''-from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called -path breaking,- -seminal,- -essential,- a -must read.- How the Irish Became White is such a study.'' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst
The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country - a land of opportunity - they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person-s skin. Noel Ignatiev-s 1995 book - the first published work of one of America-s leading and most controversial historians - tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists.
