ALl RISE!
This afternoons lesson:
THE IRISH NEVER WERE SLAVES AND EVEN WORSE, IRISH OWNED SLAVES AND PRACTICED JIM CROW
Muhammad Ali's ancestors were owned by an Irishman named William Clay.
The "Irish had it worse than blacks" claim is one of the greatest falsehoods that has manifested itself in the discourse about racism in America. For years I even believed that. I remember reading a book titled
“Trinity” written by Leon Uris about a fictional hero of the Irish resistance named Conor Larkin. The story detailed the treatment of the Irish from the 1700’s until the 1916 uprising. After reading that book, I was convinced that the Irish had it just as bad as blacks. Yes, the Irish were treated terribly in Europe and when they first came to America. But they were not slaves. Irish historians such as Liam Hogan have made this crystal clear.
“I conservatively estimate that tens of millions of people have been exposed to ‘Irish slaves’ disinformation in one form or another on social media.”
Liam Hogan
From 2015 until 2019, Liam Hogan compiled some 52 different articles debunking the tale of Irish slavery. The intent here is not to denigrate nonracist Irish citizens of this country, but to destroy a popular white supremacist meme that has plagued social media and American culture for years. According to Hogan and other Irish historians in his compilation, the Irish were indentured servants and not slaves. The fallacy in the white supremacist argument lies in the fact that indentured servitude was a contractual agreement made between 2 or more parties. One party agreed that for payment of passage to America, the individual(s) would work for a specified term to repay the cost of passage. To say it was not much better than slavery is simply a lie. Slavery was permanent. Slavery was also generational. If you we born into a slave family, you were a slave. When you had children, they were slaves. There was no 7 years and a headright.
“The tale of the Irish slaves is rooted in a false conflation of indentured servitude and chattel slavery. These are not the same. Indentured servitude was a form of bonded labour, whereby a migrant agreed to work for a set period of time (between two and seven years) and in return the cost of the voyage across the Atlantic was covered. Indentured servitude was a colonial innovation that enabled many to emigrate to the New World while providing a cheap and white labour force for planters and merchants to exploit. Those who completed their term of service were awarded ‘freedom dues’ and were free. The vast majority of labourers who agreed to this system did so voluntarily, but there were many who were forcibly transplanted from the British Isles to the colonies and sold into indentured service against their will. While these forced deportees would have included political prisoners and serious felons, it is believed that the majority came from the poor and vulnerable. This forced labour was in essence an extension of the English Poor Laws, e.g. in 1697. John Locke recommended the whipping of those who ‘refused to work’ and the herding of beggars into workhouses. Indeed this criminalisation of the poor continues into the 21st century. In any case, all bar the serious felons were freed once the term of their contract expired.”
Liam Hogan
Certainly, the Irish did endure difficulties. The general argument in order to dismiss or derail conversations about the treatment of blacks is that everybody had it tough. That is true, but everybody else CHOSE to come to America. No matter what diversion is used, Africans sold Africans to whites. The shipping companies were not owned by Africans. Nor does it appear that the more than 10 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic made any contractual agreement to perform labor in return for passage. So yes, the Europeans that chose to come here with little or nothing did struggle. But the various European ethnic groups had one thing they used to lift themselves up. And they used it to step on others- the race card.
“Whiteness is a social construct, and one with concrete benefits. Being white in the U.S. has long meant better jobs and opportunities, and an escape from persecution based on appearance and culture. Although these structural advantages remain, the meaning of whiteness is still hotly debated.”
Sarah Kendzior, How do you become “white” in America?
Those who claim today to have suffered like blacks did not. I will cite 2 groups, the Irish and the Polish. Upon coming to this country both groups were considered lesser and inferior. In the north, Irish and blacks competed for the same jobs, or should I say, were relegated to low wage, menial labor. Irish and blacks in the north lived in the same communities. Both groups mixed socially, intermarried and had biracial children. The green was the black when and where no blacks existed.
“In the early years of immigration the poor Irish and blacks were thrown together, very much part of the same class competing for the same jobs. In the census of 1850, the term mulatto appears for the first time due primarily to inter-marriage between Irish and African Americans. The Irish were often referred to as Negroes turned inside out and Negroes as smoked Irish. A famous quip of the time attributed to a black man went something like this: "My master is a great tyrant, he treats me like a common Irishman." Free blacks and Irish were viewed by the Nativists as related, somehow similar, performing the same tasks in society. It was felt that if amalgamation between the races was to happen, it would happen between Irish and blacks. But, ultimately, the Irish made the decision to embrace whiteness, thus becoming part of the system which dominated and oppressed blacks. Although it contradicted their experience back home, it meant freedom here since blackness meant slavery.
An article by a black writer in an 1860 edition of the Liberator explained how the Irish ultimately attained their objectives: "Fifteen or twenty years ago, a Catholic priest in Philadelphia said to the Irish people in that city, 'You are all poor, and chiefly laborers, the blacks are poor laborers; many of the native whites are laborers; now, if you wish to succeed, you must do everything that they do, no matter how degrading, and do it for less than they can afford to do it for.' The Irish adopted this plan; they lived on less than the Americans could live upon, and worked for less, and the result is, that nearly all the menial employments are monopolized by the Irish, who now get as good prices as anybody. There were other avenues open to American white men, and though they have suffered much, the chief support of the Irish has come from the places from which we have been crowded."
Once the Irish secured themselves in those jobs, they made sure blacks were kept out. They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation. In fact, one of the primary themes of How the Irish Became White is the way in which left labor historians, such as the highly acclaimed Herbert Gutman, have not paid sufficient attention to the problem of race in the development of the labor movement.
And so, we have the tragic story of how one oppressed "race," Irish Catholics, learned how to collaborate in the oppression of another "race," Africans in America, in order to secure their place in the white republic. Becoming white meant losing their greenness, i.e., their Irish cultural heritage and the legacy of oppression and discrimination back home.”
Art McDonald, Ph.D., “How the Irish Became White”
The Polish had a similar experience. As you read the next few paragraphs, you will see a pattern that has been used in modern America against another group of immigrants. “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
“Here it is important to understand how, exactly, Americans ‘become white’. The history of Polish-Americans is an illuminating example. Upon arriving in the U.S. en masse in the late 19th and early 20th century, Poles endured discrimination based on their appearance, religion and culture. In 1903, the New England Magazine decried the Poles’ “expressionless Slavic faces” and “stunted figures” as well as their inherent “ignorance” and “propensity to violence”. Working for terrible wages, Polish workers were renamed things like “Thomas Jefferson” by their bigoted Anglo-Saxon bosses who refused to utter Polish names.
The Poles, in other words, were not considered white. Far from it: they were considered a mysterious menace that should be expelled. When Polish-American Leon Czolgosz killed President William McKinley in 1901, all Poles were deemed potential violent anarchists. “All people are mourning, and it is caused by a maniac who is of our nationality,” a Polish-American newspaper wrote, pressured to apologize for their own people. The collective blame of Poles for terrorism bears great similarity to how Muslims (both in the U.S. and Europe) are collectively blamed today.
But then something changed. In 1919, Irish gangs in blackface attacked Polish neighborhoods in Chicago in an attempt to convince Poles, and other Eastern European groups, that they, too, were “white” and should join them in the fight against blacks. As historian David R. Roediger recalls, “Poles argued that the riot was a conflict between blacks and whites, with Poles abstaining because they belonged to neither group.” But the Irish gangs considered whiteness, as is often the case in America, as anti-blackness. And as in the early 20th century Chicago experienced an influx not only of white immigrants from Europe, but blacks from the South, white groups who felt threatened by black arrivals decided that it would be politically advantageous if the Poles were considered white as well.
With that new white identity came the ability to practice the discrimination they had once endured.
Over time, the strategy of positioning Poles as “white” against a dark-skinned “other” was successful. Poles came to consider themselves white, and more importantly, they came to be considered white by their fellow Americans, as did Italians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, and others from Southern and Eastern Europe, all of whom held an ambivalent racial status in U.S. society. Also, intermarriage between white ethnic groups led some to embrace a broader white identity.”
Sarah Kendzior, How do you become “white” in America?
In both instances these groups of whites stepped on blacks when they had the chance to unify with blacks to end the oppression of both sides in order to advance themselves. What we are looking at here is literally white privilege. No matter how they try to argue, these people are white and many of them hold the same racist views. Not one of these groups can honestly make the claims of how they have had it just as bad as blacks.
No reparations for whites. The government has given them everything already.
Here endeth the lesson.
Liam Hogan,
All of my work on the “Irish slaves” meme (2015–’19),
Liam Hogan,
Irish slaves’: the convenient myth,
‘Irish slaves’: the convenient myth
Eoin O'Carroll,
No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas, Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2018,
No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas
Art McDonald, Ph.D.,
How the Irish Became White,
Sarah Kendzior,
How do you become “white” in America? How do you become “white” in America?
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