In this issue, Paul Michael Garrett responds to my paper about social work education and whiteness studies, which was published in a previous issue of this journal (Jeyasingham, 2012). His response includes a number of misreadings of my article and therefore this short paper will begin by clarifying the original article's focus and main argument. It then moves on to make some observations about Garrett's stated criticisms of my paper and the ways in which he presents scholarship about race, ethnicity and Irish people. It ends with some discussion about binary oppositions and the tone of Garrett's response.