Jennifer Nugent Duffy. Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity

Within the Irish American canon, the well-documented historical landscape between the Great Famine and the Anglo-Irish Treaty contrasts with peripheral dimensions of the immigrant experience that still await rigorous scrutiny. Wading into the relatively uncharted waters of the late twentieth century, Jennifer Nugent Duffy joins a recent groundswell of interest in expanding traditional Irish American historical frameworks to include their most modern incarnations. Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity aims to contextualize Irish arrivals to Yonkers, New York, during the 1990s within a larger Irish American immigrant settlement continuum, and seeks to address a range of broader race-based considerations in the process. In this study, the charged question—“Who's Your Paddy?”—serves as a conceit by which to map different manifestations of twentieth-century Irishness in America and engage the supplementary topic of Irish American racial privilege. The term is also intended to function as a lens through which to broach the expansive landscape of ethnic Irish identity. To these ends, Duffy employs a “Good Paddy/Bad Paddy” binary to frame a multilayered analysis. She distinguishes undocumented 1990s Irish newcomers from earlier waves of assimilated ethnic Irish, and from those who “made the ‘white flight’ to Yonkers”: Irish immigrants who came to New York in the 1950s and 1960s before relocating to more economically viable hinterlands in Yonkers (p. 50). Underpinning these ethnic waves lay an Irish Catholic schema rooted in the previous century, Duffy argues; a formula for successful assimilation based on qualities of “order, hard work, and family, which corresponded to a specific configuration of race, class, and gender” (p. 50). By the early twentieth century, she continues, loyal subscription to American citizenship privileges trumped lingering negativities associated with the Irish. Popular identification with “lace-curtain” (p. 67) representations showcased “Good Paddy” norms and practices entrenched by first- and second-generation ethnic Irish, underscoring their status as acceptable ethnics and eradicating Famine-era association with disorder, hard drinking, and a doctrinaire, un-American religious culture. “The bad Irish Paddy,” in this view, was effectively “tamed” (p. 69)

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