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.

“Different Voice” to the Mainstream Media

Western media, the media that is ruling by white people is considered to be authoritative and is in a leading role throughout the world. However, it tends to be tendentious as it usually provides the information solely from the white people's perspective and may not be able to concern other group of people's value system. Being brain-washing by the mainstream media, it is interesting to learn about how the non-western local media present their people in their own ways through producing the media products, films for instance. These media products can be seen as a different voice, a challenge or even a resistance to the western media.

According to Said, “non - western countries together as inferior to so-called western countries.” This causes the complaints of non-western people. Learning from class, “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the orient as a sort of surrogate or underground self.” This derives from the essentialism. “For instance, if westerners are to identify themselves as rational, peaceful and liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion. We other people do not have these things?”

Questioning from this point, two “third-world” film scenes could be used here as examples.

Fist of Fury - a Chinese film whose protagonist is Bruce Lee, presented the notion of “the other”.

The background is set at the time when china was semi-colonized by the West because of the western desire towards the east. The main character Zhen was trying to enter the embassy which does not allow Chinese people to go in. He was rejected by the public security. As a resistance to the racism, he shows his anger by using Chinese Kungfu and breaks up the board. His racial dignity is expressed through the media portrayal of his strong physique. Thus, the conventional East-Asian image of “sick man” conceived by the western media can be broken through this way.

The second relevant example is a scene from the middle – eastern terrorist film, Paradise Now.

From the image, audience could observe that the main character is doing the video recording before the suicide bombing. For Said, “in films and TV, the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty”. Well, this is true. But, in the process of videoing, he shows his humanity when mentioning about his mother. Since his “unexpected” emotions appeared, the video recording could not even be continued. This presents their psychological world and it is a chance for them to speak out to the world.

Therefore, to watch movies from different stream of media may not be a bad thing as it provides different points of view for the audience to understand different groups of people by listening to their own voice.

Sources:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/paradise-now/w448/paradise-now.jpg

https://badcanto.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/old.jpg

Said, Edward. "Orientalism. 1978." New York: Vintage 1994 (1979).

Racing through education

Overt racism has been a running thread in our society, woven through many practices, dating back to the days of pre-colonisation in the 16^th century. Historical accounts of the indigenous people of the land, or the ‘other,’ written by European explorers and seamen, explain the fear of the unknown. These fears created an arbitrary divide between people based on the colour of their skin. Through religious practices, education systems and forms of social control, those in power in the Western world were able to spread biological assumptions and ‘commonsense’ statements about people’s intelligence, personality types and worldviews to the wider, western social sphere. The savagery, barbarism and brutality that occurred throughout history helped create, maintain and reinforce the hegemonic discourses and ideologies that are still apparent in the 21^st century. The defining emotion that is consistent is fear. I would like to question, though what the true motives and fears were? I believe an initial introduction to an individual, or a group of people, who live in a different context, partake in different social and cultural practices and contest dominant western ideologies and beliefs may spark some incongruence and raise some questions within oneself. These challenges though, or fears of a different perspective on life, should never just be met with resistance or perceived from a higher ground, as we are all human, and despite institutions, such as governmental, religion and education systems telling some people they are worth more or have a right to stand on a higher ground than others, the truth is, each individual’s outlook on life is as valuable as the next. It is all relative. So, with this in mind, I would like to ask another question. How is it that many education systems today are still covering up and manipulating the history of colonisation and the savagery and corruption of Western culture? Surely, if our very own practices that inform generations of youth are perpetuating dominant western hegemonic discourses, then our youth are being taught ignorance through bias history teachings. Although many practices do encourage critical evaluation of racial discourse and history, the injustices and histories are often taught from a western perspective. This graph shows the statistical distribution of schoolteachers by race and ethnicity in 2007-2008.

Sadly, I’m not even surprised at how high the percentile is of white, non-Hispanic teachers, and how underrepresented teachers of colour are. I think even though many white, western teachers do hold a well-rounded view of the injustices and inequalities of social practices, often they are still taught within a western framework and informed by their own ideologies and beliefs. It is important to see the disparity and gap between white, non-Hispanic teachers and ‘other’ ethnicities closing, so the younger generations are informed through a diverse range of cultural and social approaches, and a ‘colour-blind,’ denial to racism isn’t adopted. I would love to hear about anyone’s view on this, and whether anyone has experienced prejudice on unjust racial ground in an education system before.

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009324/tables/sass0708_2009324_t12n_02.asp

http://politicalblindspot.com/study-finds-white-americans-believe-they-experience-more-racism-than-african-americans/

Minstrel Shows: The Wrong Form of Entertainment

Blackface performers are, "...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." -- Frederick Douglass

        The belief that Caucasian and African American people did not just have different colours of skin but also different defining traits is not a stereotype that just sprung into being. It is a belief that has been nurtured and fed through the jokes and lies perpetuated in American culture. One of the biggest contributors to racist ideology was the minstrel show which presented itself as a joke but contained many of the lies that white people told themselves to justify the treatment of blacks. The audiences of these shows were not only the ignorant and openly racist as we would like to imagine but all sorts of American citizens. Indeed, in 1844, there was a minstrel show at the White House. This exemplifies the duping of the American people into harbouring certain stereotypes that continue on to this day.

        A minstrel show was originally played by a group of white men who went on to the stage in blackface (white men painting their faces brown and changing their hair to look more like that of African Americans) and entertained the crowd through a presentation of entertaining racist ideas. The act would usually include the men playing instruments such as the tambourine, banjo, or bones. Many other instruments were used but these three were very common. This served to present African Americans as uncivilized, not having either the means or the talent to play the more gentile instruments such as the violin or harp. The act would also typically include an attempt by one of the performers to give a speech or comedy routine. The man would inevitably come off as unintelligent and hopelessly inept. The ending part of the minstrel show would give the audience a perspective of life on the plantation. This presentation tied together many of the stereotypes of blacks and misunderstandings of whites to send the audience off feeling good about being Caucasian because of their obvious superiority. A more modern depiction of this act comes in the form of “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” in which an African American man strolls along and seems at peace with the world in clothes that a plantation worker might have worn. Minstrel shows portrayed the African Americans as uncivilized, unintelligent servants who needed the help of the white man to live and be happy.

We see the influence of minstrel shows all across our society. In the very popular show Scrubs JD appears in blackface which then ques a laugh track.

An interesting use of blackface appears in the movie Tropic Thunder in which Robert Downey Jr. apparently gets a skin change operation and then spends most of the movie trying to act “black”. However there has been debate on whether or not this is racist since the directors include an actual African American actor who spends a lot of the movie calling out Downey Jr.’s character on the obvious racist stereotypes that he portrays in the movie. It seems like a stumble in the right direction. It is by understanding the origins of mistaken stereotypes that we are able to not repeat those same mistakes in the future.

The Lessons to Learn and not to Learn from the Movie- 42

The movie 42 portrays the struggle of Jackie Robinson, a young African American baseball player, who was first of his skin color to join the major leagues. He encountered heinous racism both on and off the field because of he was paving the way for other African Americans to follow in his wake and the white baseball fans did not like that.

The main lesson to learn from the film is that we must constantly question our own assumptions of how the world should be. Soon after Robinson joins the Dodgers the team starts a petition to get him off the team. We see later on in the movie that these men are not necessarily evil but that they have been brought up believing that they were superior to blacks. The evidence is everywhere, from restaurants that only admit white clientele to separate drinking fountains. Then, at a game in Cincinnati, the film shows a white boy say some racist comments due to the peer pressure around him. While I do believe that racism is taught, not something that we are inherently born with, the film depicts whites as victims of their culture. Even though the society that they were born into might have been racist it does not excuse the promotion of that misunderstanding because of social doctrine.

Another lesson not to learn from 42 is the turning of the other cheek. The biggest struggle that Robinson goes through in the movie is not reacting to all of the racism directed at him and his family. This attempts to teach the viewer that the best way to combat racism is to not confront it directly. However we see many different types of resistance in our culture and sometimes attacking what is wrong directly is the right course of action. We must combat the wrongs of our society with all that is available to us, otherwise we are just refusing to commit fully to making our world the best it can be.

The importance of symbolism as a catalyst for change is perhaps the lesson most needed in the film. Robinson is told by several people around him that after he joined the club, the struggle that he was enduring was not just for him and whether he gave up or kept going would change the world around him. At the end of the movie we see the impact that he had on his teammates and baseball itself even though all he was doing was being the only black man in a white man’s league. It is through his example that we can see the power of being the first to fight back against any form of injustice in our world.

Could there be such thing as ‘positive’ blackface?

In answer to the question above, following Fridays lecture I would have said that such a thing is impossible. ‘blackface’, ‘yellowface’ (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I’m looking at you) or any form of this theatrical makeup is easily one of the most overt representations of racism in history. Going hand in hand with the stereotype of the ‘coon’ or the foolish black clown, it is now strongly taboo and a remainder of much darker days of racism (please excuse the pun). In today’s society where racism is generally more inferential, almost all will cringe inwardly at these caricatures of minorities who were regarded as both incapable and unworthy of representation on their own terms. Although racism is by no means eradicated, I would have said that it is safe to declare such explicit examples to be considered universally inappropriate.

But as I said, this was Friday.

I must admit, looking for inspiration for these blog posts is the only occasion where I find internet filtering to be useful over mildly terrifying. My recent focus on racially-concerned events or opinion pieces has certainly caused more and more of this content to find me rather than the other way round (don’t be smug Google, you still haven’t won me over). Anyway, I digress. Whilst on autopilot scrolling through my newsfeed on Saturday in yet another bout of procrastination, I saw something which caught my eye (and for once it wasn’t a cat video) but the headline “German football team fights racism with 'blackface' photo”.

I actually did a double-take. Fighting racism? With blackface? Surely this headline had to be the pre-runner to an ironic or satirical article. But no, it was exactly what it said on the tin.

A regional football club in Germany posted a photo of the team on social media which was digitally altered to make the skin colour of every player black. It was designed as a show of solidarity and support towards one of their players, a Sudanese refugee named Emad Babiker, who was the victim of a racially-motivated assault over Easter weekend. With increasing racial tensions within the country as a result of the refugee crisis, such incidences are sadly becoming more common. Soenke Kreibich, the teams coach, stated that the intent was“We wanted to make a stand, amongst ourselves but also to the public. It should make it clear that Emad and Amar are an inherent part of our team, and not a minority on whom you can use violence to let off your personal frustration.”

It’s certainly a very striking image, and one which without context could even be called disturbing as such a visual subversion of the domination of whiteness. Yet it is undoubtedly a clever, original and most importantly attention-grabbing way of harnessing the media’s control over racial discourses and turning on its head to give a message of anti-racism. By appropriating one of the most potent symbols of racism and completely subverting its meaning, it shows that we are not powerless against the media’s apparently unstoppable narrative of Whites as being ‘outside’ of ethnic representation whilst minorities are either underrepresented or ignored altogether.

The use of blackface in this context is a stark depiction of Stuart Hall’s “Contrasting a Racialized Regime of Representation” as discussed in the lecture; a rebellion against media ‘whiteness’ and drawing attention to the plight of refugee minorities in Germany in a true representation of racial realities. The crucial point here is not of minorities being recognized in a celebration of difference as the usual message of positive racial imagery, but the opposite; it is one of sameness. It says quite clearly ‘if you pick on him, you pick on us’. From a visual analysis standpoint, the picture is an ingenious representation of the emotional, internalized reality of racial relations which can’t ever be seen externally in everyday life or the mainstream media; Babiker can no longer to picked out of the crowd or made vulnerable because he blends in and is, in the words of the team, ‘one of us’. In their view this is what Babiker, or any ethnic minority, should be to the society they live in.

On the other hand, some critics have taken a more cynical approach and labelled the image as simply another product of assimilationist discourse; it has been cited as another example of the apparent need to show that minorities are as ‘good’ or as ‘human’ as Whites. Or else it has been criticized for not truly engaging with the politics of difference, being a simplified representation of a highly complex and ongoing issue. Of course, such a bold statement is bound to be controversial; but to call the image blatantly racist completely misses the valuable message and the whole intent of the club, regardless of whether or not one considers it an ‘appropriate’ use of blackface. The fact that its ‘appropriateness’ is even under question I believe constitutes a valuable victory in the fight against mainstream racial discourse; it is a sign that it is possible for positive imagery to be leveled against the media’s supremacy, and a doubly successful one if it can be done by overthrowing one of the most fundamental symbols of racism and turning it into a completely contrasting representation of unity.

So what is your opinion to the title of this post? I would love to know!

Sources:

The original Facebook post:

https://www.facebook.com/DeinsterSV/posts/1782487595306523:0

CNN article:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/01/football/german-football-irpt/index.html?sr=fbcnni040116german-

football-irpt0730PMStoryLink&linkId=22970743

An interview with Emad Babiker for those who are interested:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pqpwb?ocid=socialflow_facebook