'I did imagine...we had ceased to be whitewashed negroes': The racial formation of Irish identity in nineteenth-century Ireland and *America

When scholars analyze the roots of nineteenth-century Irish-American racial prejudice, they often turn to Daniel O'Connell. An influential Irish agitator who expanded his winning of Catholic "emancipation" into a movement to repeal Ireland's Union with Great Britain, O'Connell is famous for scolding those Irish-American Repealers who opposed his support of the abolition of slavery by saying, "It was not in Ireland you learned this cruelty." This statement has often been taken as proof that the Irish lacked a white racial structure of feeling before emigrating to racially stratified America. By quoting a portion of O'Connell's lament that American Whigs persisted in treating Irish Americans like "whitewashed negroes" despite their having "thrown off all traces of the colour of servitude," my dissertation title intends to suggest that despite their colonized status, the Irish did indeed conceive of themselves as white Europeans, and by extension as racially superior to enslaved Africans. This is not to say that the Irish lived their "whiteness" in the same way as English or Anglo-Americans Their "inbetween" colonial and initial American status as simultaneously white and racially inferior ensured a certain ambivalence in their experience and expression of whiteness. Both in Ireland and in America, then, Irish whiteness contained traces of the rhetorics of white supremacy and of solidarity among the oppressed, with one or the other dominating depending upon the context. I begin by concentrating on the racial formation of identity in Ireland between the 1800 Act of Union of Britain and Ireland and the mid-century famine that reached its peak in "black '47." I then move to America with the famine refugees, noting how their reception by native whites and blacks and their efforts to assimilate by asserting a white identity demonstrated both continuities with and differences from the racial identity and attitudes that they had formed in Ireland. My study ends in America in the 1880s.