No Irish Need Apply

[lisaquestions]

Shinin' the Light on White Privilege:

"White mob violence guaranteed the white privileges from the economy of internal colonialism. In the 1840's and 1850's Irish working class immigrants pushed African Americans out of the skilled trades in New York City by burning down parts of the Black community while Irish police and fire fighters looked on. White homesteaders murdered indigenous warriors trying to protect their historical homelands, and slaughtered millions of their buffalo. Unemployed white workers burned down parts of San Francisco Chinatown in the 1880's to drive Chinese workers out of the cigar-making and shoe industries. White squatters lynched Chicanos fighting to keep their ancestral lands in Occupied America."

Saving this link the next time anyone talks about how the Irish were oppressed in the US.

Comments

[youngsoulrebel]

The "Irish oppression in the U$" has been blown WAY out of proportion — and I'm saying this as somebody whose father's parents emigrated from Belfast. It comes from a small number of things that, in most of the country, didn't have much sway:

1) the earlier days of the KKK includes a massive hate-on not just for non-whites, but all immigrants and Catholics; the Irish who were emigrating were typically Catholic, and

2) as was common practise for the 19th Century CE, adverts for domestics or other immigrant-dominated employment would specify ethnicity or religion sought for a wide variety of reasons; on occasion, these adverts would specify "No Irish", but nevertheless, the Irish also tended to dominate those jobs:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm

So yeah, there *is* a little merit to that history of discrimination as an extension of discrimination against *all* immigrants, but considering that Irish-Amerikans are the second-largest ethnic group in the $tates after German-Amerikans, it's kind of hard for that minute history of discrimination to have any solid meaning in the here and now.

[lisaquestions]

Yeah, my father's parents emigrated from Northern Ireland, although I don't know which city.

And yeah, you have good points here.

And it always seems to be brought up in the context of the present day.

[youngsoulrebel]

Yeah, in the present day, discrimination against the Irish in the United $tates, at least, is kind of bullshit — it's pretty much a residual quirk of the elderly in large cities with a lot of ethnic neighbourhoods. On the other hand discrimination against the Irish does still exist on a pretty wide scale in the UK — not only do I have UK friends who consider themselves "lucky" to have Scouse, Manchester or London-local accents, unlike their parents, but I learned pretty quickly living on-again/off-again in London as an adolescent during the mid-1990s to both adopt a local accent and go by my mother's maiden name (which is English, her parents emigrated during the Blitz); but getting off a plane in London in '97 (at 16), I was briefly detained and questioned about potential IRA involvement. A "real life" friend of mine honeymooned in Swansea, Wales, and though he's a UK citizen by birth, grew up mostly outside Dublin — he and his wife were denied rooms at two places in 1998.

...but yea, in the $tates, racism against the Irish is non-existent in institutionalised form, and practically so on individual levels — but as Morrissey says, Amerika is not the world, and other countries have their own issues.

[lisaquestions]

true.

My post was meant to be America-centric in this context. Maybe should have been more explicit about that.

[lisaquestions]

BTW, thanks for that information. I hadn't been aware of what things were like in the UK.

[youngsoulrebel]

No problem. In general, it's at its worst among older UK generations, but films like 9 Dead Gay Guys (which is otherwise pretty hilarious) still reinforce negative stereotypes that "Paddies" come across the Irish Sea to drink British booze, leach off British welfare, squat in abandoned British buildings, and, on occasion, prostitute themselves because Catholic morality is weaker than Anglican; Afro-Caribbean characters in that film, by comparison, are treated more positively and the stereotyping (which frankly all comedy is based on) at least seem, on the surface, less cutting (but having never been an African and Afro-Caribbean in the UK, that's about as far as I can make that judgement), and the stereotyping of the sole Pakistani(?) and Orthodox Jewish characters seems pretty light (Middle Eastern guy is a cab driver; Orthodox Jew thinks he's more closeted than he is cos he's Orthodox). I know Tony Blair recently "came out" as Catholic, citing the very real negative and often hostile climate faced by many Catholics in the UK for why he waited so long; it's just a bit more complex in some ways in the UK than the U$, and I think that's largely do to the nature of the U$ defining itself as "a nation of immigrants" so at some point "race" in the U$ became defined differently than in many other countries ("race" in the UK and pretty much the rest of Europe is generally defined not by skin colour, but by nation of origin and/or cultural identity), but measure for measure, neither place is really better nor worse about their -isms.