The Irish Slave Myth
When the #1619Project was published, I was desperate to get a copy. I had my mom in Kentucky looking for a copy of the New York Times with the supplement that she could post over to me. When this looked unlikely, I contacted the creator, Norah Hannah Jones on Twitter to ask if it would be published online and through this conversation found out that the Pulitzer Center had made the whole project available in PDF.
But as it goes with most Twitter exchanges about anything new or controversial, it also lured out someone with a very different level of excitement about the project.
That this trope has again returned to Social Media is not a surprise. Since the murders of Ahmad Aubrey, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a righteous outpouring of frustration, sadness and anger has spread worldwide. This latest blossoming of the #BlackLivesMatter movement has kick-started conversations across the globe about our societal systems and how they fundamentally benefit some while disenfranchising others. It is not revelatory that those who find this challenge to the status quo unsettling would kick back, from full blown White Supremacists to everyday white people who are rattled to discover that they have benefited and/or participated in perpetuating systemic racism. I do believe that many people who show passive discrimination often do so unwillingly or unknowingly because we aren’t taught the fullness of American racism and only those who actively seek to educate themselves on the complexity and breadth of this untold cirriculum are able to recognise it.
The myth of the Irish slave is one such kick back, a show of how a group white people have had it just as bad as Black Americans while never complaining about it. The most recent flare up of this damaging narrative was a Facebook post from an “Irish Lives Matter” account warning people not to believe the true counter narrative that they obviously realised would come.
People try to use the myth of Irish slaves to dilute the African American experience and, by extension, #BlackLivesMatter. So, let me say this as clearly as possible: There was no such thing as the Irish slave in North America.
But there are racists and disingenuous people who try to co-opt the Irish experience to try and bolster their own disturbed beliefs. It’s a common used method to try and denigrate or weaken the immense and lasting impact of the institution of Slavery in the U.S. It’s a racist trope and should be called out every time.
So again, let’s go ahead and discount that as nonsense. There were never Irish slaves and this has been thoroughly debunked by historian Liam Hogan @Limerick1914
Yes, there is a profound and long lasting history of oppression in Ireland and of the Irish. But, the Irish were never considered generational property. No one could own an Irish person and subsequently own their offspring as if they were livestock.
It’s a harmful myth and actual denigrates both the Irish experience as well as the African American experience. Yes, the Irish had multi-generational systematic oppression through the subjugation of the island and through the Penal Laws.
There were numbers of Irish indentured in the Caribbean and forced to work on sugar plantations, yet they still weren’t chattel slaves. The citizens of Baltimore, Cork were captured by Algerian pirates and forced into servitude many would term slavery, yet they still weren’t chattel slaves.
Conflating them, conflating any person who suffered through indentured servitude with chattel slaves romanticises their experience and works to erase the very real and very tragic history of the African American slave.
There is a distinct difference between indentured servitude and chattel slavery. This is not to say that those who were indentured did not suffer. Indentured Servitude was an avenue for the poor in society to seek a new start in the world.
They pledged a portion of their lives in exchange for passage and often, land. If they were transported due to criminal offence, often the charges brought against them were borne out of poverty and the struggle to simply survive, and many would later find themselves transported to Australia or the Caribbean. However, there is a chasmal difference between the life and prospects of the indentured versus the chattel slave. Indentured Servitude by its very nature was finite, like a prison sentence.
While those people surely found life difficult, they knew that their time of hardship would come to an end. It would end and they would get their land and their chance to create a new life. They knew if they survived they could begin again. They knew their children could be born in a world of better circumstance than they were. They knew that any degradation was temporary. The African slave knew only slavery. They knew that if they survived, it was only for another day; that their very lives where at the whim of others. They knew that any children would be removed from them to begin their own looping journey of the worst kind of servitude and inhumanity. They knew that their degradation was for life. They knew toil, psychological and physical torture, rape and murder that would only end through death. They knew the worst of humanity as well as they knew sunrise and sunset. This is a far cry from signing a contract for 7 years for the receipt of transport and land.
The lucky few slaves who escaped or “earned” their freedom still found themselves in a world wholly designed against them. This systematic disadvantage continues to this day.
And it must be noted that a good portion of Irish indentured servants, once their contract of servitude was finished, often become a part of power system themselves as either overseers or owners. This was in direct contrast to their own history of suffering.
Frederick Douglass, when he toured Ireland found a great ally in the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell. Douglass left impressed with the veracity and sincerity of O’Connell regarding the plight of his fellow humans. O’Connell did not shirk his responsibility in both noting the difference and shaming Irish people everywhere for their failure to support African Americans.
To paraphrase O’Connell: If you don’t fight slavery in America, then we don’t recognise you as an Irish person. We can now insert ‘racism’ for ‘slavery’ because that’s where we’re at with these straw man arguments.
Anyone who belittles their experience, anyone who views with suspicion the effort to understand the lasting impact this institution had and continues to have in the U.S. by directly comparing it to the Irish experience is disingenuous, to put it nicely.
Another way to put it is “willful ignorance.” The argument that because Africans were involved at the beginning of the slave trade with British, French and American partners somehow negates over 200 years of slavery and the discrimination that followed is a weak argument and only shows the arguer for what they are. Loving our “imperfect country” is understanding why it’s imperfect and how we can make it better through that understanding.
Actively trying to understand the deeper truth through the nuances of one’s national history IS patriotism. Refusing to view or acknowledge the sins of the past because it interferes with a comfortable national view discredits everyone who’s come before us. If we don’t continually seek to better understand our history then we are doomed to fail our future. We don’t accomplish this by trying to water down the entirety of our story by such falsities such as “the Irish slave.”
To better understand the complexities of the African American experience which has been directly informed by the spectre of slavery, please read the #1619Project or any of these resources to better understand racism in an U.S. context.
