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Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity

Online ISBN:
9780814744130
Print ISBN:
9780814785027
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity

Jennifer Nugent Duffy
Jennifer Nugent Duffy
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Published online:
24 March 2016
Published in print:
2 December 2013
Online ISBN:
9780814744130
Print ISBN:
9780814785027
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

After all the green beer has been poured and the ubiquitous shamrocks fade away, what does it mean to be Irish American besides St. Patrick’s Day? This book traces the evolution of “Irish” as a race-based identity in the U.S. from the nineteenth century to the present day. Exploring how the Irish have been and continue to be socialized around race, the book argues that Irish identity must be understood within the context of generational tensions between different waves of Irish immigrants as well as the Irish community’s interaction with other racial minorities. Using historic and ethnographic research, the book sifts through the many racial, class, and gendered dimensions of Irish-American identity by examining three distinct Irish cohorts in Greater New York: assimilated descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants; “white flighters” who immigrated to postwar America and fled places like the Bronx for white suburbs like Yonkers in the 1960s and 1970s; and the newer, largely undocumented migrants who began to arrive in the 1990s. What results is a portrait of Irishness as a dynamic, complex force in the history of American racial consciousness, pertinent not only to contemporary immigration debates but also to the larger questions of what it means to belong, what it means to be American.

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