WHITENESS began not as a racial or ethnic or national identity emerging from a people’s shared experience, but as a legal construct. Whiteness was designed to distinguish between poor English-speaking men brought to North America as indentured servants (after their communal lands were privatized by law and force) and people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved by the wealthy.

Neither group could vote before or after the “American revolution,” but the former Englishmen (and English-speaking lowland Scots) could eventually “earn” their freedom, buying their way into citizenship by acquiring land after paying off their bond. On the other hand, abducted Africans were doomed to spend their whole lives in slavery; in the rare event they were “granted” freedom by their enslavers, they still would not be welcomed as participants in civil society.

The intent and effect of legislating a new division of people was to create an overseer class, a class of poor “white” men who believed that they had an interest in enforcing the enslavement of Africans and their descendants.  Laws granted them a degree of privilege, the promise of greater wealth and freedom if they made society (including the torture of Black people and the eradiation of Indigenous people) continue to run smoothly.

Whiteness has its antecedent in the British colonial policy in Ireland which put displaced lowland Scots in the position of enforcing British rule. Ireland’s long internal conflicts are religious only to the degree that the Irish brand of Catholicism maintains elements of indigenous relationship to the land, while the Presbyterianism of the ethnically Scottish inhabitants of Ireland is sparser, more conventionally monotheistic, and bears no association with holy places or Pagan festivals. Many of the poor European people conscripted into enforcing slavery were members of this English-speaking Scottish diaspora, displaced again from the first land they were used to colonize, relocated to the American south.

FOR LATER generations of European immigrants, becoming white was a privilege granted only after passing through a painful process of assimilation, sacrificing identity, memory, custom, and language. They also had to agree to participate in the enforcement of white supremacism. James Baldwin wrote:

    “No one was white before he/she came to America.  It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”

My great-grandparents came from a colonized country where their language was outlawed and children were taken from their families to be indoctrinated in English.  My great-grandfather had taken up arms against the occuppiers.   My great-grandmother spoke no English even decades after the last other Irish speakers she knew had died.  They lived on the top of the highest hill in Lynn, MA, so they could always look down and see if anyone was coming for them.

It was the Ku Klux Klan that did come, burning a cross at High Rock Tower to try to drive the Irish out.  My grandfather watched while my great-grandfather kept him quiet and still.  To the Klan, the Irish were not white. Nor were they white to the Anglo-American Christians, including the famously liberal Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who vilified the Irish “race” a generation before.

My grandfather spoke no Irish. He worked for General Electric. In his lifetime an Irish-American became President. And he cursed the first and second generation immigrants from Europe who were not yet white – the Jews whose whiteness remains contested among the alt-right now.

So what is whiteness?