Some Thoughts About New Atheists

I came across an article in Salon about how the New Atheists merged with the far-right. I have read it and read it and read it some more, probably 10 times total (it was the first thing I read in YEARS about New Atheists, so as I was typing this essay, I read about 10 other long articles about the New Atheists (links to those articles are at the bottom of this)). The author of the article (Emile P. Torres) has done a great service for liberal-progressive religious people and some other groups in our society (like atheist women). They seem to be a very solid atheist and might not like helping the former group, but they're also very intellectually honest and when they realized what kind of people the leading New Atheists are, they contributed to publicly exposing them as the scum that they are.

(I discuss what I mean by liberal here (my brief non-philosophical definition is someone to the left of Bill Clinton and to the right of Senator Elizabeth Warren))

(You might want to read part of my post about things Catholic. Read the stuff towards the bottom starting with “Some of this is repetitive but I’ll describe the politics of Catholics,” and ending with the asterisks above the very last section).

I’m going to offer some thoughts about the New Atheists in general, thoughts inspired by reading the Salon article. I’m sure Torres will disagree with some of it, but it is not meant as an attack on them. I encourage you to read their article first and then read this essay.

I believe that the New Atheists cross the line in terms of their hostility to religious people. I will also describe how I am both religious and secular. I will explain that I believe New Atheists were clearly more right-wing than left-wing many years ago.

(I’m going to assume that there are rank and file members of the New Atheist community who are liberal or progressive like Torres)

New Atheism crosses the line

I am fine with atheists in general. I’m close or very close to at least a few if not several. As I’ll explain below, I am very secular. But I believe that the hostility New Atheists have for religious people is so extreme that it is close to bigotry. I would say that even if they were completely even-handed in their hostility to religion, but they’re not. They are much more hostile to Muslims than they are to Jews. I’ll say more about that below.

New Atheists are hostile to religious people because they have a different belief about God (atheists don’t KNOW that God doesn’t exist anymore than theists KNOW that God does exist).They act as if great harm is done by believing in, for example, the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Great harm is done by the right-wing POLITICAL beliefs of many or most religious people (there is nothing right-wing, left-wing or centrist about the Holy Trinity (for example)) but no harm is done by believing, for example, that Christ was the Son of God. In all honesty and fairness there are some miscellaneous non-political ways that religion can harm, such as Catholic priests abusing altar boys, but that miscellaneous stuff isn’t much compared to the political work of right-wing religious people- they are the main problem with religion, and as I explain below, can be dealt with in ways that don’t put down all religious people.

New Atheism wants to make everyone an atheist. One problem with that is that if it were attempted through some kind of coercion (such as treating religious faith like alcoholism) a successful effort would be akin to genocide. And there are many things about religion that bleed into culture and history and philosophy that would also be lost if everything religious was eradicated.

They believe that religion poisons everything and that getting rid of religion would make the world a better place. First, a better place for whom? Based partly on Torres’ article and some other articles I’ve found, the New Atheists are more right-wing than left-wing. Also, the connection between being liberal or progressive and being an atheist isn’t as strong as they think. Same with the connection between being conservative or right-wing and being a theist. There are plenty of exceptions on both sides of that- plenty of liberal or leftist theists and plenty of conservative or fascist atheists. And the idea that attacking the religious beliefs of most conservatives and right-wingers is a short-cut to making them re-consider their noxious political beliefs is likely flawed. I have no idea why it would be easier to change someone’s religious beliefs than it would be to change their political beliefs. And focusing on their religious beliefs makes it easier for them to claim that it’s the liberals and leftists who have crossed the line by attacking their religious beliefs. I say, ignore the religious dimension of the religious right as much as you can and simply oppose, for example, their homophobia as if they’re NOT referring to the Bible.

What’s Good About Religion?

There are other reasons why the New Atheist agenda of eradicating religion is bad. Here’s a list of a few good things about religion.

1) To whatever degree you need to believe in God to believe in Heaven, religion provides a theory for what, if anything, happens when we die. For many people, including myself, this helps with dealing with loss of a loved one.


2) Reading the children’s Bible 3 times around the age of 11 planted the seeds that blossomed into my socialist beliefs about 7 years later (there were other factors, like the music I listened to in High School).
3) There’s a strong sense of community. Although the fairly partisan socialist in me sees that as a bad thing when it’s a conservative community, when it’s a liberal-progressive one it’s great.
4) I’m tempted to say that without the Black church in America, we’d still have segregation. In all fairness it’s likely that if that church had not developed, something secular would have played a similar role in overthrowing segregation, but the fact is, the Black church was a major part of the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s not an exhaustive list at all, but there are a lot of good things about religion that would be thrown out with the bigotry, etc. if (the more liberal or progressive) New Atheists had their way (the others (the ones Torres describes) don’t seem interested in getting rid of the injustice and inequality in our society).

I’m both religious and secular

I have been religious almost all of the time since I was about 5 or 10. But I have also been secular in many ways. When I used to wear a “medal” (like a cross but a little different) I wore it under my shirt. I wasn’t embarrassed or anything like that, but I wasn’t interested in promoting religion, it was just something to remind me of my relationship with God.

When I went to confirmation class at my church in 12th grade, I may have been more interested in the material than most of the other students, but I chose not to get confirmed at the end of it. Although I kind of regret that decision, I felt that I didn’t need the ultra-official sanction of the Church to be a Catholic. And I didn’t need it. I continued getting communion after I declined to be confirmed.

Although the Bible was part of what made me a socialist and I have no problem with religious socialists, I don’t identify as one myself. I’m not sure exactly why, but just in general I am very secular outwardly and fairly religious and spiritual inwardly.

I don’t believe in trying to convert people and I believe that religions should be fairly passive in trying to get new adherents.

I believe in Intelligent Design, the idea that Evolution was guided by God.

On foreign policy New Atheists are mostly right-wing

In addition to being universally and incredibly hostile to Islam, New Atheist leaders have MOSTLY also sided with Israel in the Middle-East conflict and, years ago, (mostly) with the US administration of George W. Bush in the War on Terror and specifically the Iraq War 2003-2008. As others have more or less pointed out, the Palestinian struggle was dominated by secular forces for decades before Hamas won an election in 2006- and although they haven’t lost an election since then they also haven’t won one either- there’s reason to believe that a majority of Palestinians don’t share all of Hamas’ beliefs. There were a lot of complaints among Palestinians about the PLO that had nothing to do with it being secular. I’m not sure to what degree this is true in Gaza since 2006, but in the West Bank the Christian minority of Palestinians is treated just fine by the Muslims. It’s the Israeli state that’s tough on minorities. Christians and Muslims are not considered full members of the Israeli nation. And although there are a lot of atheists in Israel’s Jewish population, the Jewish identity of the State is partly about religion- but many New Atheists are so anti-muslim and pro-American imperialism that they support Israel anyway.

(I offer evidence for calling Israeli policy towards the Palestinians “Israeli Apartheid” here and discuss Zionism here) (UPDATE 7/13/21 most of my thoughts about the War on Terror are here)

Are atheists in America oppressed?

American atheists in general don’t have much to complain about. Based on various answers given on wikipedia, I believe that the percentage of the US population that is atheist is somewhere around 15 to 20. And I doubt that more than 1-2% of the US Congress is atheist, so they have a legitimate complaint there. I’m sure most atheists in America have experienced at least a little harassment because of their belief about God, and I take that pretty seriously.  They sometimes have to fight efforts by government to blur the boundary between church and state, a fight I join them in.

Does hostility towards Atheists result in the kind of job discrimination that creates disproportionate poverty? Apparently not. According to Pew 30% of atheist households earn $100,000 or more and only 24% earn less than $30,000 (in that graph I just linked to, they’re the 5th richest religious group in America, out of about 25-30). I have not heard of anti-atheist police brutality, or mass incarceration, or a low rate of graduation from college, etc..

In general, American atheists don’t have much to complain about.

Religion and The Troubles

For the most part I suggest you start with reading some of my posts here, here, and here. If you want more than that, I recommend the books “Northern Ireland: The Orange State” by Michael Farrell and “McCann: War and Peace in Northern Ireland” by Eamonn McCann.

Although religion is a big thing for most of the anti-Catholic bigots, A) there is also nationality, and B) from what I have heard there are some anti-Catholic bigots who are atheists- not many at all, but some. On the Catholic side there is very little anti-Protestant bigotry and very little religious motivation. When Catholics experience bigotry they don’t quote those parts of the Bible that make it clear they’re Christians. They don’t even use the Bible the way Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did- when they refer to America in their quest for equality, they sometimes focus on the secular actions of this country’s black population and in general they say little if anything about the Bible which inspired the civil rights movement here.

The British introduced sectarianism to the population of Ireland as a way to (on one hand) divide the settlers and the indigenous people and (on the other hand) keep the Catholics down (which helped with the former goal). They maintained a colonial presence in N. Ireland for several reasons and religious solidarity with the Protestants was only one of them. It was basically because of imperialism.

The white male class privilege of the New Atheists
 

Torres accuses the New Atheists of worrying about the erosion of their white male privilege. I think there’s something else as well as that. They decided that advancing an atheist agenda was incredibly important. They clearly weren’t concerned about economic justice or social justice. I say that partly because you need to build coalitions for those things and you aren’t going to organize a coalition for economic or racial justice if at the same time you’re putting down everyone religious. And I need to say that I’m sure those theists who would be attracted to a coalition for social, and/or economic, and/or racial justice are unlikely to be the kind that would try to start a fight with atheists in the coalition.

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Articles I read to refresh and add to my understanding of New Atheism:

Atheism and the Class Problem
Gaza Has New Atheists Split Over Which Religion is more wrong
When It Comes To Islam, New Atheists Sound A Lot Like Christian Fundamentalists
Why Are There So Few Atheists In Israel?
American New Atheism and Israel
Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim Animus
Why the “New Atheists” are Right-wing on Foreign Policy
The Trouble with the New Atheists: Part II

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The posts on my blog that are partly or entirely about religion are here.

Movie Reviews A

This is a new part of my blog. I’m going to start typing up some thoughts about the movies I watch.

Hidden Figures (IMDB Wikipedia)

I don’t know historically accurate it is, but it is a good story. I’m a little surprised that as long ago as the early 1960s black women were allowed to contribute that much to NASA but apparently they were and it’s so inspiring that these three women overcame the barriers of racism and sexism to such a degree that they succeeded as much as they did. I also love this movie because I love stories about space exploration, whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens or stuff like Apollo 13 and this movie.

I give it 4 stars out of 5.

Foxfire (IMDB Wikipedia)

I found this at a video store in 1997 and watched it a few times. I think it’s an independent film that did very well in the theaters. It’s basically about friendship among a group of high school girls who fight back against a sexually abusive teacher and get suspended. They encounter more sexism among their male peers.

I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

On the Basis of Sex (IMDB Wikipedia)

I don’t know historically accurate it is, but it is a good story. This is about the early career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court Justice. It’s one of the best and most inspiring movies I have ever seen. I didn’t appreciate her as much as I should have when she was still alive. I got the impression her husband wasn’t as progressive as she was, but he still seemed like a cool guy, giving her some help with her first attempt at changing this country in a progressive direction. And her daughter also seemed pretty awesome- she verbally fought back as construction workers were harassing her, and earlier she ditches class to go to a rally that Gloria Steinem spoke at. In 10th grade I walked out of my 3rd period class to join other students protesting the 1992 Rodney King verdict (King was brutally assaulted by LAPD officers in 1991 and the officers were acquitted, sparking protests and rioting).

I give it 5 stars out of five.

In Memory of FDR: Three New Poems

Below are three poems. They're about WWII. The second one is based on a song I like politically. The other two are not, see this for an explanation of my poetry.

The rest of the lyrics are available by clicking on the lyrics label at the bottom.

“Allied Unity” based on “European Unity” by Brutal Attack. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about progressives in America who supported FDR and America’s involvement with the Allies.
2. I could be more familiar with FDR, but it seems like he was the most progressive President this country has had. I don’t think there’s any doubt that economically he was good- not a socialist but something very close to a social-democrat. On matters of race he was disappointing as President- his (possibly unavoidable) alliance with segregationist Democrats, Japanese/Japanese-American Interment, etc. But he DID allow for the creation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (see the first poem here) and the creation of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces (see the poem in this post called “Three-Three-Two”) and the utilization as a combat unit in Europe of the 92nd Infantry Division (a segregated, Black unit of the US Army). It’s not irrelevant that his wife, who probably benefited politically from being the First Lady, was anti-racist, progressive, and politically active.
3. Blackshirts were Italian fascists.
4. The 6th line of the last verse is about my opinion of Irish neutrality during WWII. I should stress that the word mask can refer to a PROTECTIVE covering, so I’m not saying that the Irish were trying to hide their real motivation for sitting out the war. It might still be a tiny bit inaccurate, but at the most just a tiny bit (a tiny bit inaccurate because I think they're neutrality was principled instead of a way to protect their nation from harm).
5. Although I could attribute the statement against anti-Semitism to the progressives whose perspective the poem is written from, I also want to say that as far as American servicemen opposed to anti-semitism, realistically probably some moderate-sized minority of them.
6. Yes, I know that the UK and the US were/are imperialists. Ward Churchill was my faculty advisor and I’ve written this blog.
7. **66% of this poem is me, 34% is the original.
8. When I say "most" I mean most of those who fought for either side, and I think a large chunk, maybe majority? of the US male population fought in the Civil War.

You know our nation’s been put in the hands of someone so cool
Using his power, against the corporate tools
We were all together part of getting him elected
The poor, unemployed and unions have certainly been affected

Chorus
Allied Unity
Fighting with pride and dignity
Anti-Fascist Unity
European lands will be free from the Nazis

Most of our forefathers fought against the Confederacy
And now we’re fighting with the Brits against Nazi Germany
France, Libya and Poland were totally overrun
By Panzers and the Blackshirts, the Nationalist Socialist scum

So Americans, Brits and Soviets, listen very carefully
We need to stick together, with a unified strategy
United we'll win, all for one, and one for all
If we stick together the Axis powers are gonna fall
It wont be easy it'll be a long hard task
Unfortunately there are those fools who wear the neutrality mask
But we'll pull through, cos truth wins in the end
To anti-Semitism and Nazi Imperialism we will never bend

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“Three-Three-Two” based on "Belfast Brigade" I usually just provide a link to the original lyrics, but in this case I use a combination of two versions I found online (plus 3 more changes that I made myself), so the lyrics for the original are below.

1. This is about the 332nd Fighter Group of the US Army Air Force during WWII. It was a segregated, Black unit that saw combat in North Africa and Europe and towards the end of the war had an impressive record as bomber escorts. I saw two movies (twice) about them (“The Tuskegee Airmen” and “Red Tails”) and movies don’t lie, so I’m fully educated about them. Seriously, though, I don’t think I’ll do any more research about them.
2. Goring was Hermann Goring, the head of Germany’s Air Force. Messerschmitts were highly effective fighters.
3. There were efforts by American racists to keep the 332nd from participating in WWII, and when that failed, to keep them from getting bomber escort duty (after something like 1-2 years that failed as well).
4.  Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, was possibly their biggest advocate.
5. After I wrote the next line I learned that the name changed to US Army Air Force just before the war started. Goddamn fucking facts getting in the way of a good rhyme.
6. “Spit Fire” was. a motto of theirs, according to wikipedia.
7. There was the Hitler Youth, and I read a book about a member called “A Child of Hitler.”
8. Some German planes, towards the end of the war, were jets, and I think the first one shot down was downed by the 332nd. Also, the 332nd did NOT get the newest, most advanced fighters available.
9. Conflate traditionally means to combine, but according to my experience and this it can also mean to confuse two similar but different things.
10. As enthusiastic as I am when I think of the Allied cause, in all honesty, I doubt that more than half of American servicemen could have been called anti-fascist. But I think it must have been 100% with the 332nd. They volunteered and fought for the opportunity to fight the Nazis, and there’s no way they didn’t recognize Nazism as white supremacist.
11. **65% of this version is me, 35% is the original.
12. UPDATE 3/2120 The very original versions, which I combined and made a few changes to and THEN seriously altered to make this poem, say "men" instead of "those" in the chorus. But since women have (for at least110 years now) been included in republican armed groups like the IRA, I changed it (in my version of the original, which is below my poem below) to "those" and forgot to change it back for this poem. So now it says men in the chorus.
13. UPDATE 3/29/20 I already mentioned that I thought the pilots were part of the USAAC. Some would say, even if that were true, what about what the USAAC did BEFORE WWII? I don't know. Although WWI was pretty fucked up (politically) as wars go, America didn't go to France to keep Black people down or take the side of right-wingers in a conflict with left-wingers or something. And as far as all the times the Marines were sent into South American and Central American countries on behalf of US corporations, that was the Marines, not the Army, and considering the range of aircraft back then, the lack of aircraft carriers, and the very small and short-term nature of those interventions, I'd be surprised if the USAAC was involved, and if so, it would have been nothing, in terms of planes, pilots and missions, compared to what the USAAC (actually the USAAF) did in WWII.

Goring sent the Messerschmitts up to shoot the bombers down
He thought American racists had kept the Black man down
But he got a rude awakening, when, in their bomber escort debut
He met the Tuskegee Airmen of the Three-Three-Two

Glory, glory to the memory of Eleanor
Glory, Glory to the US Army Air Corps
Glory to the memory
Of the men who flew and died
“Spit Fire!” was the war cry of the Three-Three-Two

Messerschmitts came from Berlin, equipped with machine guns
Planes by the dozens, piloted by Hitler’s sons
But when they approached the bombers they found they had no clue
When it came to fighting the anti-fascists of the Three-Three-Two

Chorus

They had no jet propulsion and their secondhand planes were full of dents
They were ready to defend themselves no matter where they were sent
They were out for equality and to hell with Hitler’s Aryan state
Segregation and National Socialism were easy to conflate

Chorus

All you gallant African-Americans who joined the three-three-two
The world will always owe an enormous debt to you
We should know our country's history, and the sacrifice you made
In the anti-fascist struggle, never did you stray


original lyrics:

Craigavon sent the Specials out to shoot the people down
He thought the IRA were dead in dear old Belfast town
But he got a rude awakening, when with rifle and grenade
He met the first battalion of the Belfast Brigade

Glory, glory to old Ireland
Glory, Glory to this island
Glory to the memory
Of those who fought and died
"No Surrender" is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade

Specials came from Holywood, equipped with English guns
Men by the thousand, ammunition by the ton
But when they got to Seaford St. they were seriously delayed
By the fighting 1st battalion of the Belfast Brigade

Chorus

We have no armored cars or tenders for to show
We're ready to defend ourselves no matter where we go
We're out for our Republic and to hell with your Orange state
"No Surrender" is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade

Chorus

So come all you gallant Irish people and join the IRA
To strike a blow for freedom, when there comes our certain day
You know our country's history and the sacrifice it made
Come join the 1st battalion of the Belfast Brigade

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“ZOB” based on “Final Solution” by No Remorse. Original lyrics are here.

1.This is about the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII. ZOB is the Polish acronym for the Jewish Combat Organization. My knowledge of this comes from an extensive study of the European part of WWII and watching, multiple times, the movie “Uprising.”
2. The leadership of the ghetto occupants tried to appease the Nazis.
3. As I explain here (in a paragraph towards the top that begins with “Also”) it was possible to predict what was going to happen to the Jews and I think the ZOB understood that to one degree or another. If you think I’m being too harsh on the ghetto leadership, in that post I tear the Irish a new one based partly on my theory that it was possible to predict the Holocaust.
4. The Home Army was the non-Jewish Polish resistance and based on that movie, they were fairly supportive of the ZOB and I think that the Allied leadership told them to be. I think that the HA may have been grateful that the ZOB created another front the Germans had to fight on. They were probably also grateful for every German soldier the ZOB killed.
5. **67% of this poem is me, 33% is the original.

The Nazis will never care about your pleas and weak demands
They read Mein Kamph and will follow Hitler’s genocidal commands
You’re so blind, you don’t understand where it's gonna lead
You would just lay there dying And no one hears your pleas

Armed resistance
To make possible our continued existence

Our goal is not to defeat the reich we just want to survive
Got to make their determination tremble, when we attack we’ll leave none alive
We’re trying to educate the Jewish Council, But they cooperate with the scum
The Nazis ignore our pleas But they'll  be obstructed by the gun

Once we have guns and explosives the Jewish People will let loose
The traitorous and corrupt ghetto police will be hanging by the noose
The Home Army is out there and the Allies are concerned about our plight
They need to see Germans in body bags and see our people fight

Gerry Adams and the n-word

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).