Irish slaves myth

This article is about the conflation of Irish indentured servitude and African chattel slavery. For the actual Irish slave trade, see Irish slave trade. For the sending of prisoners to British colonies, see penal transportation. For the system of unfree labour in return for passage across the Atlantic, see indentured servitude.

The Irish slaves myth is a deliberate conflation of the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries on one hand, and the chattel slavery of Africans kidnapped for the Atlantic slave trade and their descendants on the other, usually in order to undermine contemporary African American demands for equality and reparations.[1] It has been a common trope on the white supremacist website Stormfront since 2003, and has most recently been used to attempt to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.[2] The myth is also employed by Irish nationalists, both to highlight British oppression of Irish people and to obscure Irish involvement in the African slave trade.[1]

The myth asserts that the first slaves in North America were Irish and that this has been covered up by historians in a liberal conspiracy.[3] It is especially popular with apologists for the Confederate States of America.[2] The most influential book to assert the myth was They Were White And They Were Slaves: The Untold History of The Enslavement of Whites In Early America, self-published in the US in 1993 by Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II (who blamed Jews for the African slave trade). This was followed in Ireland in 2001 by the equally ahistorical To Hell Or Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan, which introduced the concept of Irishwomen being forcibly bred with African men in order to produce mulattos, who are represented as being more valuable than African slaves. It is not made clear why this is the case, or why it wasn't possible to achieve the same result with European men and African women.[4][5]

The myth has since been circulated widely in the United States, and has recently begun to become common in Ireland after the "Irish slaves" meme went viral on social media in 2013.[1][3]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "'Irish slaves': the convenient myth". 12 January 2015.
  2. 1 2 "'Irish slaves': Historian destroys racist myth conservatives love to share on Facebook".
  3. 1 2 "How the Myth of the "Irish slaves" Became a Favorite Meme of Racists Online". Southern Poverty Law Center.
  4. ↑ "How the Myth of the "Irish slaves" Became a Favorite Meme of Racists Online". splcenter.org.
  5. ↑ Liam Hogan. "Director's Cut: Critique of Sean O'Callaghan's 'To Hell or Barbados'". academia.edu.
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