I believe we’re talking specifically about Irish slave myths as they relate to American history. If you go far back enough in history most anyone can claim that their ancestors might have been enslaved by some group or another.
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So go tell that to all the white Americans who do what you’re doing (“I’m telling you, it WAS slavery!”) in order to claim that black people are lazy, inferior people looking for a handout. Instead of, you know, nitpicking about just precisely what does and does not fit the definition of slavery.
The issue is the pernicious use of a myth to support racist claims today about descendants of enslaved Africans.
Sure, many among the Irish suffered, but not only were they not subjected to massive amounts of enslavement that was defined as generationally permanent, they also got to join the white club. Which means that even after the era of institutionalized slavery, they continued to face oppression that was not faced by the ignorant or willfully oblivious white descendants of Irish immigrants.
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You might want to reread my first post again.
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I think we can acknowledge how shitty it was, and that it ended in the 18th century. While the two institutions were similar early on, real and substantial differences emerged after Bacon’s rebellion. I think for the real crimes against the Irish, you really need to focus on the colonization and the British Empire more generally.
To be clear, the step up came later, from the post-famine wave of refugees. That was a step up, because most people weren’t indentured servants (a dead institution at that point). They were refugees and migrants and they were leaving a colonized condition. If the indentured servants of the 17th-18th centuries were essentially slaves, the vast majority of Irish migrants who came to the US in the 19th century were not.
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The issue is the pernicious use of a myth to support racist claims today about descendants of enslaved Africans.
I’m totally in agreement with that, do you actually read what I post here? It’s no excuse for cleansing the history of what actually happened though.
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I did. Again, we’re talking about a centuries difference. The fact that the descendants of Irish indentured servants were not slaves later matters. The nature of the 19th century migration matters.
What am I missing, exactly?
[ETA] Also, the article is specifically debunking myths about 19th/20th century slavery which did not exist for the Irish. So, he is making a historically specific argument. In the late 19th/early 20th century there was a fair amount of fear about whites (especially young white women) being sold into some mythical white slave trade, which went along with fears about eugenics and depleting the race. These are the myths the guy is debunking and dealing with. IN that he’s entirely correct. IN the Americans in the 19th/ 20th century, the Irish had no where to go but up, even with fears of catholics filtered through the concept of eugenics.
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I don’t think that’s what anyone is doing, though. There is little doubt that indentured servants had it bad. But it isn’t the same thing that happened to African Americans. I think acknowledging that is not cleansing history.
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I don’t think that’s what anyone is doing, though.
yes it is, I see as many people unaware of the realities of forced indentured servitude slavery as those who try to distort it to fit their racist world view.
But it isn’t the same thing that happened to African Americans. I think acknowledging that is not cleansing history
I’m not saying it was, that should be pretty clear in every post, and so acknowledging that obviously isn’t what I’m talking about regarding ‘cleansing history’. What I’m talking about is the myth that Irish indentured servitude was this mostly benign thing that people mostly went willingly into, and got out of without any problems, it simply wasn’t, it was nothing like ‘nannies in the US today’, and it was slavery.
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I was just reading he other day about the complex spectrum of states between slavery and freedom. We’ve never had actual serfdom in this country, but indenture comes close. So does prison labor. So do company towns. It’s not binary, is it?
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No one here is arguing it’s benign, though. Saying it’s not the same thing as chattel slavery doesn’t mitigate the horrible aspects of it. But, as I added above, the myth being debunked is the specific claims about a slave trade in Irish in the late 19th/20th century, which never happened. This is about a specific time and place when indentured servitude was long dead. The post famine immigrants weren’t in any meaningful way enslaved.
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again, just to reiterate, because some people on here seem to have problems with their reading comprehension, debunking myths promulgated by racists is a good thing, but you don’t need to do it by distorting history.
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No, but the original article debunks claims about a specific time and place and a specific condition of a specific people that didn’t happen. Many Irish in this time, were at the forefront of labor radicalism against these sorts of things.
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People of Irish descent who were transported as indentured servants were not considered slaves at the time, but they were slaves by today’s standards, and were indeed treated badly. In Australia, in particular, transported Fenian rebels were treated much worse than slaves were in many ancient and some medieval societies. Nonetheless their children were born free, and in most cases their slavery was strictly limited in duration, and extreme abuse of the indentured was not tolerated by most communities.
In contrast, color line slavery in the Americas was a particularly evil and horrific form of slavery, one of the worst in history, quite literally a crime against humanity. Americans could and did openly abuse their slaves in ways that would have been a capital crime in other slave cultures.
Personally, I can excuse the ignorance of people who do not have access to quality education. But if you follow the link, you see that this stuff is being done knowingly - the graphics being used do not picture abused Irish indentured servants, this propaganda is being created by people who know exactly what they are doing.
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If you see the orignal post. The issue is not the nature of Irish indentured servitude, but the claims of Irish slavery in the post-famine migrants.
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They didn’t have bounty hunters tracking down runaway indentured servants nor were children of indentured servants ever considered property of the debt holder. The material difference between them and chattel slaves in the same place, at the same time renders the analogy pointless.
Slaves in sugar plantations had a survival rate akin to concentration camps in the 20th Century. The reason African culture survived so long in the West Indies is because of the constant necessity for importing slaves there due to the horrific attrition rate. No Irish laborers dealt with such conditions.
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And again, he seems to not be talking about the era of indentured servitude, but of post-famine migration waves of immigrants who were indeed never even indentured servants. This is striclty about the 19th/20th centuries.
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Agreed. Again, this is about the 19th/20th centuries and the post-famine migration waves.
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No one here is arguing it’s benign, though.
They have argued that it was similar to nannies working in the US today (it wasn’t), that it was not a form of slavery (it was).
But, as I added above, the myth being debunked is the specific claims about a slave trade in Irish in the late 19th/20th century, which never happened.
And I’m fine with the myth debunking (though that series of articles deals with slavery from the 1600s on, not just the 19th/20th century).
That’s simply not true.
Sugar and the Blue Eyed Slave
Nicknamed the ‘Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’, the island of Montserrat has long had connections with Ireland - however, lurking in it’s history are stories of fierce Irish slave owners.
As a nation we are more comfortable with the notion of being enslaved rather than being slave owners. This is the story behind Ireland’s unofficial colony in the Caribbean, the island of Montserrat.
Earlier this year, Joe Kearney was presented with a challenge by a retired Kilkenny farmer and philatelist. He was shown a postage stamp from the early 1900s for Montserrat.
The stamp depicted a red-haired white girl in a green dress with her arm draped about a black cross. She looks mournfully into the distance and at her knee is the harp of Ireland.
The challenge was to find out how a Caribbean island with over 90% of its population of African heritage, uses this symbol as its coat of arms. The story moves from Kilkenny to the British Records Office in Kew, London and to the island of Montserrat itself.
In 1632 the first governor of Montserrat, Captain Anthony Briskett, himself an Irishman, invited his fellow countrymen to settle the island. There is no record of how the newly arrived Irish planters dealt with the indigenous people, the Arawaks and the Carrib Indians.
From its initial colonisation, Montserrat became known as a refuge for those escaping religious persecution on other islands, especially Roman Catholics. The Irish were provided with smallholdings for tobacco cultivation, however, when this industry switched to more labour intensive sugar production, slaves were found to be a necessary part of the enterprise. This was the beginning of the era of Irish slave ownership in Montserrat.
The truth behind Ireland’s involvement in slavery, slave ownership and the horrors of sugar plantations emerges from testimonies of islanders and from the guardians of the island’s history.
Irishmen facilitated the removal of identity, language and culture from the slaves transported to work on the sugar farms of Montserrat at a time when similar colonial oppression was present in their own island.
It is an era that is largely absent from both our national history and psyche but it is one that remains firmly placed within the folk memories of our distant cousins on the remote shores of the other Emerald Isle of the Caribbean.
“The Black Irish” in Montserrat:
Kinsale, Montserrat (West Indies) is home to a unique race of people, ‘The Black Irish’. ‘Radharc in the West Indies’ takes a look at the Irish story in Montserrat and the legacy that remains.
The story of Irish immigrants is known the world over and the island of Montserrat in the West Indies is no exception.
‘The Black Irish’ opens with a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for holidays in Kinsale. However, this is not Kinsale, Co. Cork, this is Kinsale on the island of Montserrat in the West Indies. Settled by Irish people in the 17th century, there are still reminders of Ireland everywhere. The flag, the accents, and the names.
The film features interviews with local resident Patrick Robert Reilly, (singing ‘Mother Machree’!) school teacher Catherine Ryan, Cork man Barney Columbia, University Lecturer Dr. Howard Fergus, Post Officers Mr. and Mrs. Allen, and a Belgian Bishop, Anthony Demesne, all of whom provide evidence of ‘Irishness’. The legacy of Irish immigrants lives on in the names, religion, accent, traditions and sentiment of many of the island’s inhabitants.
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