Existing comment:
Mid-late 1800s Irish immigration:
Large number of mostly poor Irish immigrate to the US, settling in crowded urban areas. In writing and imagery, the press portrays them as brutish and apelike, echoing the terms applied to African Americans during the same period.
"White American laws concerning who could immigrate, be naturalized, and be enslaved accepted Irish people's pale skin color and European roots as evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that Irish immigrants experienced on the job, and the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, suggested that they were 'racially' inferior to white Anglo-Americans and thus somehow nonwhite, perhaps even 'black'."
-- Catherine M Eagan, " 'White',' if 'not quite': Irish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Novel," Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies (2001)
1838 Frederick Douglass escapes slavery:
Born into slavery in 1818, Douglas [sic] will become a leading and renowned intellectual. His eloquent writings and speeches oppose slavery and challenge assumptions about racial hierarchies, and still resonate today.
"One drop of Teutonic blood is enough to account for all good and great qualities occasionally coupled with a colored skin; and on the other hand, one drop of negro blood, though in the veins of a man of Teutonic whiteness, is enough of which to predicate all offensive and ignoble qualities."
-- Frederick Douglass, The Color Line (1880)
1866 Ku Klux Klan founded:
The Klan uses elaborate rituals and disguises to terrorize blacks and their supporters during the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South. It recruits poor whites by playing on the idea that their economic troubles are caused by recently freed blacks.
"The most important thing about races was the boundaries between them... [I]f one were a member of the race at the top, then it was essential to maintain the boundaries that defined one's superiority, to keep people from the lower categories from slipping surreptitiously upward."
-- Paul R Spickard, in Maria PP Root, ed, Racially Mixed People in America (1992). |