First, below is what I what I wrote on the subject in another post:
Some would say that Jewish-Americans are oppressed and neither Catholics nor the Irish (in America) are. Are they really OPPRESSED? I have a bad history with this question, but let me just briefly say that even in the last 6 years during which we saw 14 Jewish people killed because they were Jewish, they are not oppressed (my timing could be much better and I might sound insensitive, but A) I am not going post-pone this post any longer, and B) although this doesn’t mean I am above criticism as a Christian ally, I think it’s reasonable for me to point out that a lot of the material on my blog is against anti-Semitism). What about widespread police brutality? Mass incarceration? Disproportionate unemployment? Jim Crow-type laws? A low rate of educational success? Where am I getting this? I’m not going to offer a flurry of sources, statistics or quotes. I doubt anyone will seriously say I’m wrong on the relatively specific points I just made. I have been observing American politics a lot the last 25 years. During that time I have probably read an average of 3000 words a day about America in different articles or books. It’s also relevant that while getting my BA in Ethnic Studies, I don’t think anyone ever said something like “that also happens a lot with Jewish-Americans.”
First, bigotry is not oppression. Someone said to me that when someone spray-paints a Swastika on the home of a Jewish person, that that’s oppression. It’s not. It’s a hate crime. At a certain point a massive rate of hate crimes (dependent on how big the target population is) by itself might approach oppression, especially if it’s attached to a genocidal event. But I’ll say more soon about hate crimes against the Jewish-American community and whether or not the word oppression should be used.
Here’s the thing. Catholics in America are not oppressed. Now, I have experienced anti-Catholic bigotry myself, three times. And let me explain something about Jews, Catholics, and political power in America.
In an average Presidential election year here, Catholics were about 15% of the population. Jews were about 2% of the population. IF, in some bizarre hypothetical political system that I DO NOT ADVOCATE FOR, Presidential election victories were distributed based on figures for religion and population, there should have been about 9 elections won by a Catholic. One should have been won by a Jew. Instead we have had one election where a Catholic won. Also, we have only had two elections where a Catholic running for Vice President won. If it wasn’t for Katherine Harris and the conservatives on the Supreme Court, in 2000 we would have elected a Jew Vice President.
Also, on a slightly different question, about the Supreme Court, there’s further evidence that if we just look at Catholics and Jews, Catholics have got it worse. I am not going to re-do the math I did 1-2 years ago, especially because there are different time periods to look at, but if we look at the last 20 years, about 30% of the Supreme Court has been Jewish and about 40-60% has been Catholic. Yes, the Catholics are over-represented (in the last 20 years Catholics have been about 25% of the population), and I’m slightly serious when I say that I feel the pain of American Protestants. But Jews are even more over-represented (UPDATE 5/20/21 Catholics are represented about twice as much as they should be, and Jewish-Americans are represented about 15 times more than they should be; I'm not saying there's anything seriously wrong with that, I'm just saying that the latter are more over-represented than the former).
This is not because of anti-Catholic bigotry, but according to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 only 19% of Catholic households earned $100,000 or more (the following groups were ahead of Catholics- Muslims, Mormons, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Unitarian Universalist, Presbyterian Church in America, United Method Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Church of Christ, Orthodox Christian, Agnostic, Atheist, Presbyterian Church (USA), and Episcopal Church, Hindu, Jewish, ALL US ADULTS (I think that means that Catholics are below average)). For Jewish Americans, it’s 44%.
There is the fact that in the last 10 years about 15 Jewish-Americans have been killed because they’re Jewish. A similar situation for Catholics would be about 200 Catholics killed because they’re Catholic, and I doubt there has been a single such murder in the last few decades, let alone the last 10 years.
Going back to hate crimes and oppression, between 1969 and 2005 856 Catholic civilians in N. Ireland were killed by the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries (the latter, to one degree or another, with support from the former). A comparable situation for Jewish-Americans in the last 10 years would involve somewhere around 2,000 murders of unarmed Jews because they were Jewish, although that might be off by a few hundred in either direction because there seems to be very little agreement when it comes to conducting a census of Jewish-Americans.
In N. Ireland, there’s also the following facts:
1. Until recently, the British head of State couldn’t be married to a Catholic- that was changed recently, but they still can’t be a Catholic themselves (I realize that in recent decades and maybe for around 150 years, the monarchy has been very powerless, but it's symbolic, I believe that it encourages anti-Catholic bigotry in N. Ireland, and imagine if the Head of State and Head of Government in this country were separate and there was a similar law about Jews).
2. Between 1975 and 1998, with practically zero influence on law and policy beyond local government, they were ruled by a state they quite reasonably saw as both foreign and hostile.
3. In 1971 Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants and in 1988 they were TWO AND A HALF times more likely to be unemployed as Protestants.
4. Some would say that the comparison is flawed because even just the spray-painting of a swastika on a Jewish home is a very serious hate crime since it is connected to the Holocaust. Consider the following, which I have written elsewhere on this blog:
Although this is roughly equivalent to what Hitler did with the work camps in the early years of the Holocaust, Cromwell (in the 1600s) sent tens of thousands of Irish people to the Caribbean as some kind of cross between indentured servants and slaves. They had no choice and worked under slave-like conditions until they earned their freedom or died (many or MOST died) (they usually lasted about 3-7 years). During the Famine, 10-15% of the population died and 10-15% of the population would have died if they hadn’t emigrated. This was concentrated in the South and West of Ireland where there very few settlers- if you ignore the settlers and their descendents, it was probably closer to 15-20% and 15-20% of the population. Why did a potato blight result in something close to genocide? First, the indigenous Catholic population was still recovering from about 1.5 centuries of political and legal disempowerment that occurred because of the Penal Laws which denied them most of the rights enjoyed by most or all Protestants (it varied from right to right). “Catholic Emancipation” was only made about 90% complete about 15 years earlier. Because of this and general poverty, the indigenous population was largely dependent on land owned by land lords and the potato crop. For about 45 years before the Famine and during the Famine, Ireland didn’t have a devolved parliament, they were completely ruled from London. Crucially, during the Famine, MASSIVE amounts of food were being shipped from Ireland to Britain, something that involved seventy-five British Army regiments. Now, as I have pointed out elsewhere, it’s not like the British were rounding up the Irish with the goal of extermination. But the deaths only stopped when the blight stopped. And the facts are the facts as far as how many people died or had to emigrate to avoid dying.
And…
What happened in the Holocaust, is not much worse than what happened to the Irish. On the other hand, what the Nazis wanted to do is worse than what the British wanted, IF the British had wanted what happened to the Irish to happen. But there are two more things to consider: A) The British were more or less racist towards the Irish at that point in Anglo-Irish history and were more concerned about practicing Laissez-faire economics and feeding the British population than they were concerned about mass starvation among the Irish, and B) keeping Jews in concentration camps (not DEATH camps) or ghettos with little or no food or medicine was not terribly different from what the British did disempowering and impoverishing the Irish and taking food, at the barrel of a gun, out of Ireland while there was a potato blight.
Tony Blair was the first British Prime Minister to apologize for British policy during the Famine.
5. It might not be a bad idea to read this, about how Catholics were treated in N. Ireland between 1920 and 1972.
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UPDATE 3/1120
Consider this. Although it’s true that America, in terms of immigration policy, opened its door to the Irish during the Famine, there was incredible nativism and anti-Catholic bigotry at the same time. And, although the British may have been much less than a fully fledged democracy (today, the monarchy, as far as I’m concerned has got so little power in practice that it almost doesn’t matter, but I think that during the Famine, the monarchy may have been more powerful than it is today, and I’m pretty sure that the un-elected and elitist House of Lords had more power than it does today) and was an imperialist power and was occupying a foreign nation where it’s policies were resulting in something close to genocide, no country in the world militarily took on the UK. America took on Nazi Germany, but not the UK during the Famine. Back then the US was, admittedly, perhaps not as strong militarily as the UK, but they could have assembled a coalition with some European nations, probably some of the Catholic ones, and landed troops in Ireland to kick the British out and stop the shipment of food out of Ireland. (UPDATE 3/12/20 Some would say it was a different USA back then, but has any American President ever apologized for the failure of the US to do something? In some bizarre alternate history where the US sat out WWII and Nazi Germany was defeated anyway and there were a whole bunch of Holocaust survivors, the US would have at some point between then and now apologized for their inaction)
And although Catholics in N. Ireland went through a nightmare 1969 to 1998 or 2005, the US banned Gerry Adams for the first 10 years he became President of a party getting 40% of the Nationalist vote and probably about 60% of the vote from the poorest half of the Nationalist community (go here and type "SDLP" and "Ireland" in the first field and "middle-class" in the second field) (remember what I wrote about unemployment, and see this). Ex-IRA members who fled to America and tried to start a new life were deported or extradited back to the UK (see this and the middle third of this). It's not like the US didn't have a relationship with the British, they were best friends. I doubt that anti-Catholic bigotry was more than a very small part of it, and Clinton (in contrast to Reagan of the Reagan and Thatcher friendship) played a slightly positive role in the Peace Process (did I just say something nice about Clinton? Someone please shoot me), but still... (the update that is attached to the paragraph above was, for a few minutes or hours, here, but that was a mistake)
(Some would point to Catholics on the Supreme Court as evidence that I am greatly exaggerating anti-Catholic bigotry in this country. But, bearing in mind that the vast majority of such Justices in the last 20 years are conservative and the Dems have a better history (in the last 100 years) of nominating Catholics for President or VP and electing them and admiring them, I think it's similar to anti-Semitic Christian Zionists putting Jews in the spotlight- it's harder for supporters of the Palestinians to attack Jewish supporters of Israel and it's easier for conservative Catholics than it is for conservative WASPs to counter-attack when liberals and leftists call them bigots (UPDATE 5/28/21 I have gotten the impression that evangelicals are a huge part of the GOP and I get the impression that a LOT of them, maybe a majority, don't think that Catholics are Christians))
(also see what I write about the Left and N. Ireland here, first reading what was done or not done starting about half-way down with the sentence "Going back to how much was done...." and then also read, a little further down, the section that starts with "5) The second large chunk....")
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Jewish-Americans in the last decade don’t know what oppression is. Neither do Catholic Americans. Although, looking at the former, the rate of hate crimes is, I'm sure, much worse than with the latter, it doesn't approach, by itself, oppression, and look at the surplus of power of the former on the Supreme Court and the fact that when it comes to the White House Jews have little to complain about, unlike Catholics.
CATHOLICS IN AMERICA ARE NOT OPPRESSED AS CATHOLICS. BIGOTRY IS NOT OPPRESSION. AND JEWISH-AMERICANS ARE NOT OPPRESSED AS JEWISH-AMERICANS.
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There's a relevant article here.
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