Defying the exclusionary homogeneity of Irish whiteness: mixed-race children in Irish industrial schools in the twentieth century

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses the findings from my PhD research of an autoethnographic investigation of the construction and negotiation of racial identity(ies) for the researcher and 15 women, all of mixed Black-Irish descent, who grew up in the Irish institutional care system in the twentieth century. It describes how the combined effects of being racialized, parentless, and institutionalized resulted in a subjective (re)construction of a racial self that accommodated the social reality of how we were perceived within the predominately monoracial nation. Our racial identities were palimpsestic, being written and rewritten, according to contextual and relational factors, and alternated between biological and cultural modes of discourse on identification and ascription. I argue that the negotiation of our mixedness is not adequately encapsulated by existing explanatory frameworks that rely on the familial setting to ground mixed-race identity formation.