Gerry Adams, President of SF, recently created a controversy with a tweet that many would describe as racist. He wrote: “Watching Django Unchained- A Ballymurphy N----r!” but he spelled out the n-word (Ballymurphy is part of west Belfast, and is a republican area Adams apparently lives in). Although I haven’t seen it yet, according to the BBC, it’s a movie “set before the American Civil War and focuses on racism, slavery, violence and murder.” Please read the BBC article for Adams’s response to the criticism of his tweet.
Although I of course believe that there are strong similarities between the oppression of Northern Catholics (referred to hereafter as "Catholics") and the oppression of American Blacks (referred to hereafter as "Blacks") in the last century, and I think an argument can be made that the former are not white, I think Adams was out of line with this statement (and if we're talking specifically about slavery in America, that's VERY different from what Adams has experienced as a Catholic, even if we look back to the Stormont era). Although he might not be white in the N. Ireland context, he’s not a person of color and to one degree or another, outside N. Ireland, he’s sort of white (crucially, in multi-racial yet (at least fairly) racist societies like America and the Republic of Ireland (where he’s a TD (member of parliament))).
On the other hand, the ways Catholics have been treated since partition are similar to the ways Blacks have been treated since Reconstruction. I’m going to assume the reader, especially if they’re American, is familiar with how Blacks were/are treated and focus mostly on the Catholics part of this comparison. In N. Ireland (this is not an exhaustive list):
(the Stormont era refers to 1921-1972, when there was a devolved government there and The Troubles were roughly from 1969 until somewhere around 2005)
1. There were laws (during almost all of the Stormont era) about voting for local government which, without mentioning Catholics, were anti-Catholic and could be compared to poll taxes and literacy tests, etc. that were used to keep Blacks in the South away from the polls (for local, state, and federal elections). Also, certain kinds of businesspeople, who were disproportionately Northern Protestant, had MORE than one vote in local and regional elections.
2. Although it wasn’t formal, there was segregation in housing- crucially, Catholics in mixed areas were often intimidated out of their homes (Stormont era and The Troubles) (of course some things very similar happened (and might BE happening) to blacks).
3. There was clear evidence of widespread discrimination in employment during both periods (towards the beginning of The Troubles Catholics were 2 times more likely than Northern Protestants to be unemployed and in 1988 they were 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed) (in recent decades Blacks have experienced an unemployment rate consistently about twice what the white one is (see this))
4. There was clear evidence of discrimination in the allocation of public housing in the Stormont era (partly because of that it was incredibly common during the Stormont era for more than one Catholic family to be living in a small home and this may have continued to a small degree in the 70s and 80s, although apparently DISCRIMINATION stopped in the very early 70s) (there was and is also housing discrimination against Blacks).
5. The police were vastly disproportionately Northern Protestant and very bigoted (both Stormont and The Troubles) (there was and is also a similar problem in America with police racism). In The Troubles, the British Army also behaved violently towards Catholics or at least harrassed them.
6. There was sectarian murder of Catholics civilians (including murders by the British Army) even at times when there was little or no armed activity by republicans (most of the Stormont Era and the last 19 years) (not that such activity justified such murders). During The Troubles, it probably was (on a per-capita basis) 5-10 times worse than what Blacks experienced during the same time period (since the end of the Troubles it's probably worse in America (part of the difference during the Troubles was that the "rebellion" in America was a lot less militaristic and that appears to be a factor in terms of what kinds of repressive tools are used)). (UPDATE 2/18/20 although the asymmetric chronology of this comparison is starting to frustrate me, I should say that in the decades before the Troubles, with lynching in the American South, it was probably worse for blacks)
7. To be fair, the informally but VERY segregated nature of the education system in the North is something the Catholics actually welcomed, whereas, of course, in the American South it was formal and a huge part of the problem (third level education (i.e. universities) in N. Ireland haven't been segregated at all for decades now, but besides that there's a high degree of segregation).
8. I am almost certain that Catholics haven’t had anywhere near the same problem with mass incarceration that Blacks have had in America, but the use of internment, non-jury courts, etc. is kind of similar.
9. Considering the poverty and unemployment that Blacks disproportionately experience and the horrible health-care system we have, I have to point out that Catholics benefit from the UK's National Health Service.
10. UPDATE 6/1/21 When I first did this comparison, I left out one aspect of oppression. And that is what might be called pogroms (bigoted riots against minorities), in this case not against Jews but against Northern Catholics or Black Americans. I had almost no knowledge of that when it came to Blacks and I didn’t want to imply that it happened to Catholics but not Blacks. It did happen to Catholics, crucially in the first few years when N. Ireland was being established in the early 1920s and then again at the beginning of the Troubles in Aug. 1969. In July, Aug, and September 1969, and mostly during a period of 2-3 days, in Belfast, 1,505 Catholic families fled their homes (probably something like 18% of Belfast’s Catholic population, probably something like 1.8% of the North’s Catholic population). In one night alone 650 families were burnt or at least forced, out f their homes. There were some smaller-scale pogroms at other times in N. Ireland. In America, I’ve been aware for decades of the events illustrated in the movie
“Rosewood.” And for at least a year now I have been aware of what happened in Tulsa OK in 1921. What prompted me to do this update is that CNN created a sort of interactive report on all the times there have been race riots in America. It’s here.
On a related note, there have been, historically, strong person-to-person and organization-to-organization contacts between the various Nationalist and/or Republican and/or anti-Unionist struggles in British occupied Ireland and the various struggles among Black people in America. I go into that more here.
Are Northern Catholics white in N. Ireland? There are two crucial ways in which they aren't:
1) You can sort of say they don’t have white privilege. IN NORTHERN IRLEAND (until the last 10 years or so when things improved for them) they had it worse than people of color IN NORTHERN IRELAND. I’m not sure of the exact history of the growth of that population, but in 2001 they were about .7% of the population and in 2011 they were about 2% (Chinese people were arriving in the 1960s and Vietnamese “boat people” were arriving in the 1970s). But on a per-capita basis there were more (or a LOT more) sectarian murders of Catholic civilians (by loyalist paramilitaries frequently with some degree of help from the
security forces or by the security forces (including the British Army) than racist murders (as far as I can tell there wasn’t a single racist murder). As far as I can tell, unemployment among Catholics was also higher than that among people of color in N. Ireland. I found a table that touches on this, in a book partly available on-line thanks to Google called “Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland,” by Paul Hainsworth. 21% of the general population, 2% of the Chinese population, 7% of the Pakistani population, and 3% of the Indian population “had no paid job within the last ten years” (p.195) (that was in 1992 (and back then Catholics would have been a lot more likely to be unemployed than the general population)). According to the same book (p. 7), in 1997 Baroness Denton said in the House of Lords, while a Northern Ireland minister, that employment “is not a current problem” for ethnic minorities in N. Ireland. In general, based on doing searches for two words in the book, and skimming through the pages available on the web and looking for the word “unemployment” or the word "unemployed" highlighted, unemployment was an absolutely tiny part of the book- and with one possible exception, none of the references to unemployment (or the unemployed) suggested that it is or was a problem among people of color there as seriously as it was a problem for Catholics.
Some people would say that the lack of racist murders is not because racism is less widespread and less deep there than sectarianism is, but because people of color stayed out of the conflict and would have been slaugtered if they hadn't. If they had suffered civilian deaths for standing with the Catholics, that would have been because they stood with the Catholics, not because of racism. If they had stood with the Protestants, civilian people of color would have been less likely to be killed by republicans than Protestant civilians were, and very few Protestant civilians were killed because they were Protestant (primarily because of what I write below and some stuff here, it should be accepted that republicans were incredibly anti-racist, IN N. IRELAND (I could also point to support from people of color in America and good relations with the ANC, but that is probably less convincing)). I'm not sure what effect involvement in the conflict would have done to unemployment among people of color. If they sided with the Protestants, it wouldn't have mattered since Catholics did not control a large part of the economy. If they sided with the Catholics, they probably would have been less prosperous (possible boycotts by Protestants, etc.).
2) Although I’m not very familiar with this sociological process, it could be said that many if not most Catholics are not socialized to identify as white. I’m not saying that message never gets through, or that there aren’t racist Catholics there. But a frequent message from many of their political leaders, many of their community organizations, and some of their schools is to identify with people of color throughout the world. For example, MANY of the numerous murals in republican areas stress anti-racism, celebrate African-American political figures, express solidarity with struggles in the “developing world,” or compare the experiences of Catholics with those of people of color elsewhere.
Lastly, I need to stress that Gerry Adams is not a racist. SF, under his leadership, has an impressive record (in IRELAND, and kind of in America) of opposing racism. I offer some examples of that here. (the America part is briefly discussed here).
