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In his post on ask a slave, Willie mentioned how many Americans today live under a veil of ignorance that blurs the facts of history. This is something that everyone is guilty of. In his post Willie talked about current day America’s ignorance of certain aspects of slavery. In this post, I want to explore the ignorance that surrounds immigrants in United States History. Many descendants of immigrants today would be considered white. Today, I would say that a person of Irish lineage is a white american, and thereby would benefit from what we today call white privilage. While this claim is general, it is something that I have perceived to be true. This view disregards the fact that there was a point in America’s history Irish people were othered as well. This is something that Barrett and Roediger touch upon in their essay, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class”. Barrett and Roediger note that even between generations, there was a distinct change in how the rest of white america and the immigrants themselves viewed their status in society based on race. They note, in reference to the first generation immigrants, that “Most did not arrive with Conventional United States attitudes regarding ‘racial’ difference, let alone its significance and implications in the context of industrial America.” But as with many other new groups introduced to the “American” culture, including Native Americans, and African Americans, there was an attempt to racialize them. This is where Barrett and Roediger’s theory of inbetweeness is important. They assert that there was actually no definitive way to categorize immigrants when it came to race, this led to an intensely complex racial identity among immigrants themselves and it complicated the history of thier racialization. They were absolutely othered by already “americans” but at the same time came to hold a position in society different than that of slaves (which was different than that of Native peoples). This is the kind of thinking that is not applied when we as Americans think of our History–but it is a mode of thinking that is so necessary to understand where we have been as a country and why we are where we are today in terms of race relations.