“May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.” Irish Blessing
It finally happened last night. It was inevitable, although I was trying hard to rise above the pressure to simply “unfriend” the voices of those with whom I disagreed. It was just one racist meme too many for me and my second cousin on my father’s side had to go.
It could have been any number of the memes he shared that were pointing to how Black American’s (who had “nothing” to do with slavery) were blaming whites (who had “nothing” to do with racism) for all their problems. But it was the one conflating the myth about Irish “slavery” and the reality of African slavery that tripped the unfriend button. Just…no.
It’s true what Dr. King said in 1963, “Privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” What we are seeing in America right now is that white men (and women) are fighting to maintain the status quo and they are doing so by any means necessary.
You don’t even have to be a card-carrying white supremacist to engage in this fight. Most will tell you “I’m the least racist person you’ve ever met.” But it’s not true. They are racists whether they are willing to admit it or not if they are actively trying to continue the false narrative that the African slave trade wasn’t nearly as bad as liberals say it was and that the ramifications are no longer felt today.
As a social scientist, I try hard to keep an open mind and consider new information until I have had a chance to explore the research. As was the case with the Irish slave meme. It said something to the effect that people weren’t aware that Irish slaves had it worse than African slaves. I certainly wasn’t and I had spent a good many years studying my genealogy and I’m 42% Irish according to Ancestry.com. So, this morning I decided to conduct a deep dive into this little known “fact”, and I was prepared to be schooled. It ended up being a very short lesson.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center website, in 2016 Alex Amend writes, “In short, the "Irish slaves" myth argues that the first slaves brought to the Americas were Irish, that they were white, and that this fact, covered up by liberal historians, undermines the legacy of the African slave trade and proves that modern theories of racial inferiority are true.”
Snopes.com shared David Emery’s piece in September of 2016 titled, Were There Irish Slaves in America, Too? Emery states, “Questionable sources maintain that the plight of so-called "Irish slaves" in early America was worse than that of African slaves. Historians beg to differ.”
As recently as last week, USA Today published Matthew Brown’s piece titled, Fact check: The Irish were indentured servants, not slaves. Brown explains, “Irish historians widely agree that the treatment of indentured servants was extremely violent and unjust. That said, they also agree it is a distortion of the stories of the thousands of servants to inaccurately equate their conditions with those of Africans subjected to chattel slavery.”
Brown further makes the distinction that “…indentured servants were considered human beings under the law. African slaves were seen as property rather than people; Africans were racialized as Black to cement this enslaved status as permanent, inheritable, and justifiable in the natural order.”
To recap, the African’s weren’t even considered to be human.
I am in no way making the case that what happened to Irish indentured servants was in any way acceptable or just. It is abhorrent. And because more than one thing can be true at a time, no one needs to compare the two as being mutually exclusive. A better way to describe the analogy is with a proverb from the Persian Sa’di. “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
I could have hit back on my cousin’s thread with these facts, but even I know which hornet’s nest to leave alone. The likelihood that my “information” would change his or any of his like-minded friends was slim to none. It would likely incense them and force more irrational behavior. So, I did what all of us are free to do on social media. I exited the thread without leaving one disparaging comment despite my moral objections. Why waste my breath.
The need to force the argument that Blacks don’t have a right to complain about the long since gone troubles of slavery is necessary to help whites feel that this unrest has nothing to do with them. It is also why they insist that ALL LIVES MATTER because they are completely unwilling to yield that yes, in fact, the world did treat African slaves utterly brutally and inhumanely for hundreds of years and that America continues the savagery today. That is why millions are protesting around the globe.
For every person who has said to me, “This violence solves nothing. There are other ways to protest. Hurting people is wrong.” I say, “If you believe that, show it. Say BLACK LIVES MATTER and mean it. Then we can talk.” As long as you refuse to use hindsight to learn where history has taken us, it’s unlikely you’ll use insight to know you’ve gone too far. Until then, go ahead and hit that unfriend button.
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