 On this St. Patrick's
Day, everyone wants to be thought of as at least part-Irish. It provides a wonderful excuse to go out
for a pint of Guinness or some corned beef and cabbage. Irish brogues and Irish
blessings seem to be on everyone's tongue. Green clothes have emerged from the
backs of closets, and a couple of comments on Facebook have reminded everyone
that if you don't wear green today, you can expect to be pinched by one of
those celebrants who may have imbibed a bit too heavily of green beer. I
am reminded, however, how frequently various nationalities have suffered from
discrimination because they seemed strange or different, and the Irish were no
exception. One hundred and fifty
years ago, it was the Irish who were regarded by many Americans as somehow
inferior forms of humanity. That
form of prejudice leaps out at me as I
have been reading about the abolitionist attempts to prove that the
children of southern slaves were as capable as white children of getting an
education. Here's just one example,
taken from letter written by
Edward Philbrick, an Abolitionist missionary in South Carolina. He had been telling his wife why he
believed newly-freed slaves were fully capable of becoming useful
citizens. He says, "Think of
their having reorganized and gone deliberately to work here some weeks ago,
without a white man near them,
preparing hundreds of acres for the new crop. The Irish wouldn't have done as much in the same position."
Another of the missionaries commented that to one who was used to seeing the
stupidity of Irish faces, the slaves did not appear to "suggest a new idea
of low humanity." There
seems to be an underlying assumption in the thinking of the Civil War period,
that some peoples are just naturally inferior to others. Others among the missionaries speak of the
Irish as one of the "degraded races" of people who had fallen from
their original state of natural equality to a lesser status. I've been shocked
to see that the same people who argue for the inherent ability of the former
slaves have no qualms about sneering at the inferiority of the Irish. As a
counterbalance, it is also easy to find the Bostonian Irish making the same
disparaging remarks about Negroes in general, perhaps because they saw them as
competition in the labor force. I'm
not quite sure what to make of all of this. Are you surprised to learn that the
Irish were attacked in this way? More important, what does it say about our
ability — or inability — to judge the worth of people who are different from
us? |
