Exactly, and that privilege is one of the reasons Black is a thing. We white folks are English, Dutch, French, etc. National and/or cultural origins get the capital letter, not the pigmentation. Black Americans were very intentionally stripped of that. They may be Ghanaian, Nigerian, Kenyan (in modern terms) or members of certain tribes (historically) but that can’t be known because it was stolen from them. So Black gets capitalized, because the actual national/tribal identity and culture was taken from them. (Off topic, sorry, rant over.)
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Genuine question because I don’t know: were the English who were looking down on the Irish for being an inferior race actually using the word “white” to describe themselves (and exclude the Irish)? Or was it more about the “English race” and “Irish race?”
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Can’t answer that for the English. Early on in the US, Irish were specifically excluded from “whites only” kind of things, but no clue how the English handled the situation.
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Signs saying “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish, No DHSS” (or worse) are still in living memory, although technically illegal by the time I was born.
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Just try telling all those old Yurpeen artists about that.
That sorely confused me when I was a little girl visiting museums.
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Medievalist with a special interest in Ireland and England here:
They didn’t think in terms of “races” so much as “peoples”, and they did that by culture and language more than by colour. (Although physical characteristics were also well known: the Romans associated red hair with Germanic tribes, and by the time Britannia was being invaded, the Picts, with their red hair, were assumed to have migrated from Germania.)
By the time of Bede, the words for “a people” and “a language” overlapped. Bede’s description of Brittaina said
Haec in praesenti, iuxta numerum librorum, quibus lex diuina scripta est, quinque gentium linguis, unam eandemque summae ueritatis et uerae sublimitatis scientiam scrutatur, et confitetur, Anglorum uidelicet, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum, quae meditatione scripturarum ceteris omnibus est facta communis.
There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of the one self-same knowledge, which is of highest truth and true sublimity, to wit, English, British, Scottish, Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all by the study of the Scriptures.
By the time this was translated into Old English for the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, this became
⁊ her sind on þis iglande fif geþeode: englisc, ⁊ brittisc, ⁊ wilsc, ⁊ scyttisc, ⁊ pyhtisc, ⁊ bocleden.
And there are on this island five languages: English, and British, and Welsh, and Scottish, and Pictish, and Book-Latin.
(Yes, that’s six in total, but note that “British” and “Welsh” were the same language. Also: “Scottish” meant “Gaelic”, because there was only one people, based in Ireland, who were expanding into southern Scotland, and they were called “Scotti” as much as anything.)
The word geþeode is derived from þeod, which is cognate with words like the Irish tuath and the Proto-Germanic Teuta, thus “Teuton”, and via þeudo to Deutsch. This word originally meant “a people”, and in Old English later expanded to “a language”, indicating how closely the concepts were intertwined.
The Anglo-Saxons and the Irish were on as good terms as two neighboring cultures could be. They traded, they swapped clerics, they occasionally skirmished, when the Scots and the Picts had more-or-less merged into one culture, they and the Anglo-Saxons butted heads at the Northumbrian border.
The real watershed happened after the Norman Invasion. First the Normans conquered England, then, a hundred years later, Strongbow led the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170. And Prince John of England was soon made Lord of the newly “conquered” Ireland.
John visited Ireland in 1185. He was 19, and exactly as mature as you’d expect a 19 year old to be. He managed to annoy the local Norman lords, he actively insulted the Irish lords and kings who met him (the story is that he went around pulling on their beards because he thought it was funny), and when he got tired of everyone getting angry with him all the time, he went home to England.
In John’s court when he travelled was a Norman/Welsh minor nobleman and clerk named Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales. And he saw an opportunity. So he wrote a book called Topographia Hibernia “The Topography of Ireland”.
And he made a special point to say that John’s lands were fine and valuable, but his reception wasn’t his fault, because these lands were spoiled by the animals living in them:
This people then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner, just like the modern fashion recently introduced; indeed, all their habits are barbarisms. But habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as these people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world and lying at its furthest extremity, forming is it were, another world, and are thus excluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing and practise nothing, but the barbarism in which they are born and bred and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless.
Topographia Hibernia became, quickly, the standard reference work when anyone in England wanted to read up on Ireland, and it almost immediately became common knowledge that the Irish people were barely better than animals.
It only got worse after that point. (See: the history of Ireland from 1200 on.)
So you can trace the dehumanisation of the Irish back to c.1200, and a minor cleric’s desire to suck up to his boss.
It wasn’t a matter of colour, because that wasn’t really a thing at the time. And who was hated by whom depended to some degree on who their king was at war with.
There was definitely racism, though. It was just mediated through nationality (which was, as it still is, a complicated concept) rather than skin colour.
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Even within Ireland many people have traditionally looked down on and discriminated against the Irish Travellers (sometimes called “Tinkers” or inaccurately referred to as Gypsies) who are often considered to be a separate ethnicity despite being as just as white as anyone else in the country. Even to this day it’s common to see old-timey signs like this that say “no tinkers” for sale to hang up on your bar’s wall as a novelty.
So yeah, it’s all about power, and almost every group seems desperate to find one of lower status to “otherize” and crap on.
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Huh. I saw the movie in the 90s and assumed it was a made-up 'burb. Today I learned.
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Probably written long after 1786.
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Doesn’t it also have something to do with anti-catholic stance in Protestant UK and America? Remember people were making a big deal about JFK being catholic in the mid 20th century still. but also probably a helping handful of “the new poor people who have come to take my jobs” like the people moving from Oklahoma to california during the dustbowl. Ethnically they were all pretty much the same. It was about social class and fear of displacement… just guesses…and then probably those social fears give rise to people looking to justify it - “those other people aren’t like us for some made up reason” In the modern day, aside from literal racism based on skin color or country of origin, we have people prejudiced against the homeless and people who collect welfare.
The above is a tangent. I’m not arguing for whoopie’s point of view. If someone if discriminating based on even perceived racial differences, it is still racism.
Yeah, it’s definitely not just a thing of the past:
Just weird to me that people still unashamedly sell novelty signs like that. There are plenty of bigots in the world but few of them openly sell “no Jews allowed” signs as a novelty.
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Learn something new, i had never heard or seen that term before. Sad but glad to be informed
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A humorous sign hanging in,I believe, Matt Malloy’s pub in Westport Ireland
Easily verifiable. Check back later.
BTW the more socially-acceptable sign to indicate “No Travelers welcome” is a sign saying “No halting allowed”. Everyone knows what it actually means.
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They picked up that name because the Irish Travellers had a reputation for being good at metalworking and repair of utensils:
In some of Disney’s recent Tinkerbell cartoons they seem to be trying to reclaim the term in a positive way, having the character demonstrating skills in inventing gadgets out of old teapots and such.
Edit: I guess she’s always had those skills from back when J M Barrie created the character. From Wikipedia:
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here, how about a take even worse than whoopi’s original–
edited to add-- hard to believe but i’ve been around long enough to remember when sullivan was considered a “must read” whenever he published something. thinking about that makes me feel old indeed.
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What is it that distinguishes a “serious newspaper opinion columnist” from any other asshole on Facebook, anyway?
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Shut up, Andrew…
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Would he care to comment on the “Jews will not replace us” crew from Charlottesville?
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Say what now?
I’m not signed up for the Twatter, so I can’t read much of what’s at that link. Does Sully bother to explain that bizarre comment?
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