Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American IdentityJenniferNugent Duffy. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity Jennifer Nugent Duffy. New York: New York University Press, 2014.The Irish have long occupied an uncertain position in the and ethnographic history of the United States. Variously vilified, romanticized, demeaned, and eventually celebrated over the course of American history, the collective ideas and ideals surrounding American Irishness have prompted much scholarly work to determine how and to what extent the Irish have been woven into the American tapestry. Jennifer Nugent Duffy's aptly-named book contributes a focused study of Irish identity that simultaneously reinforces other works in the field while upsetting the conventional narrative of Irish acceptance in the contemporary United States.More than an eye-catching pun title, Who's Your Paddy}, serves to investigate the question of Irish identity in the context of twentieth-century American society. While other scholars have focused on the racialization of Irish immigration and settlement (Matthew Frye Jacobson and David Roediger foremost among them), their focus has primarily been centered on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which scientific racism seemed to enjoy a powerful, if temporary, ubiquity in American (and Western) intellectual culture. Duffy's book shifts the timeline to focus on the continued racialization of Irish identity from the twentieth century onward, demonstrating the interactions between Irish immigrants and those Americans who continued to judge the Irish through the lens of race well after the boundaries of whiteness had supposedly shifted to firmly include the Irish within its fickle parameters.The book documents the general experience of Catholic Irish arrivals to Yonkers, New York from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, though there is special emphasis on the last five decades. Duffy categorizes the generations of Irish who settled in Yonkers over the past century into three distinct migratory waves: descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants, the suburbian white flighters who left New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, and a group of primarily undocumented immigrants who began to arrive in the 1990s. Each successive wave encounters challenges to immediate social acceptance that are inevitably couched in the language of race. Duffy finds that, through the assimilatory process in which Irish immigrants and their descendants become an established part of the social landscape in Yonkers, a specter of racial hazing projected by American nativists serves as a surveillance device to bring newcomers into line in the idealized environment of the suburbs. …