Hundreds of thousands of Irish people came here under indentured servitude, which wasn't much better than slavery.
Indentured servants is different from slavery
Indentured servitude was based on a contract for a set period of time (4 to 7 years) Your contract might be bought or sold, but not you. You still had human rights. You were not mere property. It was not forever and it was not passed on to your children. It was not based on your race.
It made the Irish no different than most White Americans of the time: convicts, rogues, vagabonds, whores, cheats and rabble of all descriptions raked from the gutter of Britain and Ireland to become indentured servants in the colonies. You know, the people guys like you call Old Stock Americans, which they see as the genetic secret sauce of US greatness.
No peaches, no cream: The Irish were indentured servants, their working conditions were sometimes as bad as slavery. Many died before their contracts ended. Many were made indentured servants against their will.
But black slavery by the early 1800's was a well-oiled machine based on race and supported by law, religion, racist beliefs, slave patrols, and the latest science. All of that did not fall from the sky. It took over a hundred years to assemble. It grew out of indentured servitude, but by the time it had become full-blown slavery the Irish had been excluded by design: it was race-based.
So the Irish got to where they are
because of racism.
- They did not suffer from hundreds of years of slavery, because they were White.
- They could vote by the 1860s, not the 1960s, because they were White.
- They easily qualified for the Homestead Act, the G.I. Bill and FHA loans, because they were White.
- They could live in nice neighbourhoods and go to nice schools, because they were White.
How much disdain and disgust you can show towards black society is essential if you want to fit in for any group so when Irish immigration was at it's max in America (the mid to late 1800s), the Irish had almost no experience with blacks, but after a very short time in the states, they were rioting against blacks (as with the New York draft riots during the Civil War), joining in the barring of blacks from labor unions, and seeking to “become white” by assimilating to the white WASP system that was firmly in place.
Chinese immigrants were worked like dogs and treated the same way.
Racism in America comes in part from the hang-ups white people have about people not being white. That part applies to both blacks and Asians.
But part of the racism comes from the need to excuse the unfair advantages whites have in American society, something that grows out of their ugly, skinhead past of genocide, slavery and Jim Crow. That part applies more to blacks than to Asians.
That makes blacks a way bigger threat to white self-image (and tax rates) than Asians. Therefore whites need to think that there is something profoundly wrong with black people. Model minority Asians help to maintain that picture much better than the poor, violent Asian Americans ever could.
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