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.