The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union. A Response to the Commentators

Abstract

Though Perry Curtis considers my article somewhat opaquely written, I really do not believe that he helps himself in striving for understanding. He chides me, for instance, for failing to list examples in my first paragraph of scholars who “have emphasized the fact and power of circumlocutions adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized.” But surely it should be possible for him to have the patience to read on two paragraphs where I do iterate three such instances (David Lloyd, Claire Wills, and Anne McClintock) in recapitulating the argument. More fundamentally, Curtis insists in reading into my article an assertion that within the period reviewed “the Irish could not possibly have been racialized by the British governing class because both peoples were white” (Curtis, p. 135). This is notwithstanding that I at no point make that argument; as Curtis himself notes, I reject the reduction of racism to chromatism and at numerous points suggest that concepts of racialization have been and can be fruitfully applied to historical analysis of British perceptions of Ireland. Curtis also accuses me of not paying attention to the sentiments of unionists such as Leopold Amery (p. 142) when I quote what I explicitly state to be an example of racialization in a letter by Leopold Amery (Peatling, pp. 128 29; Curtis ignores my analysis of its context). Yet Curtis still insists on suggesting that denial of racialization is, in fact, the subtext of my argument. He thus insists on reading a subtext opposed to what I actually say, thus refuting an argument that I nowhere advance. In offering this example of what he apparently has in mind by “scholarly” reading (p. 145), Curtis repeatedly misses the mark. Instead, the issue really between us, as John Belchem identifies, is the question of “the distance . . . between cultural sources [of anti-Irish prejudice] and the political decision-making process” at key moments in the nineteenthand twentieth-century periods under review (Belchem, p. 148). It is not my view that racialization, or anti-Irish prejudice, did not exist or had no political influence in those periods. In relation to the Irish famine, for instance, I suggest it may be of limited benefit to emphasize the influence of racialization on British government relief policy and British opinion toward Ireland (Peatling, p. 120). This is not to suggest that there was no such influence, merely that there were also other factors and that the role of this one factor may be exaggerated. While I criticize aspects of the recent work of Michael de Nie, it is legitimate to suggest that British government policy in the event of an equivalent humanitarian catastrophe in contemporary Britain may have been different and that the currency of racial ideologies may partly, but only partly, explain this difference. However, one should also take note of other recent research on the famine which may alter our understanding on this point. On the larger question, while both Curtis and I feel that anti-Irish prejudice did have a political influence on British policy, at least at certain times,