‘White’ diversity is often overlooked in the recent flurry of academic interest in whiteness which usually focuses on a singular white ‘identity’. Yet an unsettling of the rigidity of the black/white binary, which has such a prominent place in many Western industrialised societies, demands that the central issue of white homogeneity is challenged. Moreover the notion that ‘white’ groups can also be treated as ‘racially’ inferior needs recognition. There are many parallels between the experiences of African Caribbean and Irish minority ethnic groups in Britain, for example, as evidenced by their locations in the labour market, unequal treatment by the police, problems in accessing social security entitlements and neighbour harassment (Hickman and Walter 1997).

White diversity was officially acknowledged for the first time in the 2001 Census, when the previously monolithic ‘White’ category was subdivided into British/Irish/White Other. However this raised new problems, especially the failure to provide for hybrid Irish identities, including English-Irish and Caribbean-Irish, and the strong tendency for users to revert to a single amalgamated White category. Nevertheless it signalled the possibility of greater diversity in understandings of whiteness. Reframing large-scale migration from Ireland as diaspora opens up possibilities of recognising hybrid identities and challenging linear models of assimilation. They overlap, coalesce and conflict with both majority and minority ethnic groups in Britain in ways which highlight multiple rather than binary categories of difference.

Keywords

• Irish
• Britain
• Diaspora
• hybridity
• whiteness

(Virtual Presentation, English)