The census for Manhattan’s Eighth Ward — an area that was perceived, according to contemporary accounts, as a predominantly African American neighborhood — reveals a community made up of native-born Americans, both black and white, freed slaves, and a diverse population of immigrants from Europe, Africa, Egypt, and the West Indies. Among these are Irish and African American residents living together as neighbors and, in some cases, as families. This close proximity, and a unique and significant pattern of intermarriage between immigrant Irish women and African American men within the Eighth Ward in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the Draft Riots, indicates the possibility of a much greater level of interracial stability and intimacy than has been presumed in discourses about Irish and black relations during this period in New York and, indeed, in the United States.2 In the historical literature, a narrative that largely privileges evidence of conflict between men has created a simplified picture of interracial relations, one that overlooks the experience of women, and more broadly dismisses the ways in which gender and class informed the experiences of race as it was constructed on many different social levels. Indeed, understandings of both Irish and African American history are left significantly incomplete without deeper exploration of Irish and African American residential patterns and intermarriage, cooperation, and intimacy.

The theoretical and political conceptions promoted by this layer have absolutely nothing to do with “left” politics. Indeed, the irrationalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Marxist and anti-working-class perspective developed over the past half-century has brought the pseudo-left into increasing alignment with the conceptions and politics of the far-right. The obsession with race, the interpretation of history in terms of the conflict of races, the categorization of society into “white America” and “black America,” “white people” and “black people”—this is not the language of the left, of progressive social reform, let alone socialist revolution.

The theoretical and political conceptions promoted by this layer have absolutely nothing to do with “left” politics. Indeed, the irrationalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Marxist and anti-working-class perspective developed over the past half-century has brought the pseudo-left into increasing alignment with the conceptions and politics of the far-right. The obsession with race, the interpretation of history in terms of the conflict of races, the categorization of society into “white America” and “black America,” “white people” and “black people”—this is not the language of the left, of progressive social reform, let alone socialist revolution.