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I bought this shirt recently, and have been thinking about BLM, the Irish in Britain and how wrong-headed and unpleasant the whole 'Irish slaves' myth is.
My Grandmother has talked about coming to England in the 50s as a nurse and seeing 'No Blacks, No Irish' signs in windows (despite some people trying to make out this never happened). And it's always stuck with me. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/no-irish-no-coloureds-notices-were-no-myth
A little while ago, I watched a fundraiser for the @LDNIrishCentre online. @daraobriain talked about how it was happening at the time the Black Lives Matter protest was really getting going, and the empathy a lot of Irish have for it.
The Irish have been subject to colonisation, horrendous mistreatment and arguably (with the way the famine was 'handled' by the British) attempted genocide. But decades later, a lot of the active bigotry has fallen by the wayside.
It was strange seeing the 'stupid Irishman' jokes just stopping being a thing in the 90s, as the Celtic Tiger took off, for example. The Irish now generally don't get treated in the way that they once did.
(I'm not saying it's entirely gone, by the way, and the speed with which anti-Irish sentiment was stoked by some during the Brexit negotiations was a reminder just how fast these things can come back round.)
So @daraobriain talked about how there was empathy and humility involved in being Irish and seeing the Black Lives Matter movement. We don't know what it's like to be black in the UK or America, and we haven't dealt with that type of racism.
Obviously, I'm talking about white Irish people here. There are very much black Irish people, who have had to deal with just how racist people everywhere can be, including in Ireland.
But we have enough of a cultural history, and not that far removed, to have a sense of what being on the receiving end of bigotry and prejudice is like. We can empathise, while acknowledging that our situation was different.
This is why the 'Irish slaves' myth bothers me so much. Because it's so often treated as a competitive point, with the intention of dismissing the horrendous racism people of colour generally, and black people specifically, have had aimed at them.
Every time you see it, it's always about how 'Irish slaves had it worse'. That they were the worse-treated, etc. In a weird, desperate attempt to claim a horrendous history that isn't ours.
The 'Irish slaves' myth is entirely about dismissing black suffering, with the unspoken point always being "...but you don't hear *us* complaining about it, do you?". The underlying message is that black people are entitled, complaining about something that wasn't even that bad.
It'd be one thing if Irish-Americans (because this is an Irish-American thing, not an Irish thing) believed the Irish slaves myth and used it to build empathy with black people. To say 'it was horrendous that we were treated like this and horrendous that you were. You're right."
Instead, it's a lie that appeals to a pretend victimhood, and also asserting moral superiority over one of the most inhumane things people have ever subjected other people to.
Using a pretend Irish history to discount other people's suffering is one of the least Irish things I can think of.
Those who know Irish history know that it's a country that doesn't need to pretend to have suffered at the hands of others. And certainly not to put other people down.
Here's a much more Irish thing. Helping a native tribe with donations during COVID because back during the famine, they sent help to Ireland. Empathy and looking out for each other. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/09/irish-native-american-coronavirus-historic-bond
So, please don't fall for the 'Irish slaves' myth doing the rounds. It's rooted in white supremacy. And if you want your own 'More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish' shirt, I got mine from here. https://eyerishandjamaican.co.uk/
