The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws.

Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2).

Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).

Note that the Irish were not considered white throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and into the early 20th century. See eg. "How the Irish became white":

https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0...

There were plenty of "NINA" ("No Irish Need Apply") signs throughout the North, the same way we had Jim Crow laws in the South. Other groups too: Poles and Jews were also not considered "white" during this time period, and then gradually assimilated as the nation's racial animus was focused elsewhere. JFK's election as the nation's first Irish-Catholic president was as significant in 1960 as Barack Obama's election as the first Black president in 2008.

Racism as it exists in America is socially constructed, but tribalism is universal. Interestingly different parts of the U.S. have different racial divides, eg. the black/white divide is not nearly so salient on the West Coast, but there is significantly more anti-Mexican racism and economic classism.

Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents.

A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design, but he also traveled the country building these de facto redlining codes all across the continent.

It's not a red herring.

This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.

> Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit,

You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?

This is BS, and race was absolutely part of the equation. The covenants to my parent's house in the SFBAY literally say no black people can live on the property unless they're servants. It's no longer enforceable today, but it absolutely was when their house was newly built.

One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.

There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.

If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.

Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"