The “Irish slaves” memes are getting even more desperate. This one (depicting Irish Spring soap!) was created in reaction to the announcement that the Aunt Jemima branding, which is based on a song from a blackface minstrel show that romanticised slavery, was being withdrawn.

There are older memes also circulating which use the leprechaun on the box of Lucky Charms to make the same nonsensical argument. Imagine how racist you must be to equate a mythical being with slavery nostalgia that was baked into a product’s branding.

P.S. The Lucky Charms brand was created by John Holahan, evidently an Irish American who was proud of his ancestry. His daughter’s name was Shannon Kilkenny.

P.P.S. We have a National Leprechaun Museum in Dublin.

I just browsed Facebook for the first time in months and....good lord. The second example (shared hundreds of times) actually attributes the ahistorical text from that notorious Global Research blog to "Sir Oliver Cromwell", thus unintentionally blaming Oliver Cromwell's uncle.

We don't need to fabricate Cromwell quotes.

"When they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head; and every tenth man of the soldiers killed; and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other Tower were all spared, as to their lives only; and shipped likewise for the Barbadoes." (17 September 1649)

"Some merchants of the city of Bristol having petitioned to me for licence to transport 400 of the Irish Tories, and such other idle and vagrant persons as may be thought fittest to be spared out of Ireland, for planting of the Caribbee Islands..."

"...which address of theirs I do recommend to your consideration that their desire therein may be granted in such a way as to you shall seem fit and expedient." (Cromwell to Fleetwood, 30 January 1654)

I honestly can’t keep up. This time it’s a podcast with the host simply reading the same propaganda. https://twitter.com/williambrownii/status/1273653474664873987?s=21 https://twitter.com/WilliamBrownII/status/1273653474664873987

“[Aunt Jemima] was a picture of the American dream.”

A racist stereotype that comforted white folk that plantation slavery was benign and that such docile black servility could still be purchased at the supermarket. The “slave in a box.”

https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1275582279289581571?s=21 https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1275582279289581571

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”