'...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...

For sixty years Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of 'whiteness'-a social fiction that has for centuries been an unmitigated disaster for all working class people, including the white ones. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere. In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the explosive guilt trips of the Weather Underground and recounts which kind of strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana to...