What Happened to Irish America?
Removed by modI think the New Deal only happened in its paltry form due to the communist and socialist movements at the time and there were some gains to be had for non-whites, but I do agree with much of the following in substance, I think:
The New Deal worked—for white people. People of color were systematically and specifically excluded. And while some Irish priests marched with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, others spoke of defending their urban parishes from black “infiltration.” As the Irish left the subway tunnels, mills, and nursery wards for the middle and upper middle class, maybe we held hard to the wrong things. Step dancing classes and children’s names with complicated Irish spelling, but not the old neighborhoods’ practice of shared advancement. Donations to the Irish Studies Departments at prestigious colleges, but not commitment to the on-ramps that did us so much good.
It wasn’t just a problem with the racial discrimination in the New Deal (and to be fair, that was more about getting Southern whites on board than it was about Irish-Americans in the northeast), it’s a larger problem in social democracy policy wherein subsidizing programs that give bourgeois-lite institutions to the working class have a tendency to be interpreted by many of them that they are aligned with the bourgeoisie and its interests. This is really common with home ownership; I see a lot of working class folk who seem to think that them having a house with a mortgage is fundamentally the same as a capitalist’s factory or office building.