Just putting this out there to combat the "Irish people were slaves" crowd which historians have dubbed "racist ahistorical propaganda." Linking a helpful tool with resources debunking the propaganda
because! (not so) Fun fact! In reality, some pretty high-profile Irish folks bought, owned, and trafficked enslaved Africans – collusion in the empire that Ireland and Irish Americans have preferred to ignore. Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592 and is one of the oldest institutions in the world! They have began to acknowledge this truth launching an investigation into its colonial past. It's findings have scrutinized funding, curriculums, and scholars, including George Berkeley, a slave-owning philosopher after whom Trinity’s world-famous library was named.
We've learned that the front entrance to Trinity College, and many other architectural landmarks, were built with money from tobacco and other slave-related revenues. Many slave owners in the American south were Scots-Irish, at least 3% or 4% of the British empire’s slave owners were Irish, and, being Catholic, many were also able to operate in French, Spanish, and other empires. While many Irish rebelled against the Crown, others served colonial interests overseas. They made fortunes from slavery and helped to control – and sometimes massacre – the natives. The fictional plantation in 'Gone With the Wind' has an Irish name, Tara, for crying out loud.
Irelnd's national narrative is that they were victims of colonial oppression. That’s true, but it’s also true that they were perpetrators of colonial aggression elsewhere. The island's long history of subjugation and oppression by the British is no myth. The Irish were indeed colonized, caricatured as sub-human, brutalized, and left to rot by the British Empire. But that isn't the full story and it is important to acknowledge allllllll of the stuff, I say.
The struggles in Ireland and those of Irish immigrants to the Americas make clear that the concept of whiteness in the US (and I suspect the Western world in general, especially in countries where white people have held the majority of power and capital) has always been a precariously propped-up house of cards, useed more as a tool for defining a nefarious “other” than any kind of tool for forming a self-identity.
There is no “white culture” because of this. American Jews are the perfect example alongside the Irish - during the early 1800s Jews lived quietly and peacefully in pocket American communities, and white communities even touted the Jews as fantastic examples of whiteness - they were so oppressed for so much of history, but they survived with their determination and intelligence, so they must be white. They were even marked as such on the census. But then from 1880-1914 a mass influx of Ashkenazi Jews started seeing the rise of the Jewish workforce to the extent that a majority of factory workers in NYC were Jewish - and when the immigrants started taking your jobs, they’re obviously not a reflection of ‘you’ any longer.
The new hot American invention of race science and eugenics were tools used to turn a magnifying glass to Jews, with shoddy research being used to claim the Jews as physically and mentally inferior, and in pop culture, artists made an effort to tie Jews to Black people, portraying Jews with curly hair, big noses, and big lips. The caricature of the “evil witch” is antisemitic propaganda. The Nazis took a wealth of inspiration from and deeply researched the American racial hierarchy system of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which they felt was incredible in its ease of implementation, malleability, and potency in inspiring hate between the created races. Additionally, there were thriving Nazi communities and congregations in the Americas. It was only after America went to war with the Nazis in WW2 that white America had a sort of collective amnesia when it came to their previous treatment of the Jewish folks - immigration centers even stopped marking Jews as Hebrew, and race science fell out of vogue. Because we couldn’t fight a war accusing the opposing power of crimes we were on the path of doing ourselves. Jews were somewhat invited back into the fold of being white. Sort of.
If this cultural flip-flopping isn’t proof that white supremacy isn’t a crock of shit when said supremacists can’t even decide what white is, I don’t know what is. Whiteness is a social construct, not an inherent genetic trait.
Paul is the son of Patrick Doherty, one of the innocent victims. He offers his first hand knowledge and insight into the story from a unique direct perspective.
*Paul Doherty is also available for lectures on Bloody Sunday, the Saville Inquiry & the Peace Process. Click here to contact
One of the problems with the polarized way we talk about the history of racism is that it swallows subtleties. The reality is that no one is white. We're all human beings, and we all come in varying shades and hues of brown; from pale and pink-ish to a deep brown that looks navy blue in the shadows, and many olive and peachy and cinnamon tints in between. "White" is an invented concept, and its definition has varied to include different groups over the few hundred years it's been in use. It has historically been a tool used to ‘other’ communities. The Irish used to be very much on the outside of "white," as were Italians and Spaniards, Poles, and others we easily assume are "white" today, when we have a broad skin-shade-based understanding of the (fake) divisions between "races".
Now that I've gotten that taken care of, I say Sláinte!