The Irish, Slavery, and Racism Today

On the blog of the Southern Poverty Law Center there was a very prominent post where they interviewed an Irish scholar about a new racist meme on the Internet. For the most part I'll just encourage you to read it yourself. It's fascinating and could come up as something anti-racists have to deal with while doing our work.

This is fairly embarrassing, but earlier there were three posts on this blog that claimed that Cromwell sent 10s of thousands of Irish people to the Caribbean to work as slaves. First of all, I never said or even thought, not even briefly, any of the offensive claims about slavery attributed to racists in that article (that is, the following: "that “Irish slaves” were treated far worse than black slaves; that there were more “Irish slaves” than black slaves; that “Irish slaves” were worth less than black slaves, that enslaved Irish women were forced to breed with enslaved African men, and that the Irish were slaves for much longer than black slaves;" or, "overtly racist statements, e.g. 'yet, when is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching and moaning about how the world owes them a living?' ”). But after discussing it with three knowledgeable people, I know now I was wrong to refer to the Irish in the Caribbean as slaves who were treated the same as African slaves. I'm not sure where I got that from. They were more or less forced into indentured servitude, although they would have worked in slave-like conditions and many or MOST died before earning their freedom (they lasted about 3-7 years). Their children did not become slaves (I somehow got the idea that 1-2 generations would have been born slaves and then that practice would have died out somehow (I could see the British doing that for 1-2 generations and then a majority of decision-makers deciding that the Irish were white enough that their forced labour shouldn't be hereditary- that that would apply only for Africans)). In fact, a friend knowledgeable about this told me that some of the Irish, after earning their freedom, became overseers of the slaves or even slave owners themselves.

One of the three references to this issue on this blog was in a poem and it made the most sense for me to remove the issue from that poem. The other two I fixed a bit and left them there.

Tom