Formation of the Irish Race

You read that right. The Irish race.

“But I thought their race was White, and Irish is just one ethnicity inside it.”

I thought so too. Nowadays that’s the way we see it. But this hasn’t always been the case.

Across the Anglosphere, it was common to refer to the Irish as a fundamentally separate class of human. Not very positively, I might add.

“The Irish problem is a problem of the Irish race, and is neither a byproduct of politics nor of environment, but is rooted in the racial characteristics of the people themselves.”

—   Captain Hugh Pollard, British intelligence officer (quoted in Nelson 30)

“It cannot be too strongly impressed upon the minds of Englishmen that the Irish are not a mere variety of their own race, that they have had no share in the civilisation and progress of our nation…”

—   Arthur Maning Topp, writer for the Melbourne Review (19)

“the source of all evil [there] lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. … The race must be forced from the soil; by fair, means if possible; still they must leave.”

—   Robert Knox, Scottish anatomy lecturer (quoted in Nelson 33)

Many of you will be familiar with the classic example of scientific racism below, attempting to “prove” that Blacks were physically closer to apes and thus inferior to Whites.

 

You may be surprised to know that this approach was also taken with the Irish.

The caption reads “The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races.”

Note the idea that the Irish were really from Africa, which tries to directly connect them to the “inferior” Blacks. This was an attempt to “prove” that they weren’t really White (or human) and that their negative traits were naturally innate, a prime example of biological essentialism.

These ideas resonated with the public, forming dehumanising “common sense” stereotypes in which Irish were portrayed as apelike and with the negative traits also ascribed to Blacks – poor, unintelligent, lazy, violent, irrational and childlike. The example below, published in the mainstream American magazine Puck, presents a dull-eyed simian Irish caricature. The title, “The King of A-Shantee”, references the well-known R&B singer African tribe Ashanti and the “shanty”, again suggesting that Irish have something to do with Africans and they’re all really poor. The words “celebrity” and “king” make the tone derisive and mocking, and this jab is the entire punchline.

These stereotypes were perpetuated in cartoons, songs, humour, political discourse and “Stage Irish” (essentially the Irish equivalent of Blackface).

Why were Irish seen as a “Race”?

By modern standards this is bizarre. But looking at the context of the late 19^th Century, we can understand where these ideas came from. Economic recession and the potato famine caused many Irish to emigrate to other English-speaking countries in unprecedented numbers. They became the target of anti-immigration attitudes in society, which formed the Irish racial category for political purposes, i.e. protection of the pre-existing hegemony.

The negative traits of the Irish stereotypes were invoked to stoke fear of this “alien race”. It was argued that they could not be allowed to immigrate because their passionate, violent nature would subvert social order. The cartoon below (entitled “The mortar of assimilation – and the one element that won’t mix”) suggests that the USA has been successful in integrating many ethnic groups but to extend this to the Irish would be a mistake.

On the economic front, they were seen as taking jobs from so-called “Native” (i.e. White American) labourers. Many job advertisements included the phrase “No Irish Need Apply” to explicitly exclude them. This fits Omi & Winant’s definition of the racial project, “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganise and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56).

Anti-immigration forces also latched onto the fact that many Irish were Catholics. There was a popular yet unfounded fear that if the Irish were let into the country, they would use their hive-mind powers to secretly subvert institutions to convert them to Catholicism. Topp insisted that they were “…invariably with the enemies of the empire, and that they are ever hoping for and secretly aiming at its subversion, and destruction” (19), and “have used their voting strength, at the dictation of their priestly leaders, to render any stable and lasting government impossible” (25).

As the Irish community assimilated into American society, these attitudes slowly faded out, but it took a long time. In the 1960s, many conservatives refused to vote for John F. Kennedy because he was an Irish Catholic; they believed that he must therefore be part of some sort of secret plot to help the Pope take over America (Donaldson 107). Even today there still many who think it is okay to perpetuate jokes about how stupid Irishmen are.

The moral of the story is that race is only a socio-political tool used to serve a hegemonic agenda for a particular time and place. The example of the Irish “Race” is no more absurd than any of the racial formations our contemporary society has. There are interesting parallels with today’s discourse, like the idea that a Mexican "race" naturally commit crimes and steal American jobs, or that a Muslim "race" is secretly infiltrating the government to establish Shariah law. The sooner that society sees these racialised ideas as farcical and outdated as the Irish “Race”, the better.
  

Works cited

Donaldson, Gary. The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960. Lanham, MD, USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Print.

Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making the Irish Race. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 2nd. London, UK: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Topp, A. M. “English Institutions and the Irish Race.” Melbourne Review January 1881: 10-30. Web. National Library of Australia.