pierrebeaumarchais:

doctor-endless:

The only thing that gets me shit fucking arse over tits angry immediately is the denial of Irish slavery and the history of how we were genocided and forced to run or die.

No, it was not because of our skin colour, but we weren’t considered human.

It is not comparable to the African slave trade, or the genocides of WW2, but it happened and it’s disgusting and disrespectful to try and erase over 800 years of horrendous pain, suffering, and the destruction of our culture.

No one is saying “ohhoho whites were slaves too” here, because our rotten history is not defined by race relations. The British knew we were white, but we were white animals. Barbarians. Subhuman, and only good for ploughing fields, raping, and beating the shit out of.

Don’t misunderstand tho, yeah a lot of us were herded like cattle and sent to work in places like the Caribbean too. Some worked the fields and others were told to hold the whip, and that was disgraceful. Yes there were Irish who were bent over backwards to screw over the other slaves to earn Master’s favour. We know this, I know this, and would not deny it despite the shame that comes with it.

But for every one slave who got “lucky” (I cringe at using that term) there were countless breaking themselves in the heat or collapsing, hollow-cheeked with distended bellies, back home in Ireland, dying by the literal thousands from starvation that the scumfuck Brits just let happen. “Sure they were only fuckin Toms and Paddys anyway.”

Please remember, next time you want to deny anything bad ever happened to us, it was not long ago there were signs all over America depicting “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish.”

We wouldn’t erase or deny your history so please don’t do it to us

we had a mini-unit in my apush class on anti-irish discrimination and it was genuinely saddening how few people knew about it, not to mention the amount of people who tried to act like it was irrelevant in comparison to the enslavement of african americans… like, those two forms of slavery / discrimination aren’t comparable first off (like op said, only one involved race relations), and second off they can both be regarded as atrocities without invalidating the experiences of the other group.

i live next to a canal that was dug almost entirely through the labor of irish immigrants in the early 1800s. why specifically irish immigrants? because they were so discriminated against in society that they really only had the option of doing heavy manual labor- no one else wanted to hire the irish because they were considered to be lesser-than-human. these immigrants were paid the lowest wages possible, because as i mentioned it wasn’t like they had any other job options, and the overseers knew this and exploited it. 

many workers died from mistreatment and overwork because the overseers only cared about how much labor they could squeeze from them, not their welfare. this was because the irish immigrants were not the property of the overseers- unlike african american slaves, who were considered “investments” by their masters. the lives of irish workers held no monetary value to overseers, and so they could be worked to death with no loss in profit. unsurprisingly, death at the work-site was extremely common. 

the worst part of the apush unit, to me, was when i read in a primary source from one of these construction overseers that they didn’t care if the irish immigrants died during the construction project- in fact, they welcomed it, because the death of a worker in the middle of a workday meant that the overseer would not have to pay them for the labor they had finished prior to their death.

so yeah. long story short, don’t let anyone tell you that irish people haven’t experienced discrimination just because they were white. the mistreatment of and discrimination against irish immigrants in america was a terrible period in our history and should never be forgotten or brushed aside, and we also shouldn’t try to compare it to the enslavement of african americans because they are two very different situations.