#dude is such an asshole though. his response to fried would be too one dimensionally douchey for a novel

[anghraine]

I re-read the whole academic drama around Irish-Americans and NINA policies, because it was relevant for something I'm working on and I'd forgotten some of the details.

A relatively conservative professor wrote an article in the early 2000s arguing that the Irish-American cultural memory of NINA policies ("No Irish Need Apply" restrictions on both Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans, mainly in the 19th century but persisting in some places into the 20th) is hugely overblown, with the implication that anti-Irish prejudice in the US at the time was not really that big a deal in general.

It struck me as a bit odd for a conservative professor to pull this argument when the usual approach is to use the history of anti-Irish policies to deny very contemporary racism experienced by people of color or blame its victims. I'd expect "Irish-Americans are over-exaggerating their historical oppression because they want to frame themselves as oppressed people despite being the beneficiaries of modern whiteness" from progressives more, tbh (since that is indeed an issue!).

On top of that, some elements of the author's conduct can only be described as extremely unprofessional, as when he speculates that Irish-Americans collectively remember a history that either never happened or was extremely limited in its effects because of ... uhhh drunkenly imagining it, basically (no obnoxious stereotypes there, no sirree!). Another scholar described trying to talk to him about the issue, since he (Scholar 2) had seen considerable evidence to the contrary, and the author shrugged him off as a defensive Irish-American (Scholar 2 noted that he is neither Irish nor US American).

Despite the issues, this interpretation gained fairly broad academic acceptance, though with some reservations (and in other cases, quiet disbelief). But back around 2015, Rebecca Fried (who I believe was a middle school student at the time) ran over the whole thing and found it deeply puzzling, since she'd seen very considerable evidence of NINA policies in digital archives.

She ended up putting together a very polite rebuttal in which she pointed out that these kinds of documents often don't survive, as Scholar 1 undoubtedly knew, so the dozens of them that she did find likely represented a real and widespread phenomenon in the United States rather than drunken exaggeration that allowed Irish-Americans to manufacture solidarity without much cause and therefore justify the evils of ... unionizing.

(Yeah, the original article is a lot.)

The original author responded in the comments on coverage of her article, which was published by the same journal as his own (an Oxford one, I think). His response was predictably condescending and sneering, and also very nitpicky—basically he argued that he'd been talking about a very specific iteration of the NINA issue, but since his explanation of why the Irish-American community would make this grand mistake was so sweeping and obnoxious, and also even his approach to the specific situation he claimed to be addressing was clearly flawed and imprecise (in my opinion, obviously not claiming to be unbiased here).

But apart from the weird mix of the blatant anti-labor rights stuff and the stereotypes about Irish and Irish-American people and the lack of rigor and consistency in the focus, it was also interesting to see how something so clearly flawed and partial could not only pass muster but gain widespread acceptance despite considerable evidence to the contrary along with the records of even so large and assimilated a group as Irish-Americans. This isn't ancient history, it al went down less than 10 years ago.