The invention of the white race /

In this richly researched and highly suggestive analysis of Irish oppression in Britain and African American oppression in the slave-holding US, Allen argues that racism is best understood in both instances as a deliberate system of in-group cooptation and out-group superexploitation that maintained ruling-class hegemony. This study is elegantly conceived. Allen first depicts the Protestant ascendancy as a case in which a key segment of the Irish population was wooed into accepting prevailing inequities in Ulster by the perceived compensations of racial and religious privilege. He then proposes a similar paradigm of racism as social control for the class- and race-stratified society of North America ("Ulster writ large"). Finally, reenter the Irish, this time not as defamed and racially oppressed Celts in Ireland, but rather as immigrants eligible for the privileges of "whiteness" in the US--participants in a dynamic of racial oppression similar to the one they had so recently fled. The study thus provides a compelling illustration of "the relativity of race." Indispensable for readers interested in the disposition of power in Ireland, in the genesis of racial oppression in the US, or in the fluidity of "race" and the historic vicissitudes of "whiteness." Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. F. Jacobson; SUNY College at Stony Brook