Letter to the Editor Re: Morrison

This is a letter to the editor of Time Magazine from an Irish young man after having read Toni Morrison’s “On the Backs of Blacks” in late 1993. It invokes many of the narratives of creation of white identity as seen in Jacobson.

To Whom It May Concern:

While I enjoyed many parts of Ms. Morrison’s piece about race talk, I felt as though she oversimplified the immigrant experience and what race talk really means for race as an entire concept. She gives us the examples of Gatsby and Stavros, and tells us that “only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete”. But she doesn’t make a connection that I’d like to make: that if assimilation is becoming white by attacking black, then anyone can become white, and if anyone can become white, white must not be as real a category as we think.

My grandfather was an Irish immigrant to the United States who lived in New York for 60 years after arriving. Every time we went to visit him he told us stories of how racially defined immigrant groups, even immigrant groups we now consider to be just “white”, used to be. We heard the narrative of he and his family being known as Irish and being discriminated against for it, and we heard how it slowly transitioned out of his Irishness (although, he still very strongly holds onto his Irish cultural identity) to his whiteness. I guess that’s what happened to a lot of people- their race became their culture once they were accepted into whiteness. And then, when I talk to my mom, his daughter, I realize that she’s so much less “Irish” than he was. Her Irishness lay in her culture and her history, not her identity. She’s white.

I believe she could have explored why something like this has happened, or given any hypotheses on why groups that were once racialized (the Irish, the Italians, the Jews) are now given the status of white no matter their immigration status. If whiteness is something that people can be at first barred from, and then later integrated and assimilated into, I don’t understand what that makes race. Can race even be real if the lines are so blurry, if people can move in and out so easily?