the ability to sell their labor piecemeal rather than for life, compete across all job spheres, and function as citizens without racially imposed restrictions.

Becoming white did not mean the Irish achieved universal wealth or elite social status, but rather secured basic civil rights and economic mobility. While many Irish remained poor and barriers to exclusive elite circles persisted despite milestones like John F. Kennedy's presidency, whiteness granted them democratic citizenship rights such as:

• voting;
• jury trials;
• freedom of residence.

2. O'Connell and the Antislavery Legacy

Daniel O’Connell used his immense popularity as Ireland's Liberator to campaign globally against slavery. He linked the Irish struggle for freedom to the abolition of the slave trade.

Daniel O’Connell campaigned globally against slavery and urged Irish-Americans to abandon pro-slavery politics, sparking a bitter transatlantic controversy.

O’Connell founded mass political agitation techniques and led campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Home Rule. He consistently denounced American hypocrisy regarding slavery, refusing to visit the United States while the institution existed there.

In 1830, when approached by a West India interest representative offering twenty-seven votes on Irish issues in exchange for his silence on slavery, O’Connell firmly refused the bargain.

The 1841 Irish Address

The Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America forced Irish immigrants to choose between supporting the color line and joining abolitionists. Drafted by black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, John A. Collins, James Haughton, and Irish abolitionists, the 1841 Address urged Irish-Americans to treat colored people as equals.

By July 1841, fifteen thousand people signed the document, including nine thousand signatures collected in Belfast. Sixty thousand total signers endorsed the appeal before Charles Lenox Remond brought it back to America. He presented it at Faneuil Hall in Boston on January 28, 1842, where four thousand people attended and immense public debate erupted.

Immigrant Backlash

Insecure about their precarious status as new immigrants, Irish-Americans defensively rejected foreign interference in American domestic affairs. Prominent Irish spokesmen in Philadelphia and religious leaders like Bishop John J. Hughes of New York argued that naturalized citizens had a duty to reject foreign directives concerning domestic policy. They feared that supporting abolitionism would jeopardize their hard-won acceptance by native-born Americans.

Bishop John J. Hughes declared it the duty of every naturalized Irishman to resist and repudiate the Address because it emanated from a foreign source.

The Southern Alliance and Clontarf

The movement for Irish Repeal in America forged an unnatural alliance between Irish nationalists and southern slaveholders who supported Home Rule to secure Irish votes for slavery. William Lloyd Garrison warned of a stupendous conspiracy trading southern support for Repeal in exchange for Irish votes protecting slavery. Robert Tyler, the slave-holding President's son, joined the Repeal movement in Washington and became its national leader.

Faced with financial threats from pro-slavery American Repealers, O’Connell ultimately distanced himself from American abolitionists and criticized William Lloyd Garrison. Later, the British government prohibited the massive demonstration at Clontarf in October 1843, and O’Connell surrendered to avoid bloodshed. John Mitchel, a leader of the Young Ireland movement who rejected O’Connell's policies, eventually emigrated to the U.S. and edited a pro-Confederate newspaper in Richmond.

3. White Negroes and Smoked Irish

Eighteenth-century Ireland endured a system of racial oppression through the Penal Laws. These rules reduced Catholics to an oppressed caste status.

The brutal Penal Laws in Ireland and subsequent economic displacement under the Act of Union drove diverse Irish immigrants into close contact with Black populations in American cities.

Penal Laws and Emigration

Judiciary officials in Ireland declared that the law did not recognize the existence of an Irish Roman Catholic. This anticipated Judge Taney's Dred Scott dictum that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect. By the mid-eighteenth century, only 7 percent of Irish land was held by Catholics, and 5 pounds was the maximum value allowed for a horse owned by a Catholic.

The Act of Union of 1800 dismantled the independent Irish economy and transformed Ireland into an agricultural supplier. This measure triggered mass emigration as British competition crushed domestic industries. From 1815 to the Famine, 800,000 to one million Irish sailed for North America, followed by 1.8 million immigrants in the decade 1845-1855.

Early nineteenth-century Irish immigrants were diverse in class, religion, and language. For instance:

• 27 percent of arriving Irish in 1820 were farmers;
• 22 percent were artisans;
• 10 percent were tradesmen and professionals;
• 21 percent were laborers.

Propinquity and Counter-Society

Upon arriving in American cities, you would find Irish immigrants thrown into close contact with Black people. Impoverished Irish and African-Americans lived side by side in districts like Moyamensing in Philadelphia, the Five Points in New York, and Boston.

A Philadelphia grand jury report and newspaper articles described squalid hovels like Jemmy Quinn's tavern in Small Street where Black and white individuals were crowded together promiscuously. Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail operated as a fortress of revolt and a cross-section of the proletariat. Between 1815 and 1824, 3,308 persons were committed for felonies, and 421 out of 1,248 men committed between 1818 and 1824 were listed as colored.

The Choice of Whiteness

Inside the Walnut Street Jail, unfree workers cooperated across racial lines to challenge prison authorities. On March 28, 1820, inmates led by convicts like William McIlhenny launched a general insurrection under the slogan "Liberty or Death!"

Thomas Branagan exemplified the profound ideological ambiguities of the Irish experience regarding slavery. Born in Dublin in 1774, he wrote the 1804 abolitionist work Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa. Later, he published Serious Remonstrances in 1805, warning against free Black populations and miscegenation before his death in Philadelphia in 1843.

Irish Americans ultimately chose the social and political privileges of whiteness over revolutionary solidarity with Black people. Their white skin made them merely eligible for the white race upon arrival, but they actively secured their admission into it.

4. The Transubstantiation of an Irish Revolutionary

Radical Irish exiles transformed into conservative local politicians who anchored their power in the Democratic Party by defending white supremacy and opposing abolition.

John Binns fled to America after participating in radical Irish and British politics of the 1790s. Despite his early democratic rhetoric, he eventually became a Philadelphia alderman and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party and the Constitution, which protected slavery.

Federalist Congressman Harrison Gray Otis delivered an 1797 speech warning against hoards of wild Irishmen, which spurred the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and inadvertently drove the Irish firmly into the Republican camp. Between 1789 and 1800, 55 percent of all those naturalized in Philadelphia were Irish. In Southwark, 73 percent of votes went to the Jeffersonian party.

Martin Van Buren constructed the Democratic Party to unite Southern slaveholders with Northern working-class constituencies. Because white supremacy defined American democracy, Jeffersonian notions of natural equality gave way to militant racial ideology to maintain this coalition. An 1833 traveler remarked that he had never met a Negro who was not an anti-Jackson man, reflecting the pervasive racial alignment of the period.

White Labor Radicals and Slavery

Radical figures like Mike Walsh, George Evans, and Seth Luther argued that Northern wage slaves suffered conditions as bad as or worse than Southern slaves. Instead of attacking all forms of bondage, they used this rhetoric to deflect abolitionism and ally with the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party. Mike Walsh was born in 1810 and later elected to Congress in 1852.

Mike Walsh organized the Spartan Association in New York, a rough amalgam of an Irish secret society, a political gang, and a workingman's club, and ultimately allied his radicalism with the Southern pro-slavery wing.

As states rewrote their constitutions to eliminate property requirements for white male suffrage, they simultaneously introduced explicit property or racial qualifications that stripped black men of the vote. This parallel process ensured that whiteness became the formal prerequisite for political participation.

Key constitutional milestones defined this exclusionary voting shift:

• 1821 for the New York Constitutional Convention introducing explicit property qualifications for black voters;
• 1837 and 1838 for the formal disenfranchisement of people of color in Pennsylvania.

At the 1841 People's Convention in Rhode Island, delegates led by Thomas Dorr refused to strike the word white from the proposed constitution, ultimately leading black citizens to defend the charter against the Dorrites.

Civil War and Draft Opposition

Because they lacked the substantial capital required to equip a family farm and preferred the protective community ties of Eastern industrial cities, Irish workers ignored calls for Western land reform. They clung to the Democrats because the party protected them from nativists and secured their racial status above black workers. Bishop Hughes opposed Thomas D'Arcy McGee's Irish Western colonization project, doubting Irish farming capabilities and fearing the loss of Catholic and urban political authority.

It required a $1,000 minimum to equip a family farm in the West. In 1844, Irish votes provided James K. Polk's margin of victory.

As the Union war effort shifted toward abolishing slavery, Irish soldiers and civilians expressed fierce disillusionment, arguing they had enlisted to preserve the Union rather than fight for black freedom. This resentment exploded into violent opposition against government policies.

The New York City riots of July 1863, misnamed draft riots, represented an insurrection by Irish workers against the war government that paralleled their widespread service in the Union army. Seth Luther died in 1863, marking the end of an era defined by continuous Democratic rule from 1828 to 1860.

5. They Swung Their Picks

Irish laborers utilized militant secret societies to gain job control on infrastructure projects while trade unions enforced white racial solidarity by excluding Black workers.

You can trace the roots of immigrant labor militancy to Irish organizations like the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen. Immigrant laborers on American canals and railways organized strikes, sent warning notices to contractors, and destroyed equipment of competing groups without formal union bureaucracies.

Along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1834, 1,800 Irish laborers divided into factions from Cork and Longford. They engaged in violent battles over job control that required military intervention. On January 24, 1834, 700 Longford men routed 300 Corkonians.

Post-Revolutionary American society increasingly equated freedom with whiteness and slavery with blackness. This created a bipolar system of color caste that degraded free African Americans. The Connecticut Colonization Society asserted in 1828 that individuals with African blood were permanently confined by birth to the lowest social station.

The influx of unskilled European immigrants into Northern cities generated severe labor competition for menial jobs previously held by Black workers. English traveler John Finch noted in 1843 that poor Irish immigrants were fierce opponents of the Black population because they directly competed for and seized menial employments.

White mechanics and artisans systematically excluded free Black youths from apprenticeships and trades. A survey by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1838 noted that 30 percent of 506 Black mechanics could not practice their trades due to prejudice. A later survey in 1856 showed that less than two-thirds of Black artisans followed their trades.

Students from Lane Seminary near Cincinnati reported in 1834 that a cabinetmaker who purchased his freedom was forced to quit his shop after white journeymen threw down their tools in protest. Early trade unions reinforced white racial solidarity by enforcing the exclusion of Black workers, making adherence to the color line a prerequisite for labor unity.

The historic 1835 Philadelphia general strike served as a crucial vehicle for assimilating Irish immigrant laborers into the American labor movement as white workers. In May 1835, 300 coal heavers on the Schuylkill River marched with a sword to shut down wharves demanding the ten-hour day. This action inspired a broader movement of up to 20,000 workers who participated in the Philadelphia general strike wave.

Irish gangs and benevolent societies systematically drove Black workers off the urban waterfronts, transforming docks into exclusive preserves for white labor. By 1855, 87 percent of New York City's 23,300 unskilled laborers were Irish immigrants, compared to 3 percent for Negroes.

The Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society, formed in New York in 1852, was exclusively Irish. It used strikes and force to ensure that dock work was reserved solely for its members and permitted white laborers.

6. The Tumultuous Republic

Jacksonian Philadelphia experienced systematic anti-Black riots driven by economic envy and political theories of mob action, while Black residents organized vigilance committees to survive.

Scholars documented nine major mob attacks against Black people in Philadelphia between 1834 through 1849. Seven occurred between 1834 and 1838. Rioters systematically targeted Black homes, churches, and businesses using pre-arranged signals and tools like axes and ropes while sparing nearby white properties marked with illuminating candles.

During the Flying Horse Riot of August 1834, a white mob tore down a popular multiracial merry-go-round, destroyed the African Presbyterian Church, and laid waste to over twenty homes. Two Black people were killed and upwards of twenty homes laid waste during the August 1834 riot.

Racial antagonism among white laborers was heavily fueled by economic envy and competition over scarce jobs rather than mere abstract prejudice. As economic stagnation and bad debts from the South paralyzed Philadelphia, poor Irish laborers blamed Black workers for taking jobs and undercutting wages. Riots frequently erupted when Black workers found employment or successfully maintained middle-class lifestyles.

An Irish woman on Gaskill Street pointed out a house to the mob, complaining that negroes were living there just like white folks. Despite severe poverty and shared living conditions in cramped alley houses, nineteenth-century Philadelphia lacked modern racial ghetto segregation. Speculators built cheap three-story trinity houses in narrow alleys where ten to twenty poor people of various ethnicities lived packed together. Irish immigrants, native poor, and African-Americans lived side-by-side, sharing wells and courtyards without strict ward segregation.

Runnel's Court contained six three-story brick houses where twenty-four families of whites and blacks lived packed together amid foul smells and filth. Thirty different occupations were pursued among ninety-two households on Gaskill Street in 1839. Seventy percent of American cities with over 20,000 people experienced major disorder between 1830 and 1865. Thirty-five major riots occurred in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston from 1830 to 1860.

Drawing on Machiavelli's concept of the tumultuous republic, publicists and participants viewed mob violence not as a subversion of law, but as a legitimate supplement to it. The pardoning power routinely excused convicted rioters, transforming disorder into an accepted political mechanism. The extreme weakness of amateur, volunteer-based municipal policing in antebellum Philadelphia left minorities entirely unprotected against organized mobs.

Philadelphia relied on a small force of constables and night watchmen paid mostly through fees rather than salaries, leaving vast suburbs unpatrolled. The city operated with one patrolman for every 3,352 inhabitants in Philadelphia in 1833, compared to one patrolman for every 434 persons in London in 1833. Twenty-four constables and 120 watchmen patrolled the city. Because the city lacked a professional police force and depended on citizen posses, authorities routinely stood aside and allowed white mobs to riot unchecked.

During the August 1834 riots, the mayor and police remained on the city line with their hands in their pockets, refusing to enter Moyamensing to stop the violence. State authorities and white society systematically denied Black residents the right to armed self-defense, treating any resistance as an intolerable provocation. While white citizens and Irish immigrants freely formed armed militias and street gangs, Black people were legally barred from the militia and arrested when they attempted to defend their homes or churches.

During the 1838 riots, thirty Black men armed with weapons were arrested at a Presbyterian Church under attack, while white rioters who burned Pennsylvania Hall faced virtually no convictions. Eighty-three riot-related charges between September 1841 and August 1843 produced sixty-eight indictments and six convictions. Due to constant threats of kidnapping by blackbirders, Philadelphia's Black community organized robust vigilance committees and rescue networks for self-preservation. Forty children were abducted in Philadelphia in one year and sixty another. The Philadelphia vigilance committee aided 9,000 fugitives between 1830 and 1860, a number far exceeding the official federal census figures.

7. From Protestant Ascendancy to White Republic

Hostility toward Irish immigrants in antebellum Philadelphia manifested through social snobbery, partisan conflicts, religious sectarianism, economic fears, and moral disagreements. Native-born Protestants viewed disorderly working-class Irish settlers with intense suspicion. Upper-class Whigs and native artisans feared the degradation of labor conditions. The association of Irish immigrants with the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church fueled political and religious paranoia.

Escalating nativist riots forced the establishment of professional police forces, while Irish political bosses like William McMullen built enduring machines aligned with the slave power.

In 1842, a Catholic teacher in Southwark was fired for refusing to read from the King James Bible. This sparked escalating controversies over Bible-reading in public schools.

The bloody riots of 1844 in Kensington and Southwark marked a turning point where armed Irish Catholics actively resisted nativist mobs. Nativist rallies provoked violent street clashes that escalated into the destruction of Irish homes and the burning of Catholic churches such as St. Michael's and St. Augustine's. Unlike earlier disturbances, the Irish fought back with firearms, leading the elite to realize that personal intervention could no longer maintain public peace.

During the Southwark riots, General George Cadwalader deployed troops who fired into the crowd with a cannon after being targeted with rocks, bricks, and gunshots.

• 100,000 citizens cheered a nativist parade on July 4, 1844.
• 20 people were killed in Kensington and Southwark combined, with perhaps a hundred seriously wounded.
• 2,000 soldiers patrolled the streets after the governor placed Philadelphia under martial law.

The inability of personal interventions to control urban violence forced Philadelphia's elite to abandon reliance on old voluntary watches. Authorities established a bureaucratized, professional police force to suppress unruly crowds and consolidate municipal jurisdictions. Although early police forces were often staffed by former nativist gang members, eventual consolidation placed a unified police force under mayoral command.

Following the riots, the city council authorized an armed force of 1,326 men by September 26. The 1845 state legislature act mandated at least one policeman for every 150 taxable inhabitants. The new 1850 police district assigned one policeman for every 400 inhabitants, commanded by a marshal.

William "Bull" McMullen embodied the Irish political triumph in Philadelphia by leveraging street-level gang violence, ballot-box stuffing, and patronage. Starting as a member of the Moyamensing Killers and a participant in the 1844 riots, McMullen mastered electoral manipulation and intimidation. He became a premier employment and legal agency for his Irish constituents.

During elections, McMullen's men and rival factions would line up on curbs to be counted multiple times. The best fighters would physically seize possession of the polls.

• McMullen was born in 1824.
• Richard Vaux appointed Samuel Ruggles as police commissioner in 1857.
• 5,500 eligible Black voters lived in Philadelphia by 1870 under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Irish immigrants and working-class whites consistently supported slavery and opposed abolitionism. It provided them with a distinct social rank and racial privilege above Black workers. Irish political organizations aligned with the Democratic Party, championed white supremacy, and served as street-level enforcers for the slave power.

In 1865, McMullen hired two Black men whose clothing emitted a foul cesspool odor to ride a desegregated streetcar line in order to provoke public opposition.

Congressman Samuel J. Randall partnered with local Irish bosses like William McMullen to anchor his political power. Randall facilitated the famous Compromise of 1877 by using his power as Speaker of the House to break northern Democratic filibusters, thereby restoring white-supremacist Redeemer governments in the South.

8. Historiography and the Wages of Whiteness

The term racism has become devalued and imprecise. Barbara J. Fields and the author argue that the term is applied indiscriminately to views of inferiority, views that groups must be held down because they are superior, and mere personal aesthetic preferences. This vagueness hinders clear thinking about racial oppression.

Traditional labor history romanticized the white working class and ignored its complicity in maintaining racial oppression.

Historians following the school of Herbert Gutman treated the white working class's acceptance of racial distinctions as peripheral. They substituted an abstract, idealized notion of the working class for lived historical realities, ignoring how white workers allied with capital and the Democratic Party to oppress black workers.

Herbert Gutman portrayed the United Mine Workers of America as an outpost of working-class solidarity by citing thousands of black members, while overlooking how white unionists systematically excluded black miners from desirable jobs and went on strike against their employment.

In 1900, 20,000 Negroes belonged to the UMW. Despite this membership, the union structure enforced a strict racial hierarchy.

The white working class adopts racial ideologies because its identity is constructed through a racial hierarchy. As argued by Steven Shulman and illustrated in debates over labor history, the white working class is composed of both whites and workers. Racial ideologies are not external to the working class. Workers adopt these ideologies because they exist and define themselves within a racial hierarchy.

White workers accepted the psychological and public benefits of whiteness at the expense of their own class interests. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, David Roediger explains that the white working class settled for being white because the pleasures of whiteness functioned as a public and psychological wage. The cost of this color line was debased republicanism and lifelong wage labor.

Anglo-America replicated the system of Protestant supremacy previously perfected by Britain in Ireland. Theodore W. Allen demonstrates in his research that when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, white people did not yet exist. European servants, tenants, and merchants were assigned a single status that exalted the meanest European over any nonwhite. Allen describes Anglo-America as Ulster Writ Large due to parallels such as suppressed family structures, religious persecution, and forced population removals.

The number of American slaves who gained manumission was greater than the number of Irish Catholics whose conversions to the Church of Ireland were officially recognized under the Protestant Ascendancy.

Conclusion

You live in a society where racial categories continue to divide the working class and prevent broad political solidarity.

The historical transformation of the Irish shows that whiteness is not a natural identity but a social construct forged through political choices. Irish immigrants faced severe oppression in their homeland and initially shared common ground with enslaved people in America. Yet they chose to secure their social standing and democratic rights by embracing the privileges of whiteness. This choice required them to actively distance themselves from Black workers and support white supremacy. You must understand how this historical precedent shapes modern economic competition and political alliances. When you evaluate political movements, you can apply several practical rules based on these insights.

1. Recognize that racial categories are historically constructed systems of oppression designed to divide working people rather than fixed biological traits.
2. Reject any political strategy that offers short-term material benefits or social status at the expense of broader solidarity with oppressed groups.
3. Examine how economic competition and labor organizations enforce racial boundaries to maintain inequality among workers.
4. Distinguish between genuine democratic movements that challenge structural power and political machines that trade in exclusionary identity politics.
5. Support uncompromising alliances across racial lines to dismantle systems of privilege that weaken collective working-class strength.

10 Key Ideas

1. Race functions not as a biological category but as a socially assigned system of oppression that uniformly reduces all members of an oppressed group beneath the dominant class.
2. Daniel O’Connell campaigned globally against slavery and urged Irish-Americans to abandon pro-slavery politics, sparking a bitter transatlantic controversy.
3. The brutal Penal Laws in Ireland and subsequent economic displacement under the Act of Union drove diverse Irish immigrants into close contact with Black populations in American cities.
4. Radical Irish exiles transformed into conservative local politicians who anchored their power in the Democratic Party by defending white supremacy and opposing abolition.
5. Irish laborers utilized militant secret societies to gain job control on infrastructure projects while trade unions enforced white racial solidarity by excluding Black workers.
6. Jacksonian Philadelphia experienced systematic anti-Black riots driven by economic envy and political theories of mob action, while Black residents organized vigilance committees to survive.
7. Escalating nativist riots forced the establishment of professional police forces, while Irish political bosses like William McMullen built enduring machines aligned with the slave power.
8. Traditional labor history romanticized the white working class and ignored its complicity in maintaining racial oppression.
9. White workers accepted the psychological and public benefits of whiteness at the expense of their own class interests.
10. The historical transformation of the Irish shows that whiteness is a social construct forged through political choices rather than a natural identity.