Who’s Your Paddy: Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity

Jennifer Nugent Duffy

Who’s Your Paddy will cause controversy, disagreement and hopefully enlightened discussion, because the topics – whether racism is “a socially constructed response or an inherited trait?” as well as “the complexities of Irishness” – are timely and urgent. Nugent Duffy is Assoc. Professor of History at Western CT State University, and the book is the result of research she did for her master’s degree. Her laboratory was Yonkers, NY, described as “a working class bridge between the towers of Manhattan to the south and the pampered hills of Westchester County to the north.” Duffy defines 3 categories of Irish for her research: assimilated Irish ethnics from the 19th century; Irish white flighters who emigrated to the Bronx in the 1950s but moved to Yonkers in the ’70s; and new Irish immigrants who arrived in the early ’90s.

New York University Press / 308 pages / $26.00 paperback / December 2013