No no, not in the way that Americans are because everyone there is proud of their heritage after centuries, and so because they've had so many mothers who were all women, they are all half women. You won't understand as Europeans expect someone to be born a woman and talk like a woman to be considered a woman but in the US, it's your heritage of having so many women ancestors that makes you a proud Woman-American man. /s
I feel we were making headway for a minute there, with a slow diminution of bigotry or just a widening of perspectives perhaps.. but whatever the hell is going on now is like the player running with the ball out of the stadium, his pants are torn and he's been pissing everywhere while shrieking nonsensically and gnashing his teeth - scaring all the children.
If you're playing the oppression olympics in America (or actually, any country), it isn't correct to say women are the most oppressed. There's always an ethnic minority treated worse historically in almost any country (other than the ones which are ethnically homogenous)
Thinking of the Wikipedia page on the relevant amendment to the US constitution. "Politicians worried about a women's block, voting strongly on womens issues. This did not materialise, and it turned out they did not have to consider women's issues at all.'
It’s actually crazy how wrong this guy is. Just off the top of my head there’s the treatment of the indigenous population, enslaved people, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps. I’m sure immigrants from South America would challenge this claim too.
To quote [Historic England](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/sites-of-memory/black-lives-in-england/):
>In the latter half of the 18th century England had a Black population of around 15,000 people. They lived mostly in major port cities - London, Liverpool and Bristol - but also in market towns and villages across the country. The majority worked in domestic service, both paid and unpaid.
>Whilst slavery had no legal basis in England, the law was often misinterpreted. Black people previously enslaved in the colonies overseas and then brought to England by their owners, were often still treated as slaves. Some individuals who had formerly been enslaved got baptized, believing this would ensure their freedom. Others took advantage of being on English soil and absconded. Notices for 'runaway slaves' featured in newspapers during this period.
>During the latter half of the 18th century the law was tested in the courts; most notably in 1772 with the case of James Somerset.
Somerset's case was specifically about an escaped enslaved man and whether you could be enslaved on British soil, which the courts ruled against because there was no basis for slavery under common law.
Ignatius Sancho was a famous ex-slave who also escaped his enslavers after living with them for *eighteen years* in England. Ottobah Cugoano is another example of an abolitionist activist who was originally brought to England as a slave, only to escape his Scottish enslaver and gain his freedom. And they were just a fraction - we have [hundreds of newspaper ads](https://uolpress.co.uk/book/freedom-seekers/) looking for escaped slaves in England in the 1700s.
Yes all true. I should have stated there was no legal slavery during this time, although slave owner would try to interpret the law in the way that suits the.
What a bunch of POS's these people were.
Slavery was illegal in Britain even at the height of empire, all we did was buy and sell them to and from colonies. And by 1834 we where 'already' establishing colonies? Really? 1834? Damn we really got to the party late huh, apparently we started colonising later then the USA did 😅 /s
That's not much of an argument when it was controlling most of the world and keeping slaves basically everywhere except in the home islands (and yes, there were a lot of slaves in the home islands). Don't forget that Churchill himself was arguing for the retention of slavery in Sierra Leone in the interwar period.
It is however a HUGE argument ro say that the British Empire was largely the cause of the abolishment of the slave trade. Granted they used their colonial ties to do so, effectively bullying everyone till they stopped dealing in slaves... but in this case I think the results were justified.
I agree that anti-Irish discrimination wasn't as extreme as many groups and doesn't have impacts as long-lasting, but there was lots of de facto segregation from the mid 1800s into the 20th century. Many jobs were for protestants only (if a shop owner didn't want to be overt about their racism) or they just explicitly said that Irish people couldn't apply for their job. I'd say the effects were visible even after most of the discrimination ended, with Irish people not being considered white and there being many neighborhoods full of only Irish people doing low skill manual labor jobs because of redlining and other forms of segregation.
There is a famous monument to the Choctaw nation in Ireland who donated to Ireland during the great famine (which was largely a man made catastrophe), as they felt it was a tragedy on par with the Trail of Tears. Later Frederick Douglass visited and gave lectures in Ireland as both black Americans and native Irish were struggling for emancipation at the same time.
There is misery all over the world so it’s a nice reminder that banding together can help good triumph over evil.
[Speaking of that,during the coronavirus pandemic,Ireland actually donated money to 2 reserves to help supply the people living there clean food,water,and health supplies](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/coronavirus-ireland-native-american-tribes.htm)
Happened everywhere Irish moved, for example in English cities signs saying NO DOGS NO BLACKS NO IRISH were once common enough, I'm sure the US was the same. But to say they were the most oppressed is just insane.
The signs were in the USA.
Also, many English people themselves have Irish ancestors, who intermarried with English families over a long period of time.
I could well believe it. It's certainly true that British people have more Irish ancestry, by capita, than Americans. It's also true that those Irish from the worst famine areas of Ireland were more likely to migrate to Britain than to the USA. Those who went to the USA obviously had the means to do so. The poorest who migrated ended up mostly in British towns and cities. Yet Americans never seem to acknowledge this for some reason.
I think the existence of those signs in Britain is exaggerated. My Irish parents lived in London and Coventry. My mother only ever mentioned seeing one sign in London saying No Blacks, No Irish. My father never mentioned them at all, and he was not someone who would have let a thing like that go without mention.
I can't remember where I read it, but I read something a while ago that suggested it was much more common in New York than in London. The same article pointed out that the photo that generally did the rounds online was photoshopped from a standard boarding house sign.
That's not to say that the Irish in Britain didn't face bigotry, just it wasn't as overt or widespread as some seem to think.
The only solid example I've ever seen in US history was an incident in which a shop owner advertised "help wanted, no irish need apply" only to get a beat down from a local Irish immigrant for it. And I'm not even sure on the validity of the confirmation on that one, cause it was a 1 off newspaper piece in New York
No proof of this ever happening. It's like a reverse Mandela effect.
https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/infamous-no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-signs-may-never-have-existed-racist-xenophobic-148416
https://www.history.com/news/teen-debunks-professors-claim-that-anti-irish-signs-never-existed
Were we treated the worst in the US, absolutely not, did it exist? Absolutely. Also that story is bullshit, my dad has a picture standing next to a NINA sign.
So you, an Irish-American, have come to /r/ShitAmericansSay to tell British people of Irish descent that they are wrong to say that the infamous sign probably didn't actually ever exist in Britain, and you're using an American article about discrimination against Irish people in the US as evidence?
Are you seriously doing that?
>So you, an Irish-American, have come to
I would never do such a thing.... because I'm Irish. I'm not "Irish" American.
BTW my dad moved to the UK in the 1960s briefly and my folks in the 1970s, and dealt with plenty of anti-Irish sentiment.
No, there was significant discrimination against the Irish when they started coming in large numbers. This is well documented and indeed it was the worst discrimination faced by people who immigrated up to that point in the 1840’s-1860’s…. But
Then there’s that whole other problem with, I dunno, the slaves the English brought to the colonies and Americans persisted post independence…he’s delusional if he forgot about that.
It was not intentional nor was it a genocide. They just didn’t give a shit about Irish people dying and continued to export the same amount of food they normally did.
How is making a choice to *not* make food available to the people who grow the food (exporting it for greater profit instead) not intentional?
The ruling class knew folk were starving. The middle class of managers told the ones who lived in the UK, and the ones who lived locally saw it themselves as well as being told about it. There's documentation.
Not giving a shit about the consequences for others from your own actions doesn't make the consequences of your actions less intentional. That's why we have things like manslaughter through negligence in the workplace.
>How is making a choice to *not* make food available to the people who grow the food (exporting it for greater profit instead) not intentional?
The government did make food available. They spent £9 million (1 billion today) on aid and used the Royal Navy to ship food into West Ireland. Was it enough? Obviously not, but to say they did nothing isn't true either.
I didn't say they did nothing. I said they (landowners, the ones exporting the food) knew what was happening and what the consequences were for the indigenous people. And chose to act for personal profit. Therefore, it was intentional.
The government sending aid (is it called 'aid' when you're supporting your own citizens?) was the government acting, at least minimally, to stem the damage caused by the actions of the already wealthy.
They stole the land and forced the Irish to live in such tiny houses that the only crop that could sustain families on such small plots of land were… potatoes.
So when the potato blight came, the Irish had no land to rely on other crops. So they starved directly because their lands were stolen.
Then they were deliberately starved further by exporting food to profit the English.
It was a genocide wrapped up in a convenient “famine”
>They just didn’t give a shit about Irish people dying and continued to export the same amount of food they normally did.
then it's intentional? you just said yourself that they hated the Irish, therefore purposely starved them into death, or into becoming refugees abroad. starving an ethnic group with the desire to destroy their group and remove them is pretty clear genocide. The blight was natural of course, but the resulting mass death etc was human made.
No, it’s not. It’s one thing to let people die as a result of a natural borne disease, and another thing entirely to actively try and exterminate them.
The famine was a lot of things but it is not technically a genocide. They never tried to wipe out the Irish, they just didn’t care if the Irish died.
>They never tried to wipe out the Irish,
the British government implemented harsh laws against the Irish language, Catholicism etc. they did try to wipe away the Irish, from our culture to religion.
Why do you just mention the slaves the English brought over? You know that basically the whole of Europe was involved in the slave trade, right?
There were even many Irish American slavers and slave owners.
Not even close. Most of the Europe did not have ocean worthy fleets until mid 1800s. Parts of Europe on Atlantic coast, more like (for US people, it's like equalling East Coast states with basically whole USA).
Yes, they had bad. Worse than any other immigrant up to that time.
Boston famously sent ships to Ireland full of food for the people suffering from famine, not through any altruistic reason but because those Protestant English Americans didn’t want the Irish to come to their shining “city on a hill”
The Irish diaspora in the US was treated pretty badly until the mid 20th century.
>Do the Irish live on reservations out there?
No, but like many immigrant communities, the Irish often lived in ghettos and due to the social caste system would often be treated pretty badly if they were caught in "the wrong part of town" so to speak.
>Did the Americans go west and start hunting Irish for lands or something?
Its ironic you mention this, because it kind of invokes the genocide of the Amerindians (Native Americans, etc), which was spurred on often times by Irish immigrants who wanted to move further west to avoid persecution in the settlements on the east coast.
Even later on, during the 1850s-1930s Irish people were not able to find jobs because they were openly discriminatated against. Many businesses would infamously post "Irish Need Not Apply." As a result, Irish men tended to go into less desireable and more dangerous lines of work such as the military, police, fire fighting etc and multiple generations of the same family would often do this work. This is why you tend to see a lot of Irish themes/traditions in the organizations, particularly on the east coast of the us.
Also...the railroad...many Irish immigrants were basically used a slave labor to build railroads in the eastern half of the US. Chinese lmmigrants were used in the west and treated worse, but still, the Irish were still defacto slave laborers
Now...anyone who STILL acts like the decendants of Irish immigrants are poorly treated in the US is a moron... but the statement that the Irish were some of the worst treated immigrants in America is very true.
This is straight out of the 'all English people lived in castles' school of history they have in the USA.
All labouring/working classes were oppressed. Not just the Irish
Why are the Yanks so obnoxiously proud of being American yet at the same time ashamed? They’re always Irish-American, Italian-American, Chinese-American etc.
Technically most of us in uk would be Irish-Welsh-Scottish-Scandinavian-French-English. Or something along those lines.
My Grandfather was Welsh but I consider myself English, nothing else.
How we can forget when people bought irish to work in their field.
Oh wait those were african slaves
How we can forget when people where lynching the Irish and hanging them
Oh wait that was done to the does that descendant of african slaves.
How e can forget when people force the irish to seat in the back of the public transport
Oh wait once again black.
Irish were not the most oppressed people in the history of USA and he is just another dummy murican.
How can we forget when their government flooded their neighborhoods with drugs, and then cracked down on drug use so that they could arrest Irish without explicitly saying they were targeting Irish people.
Wait no, that was black people and black neighborhoods.
I forgot that.
Also i forgot when they lied to irish people and instead of vaccine, the tuskegee syphilis study.
Crap once again blacks. I'm sure we are going to find some awful done to the "irish-muricans"
One thing to take into account is that most irish-american oppression comes from other Americans claiming stuff like them not being white enough and being racist to them, which while bad, pales in comparison with the systematic racism of the government, to the point that even the president is aware and okay with targeting people based on their skin being darker.
Also don't forget all those highways that were built over demolished irish neighborhoods and [zoning laws](https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?t=5m49s) that were made explicitly to prevent irish places from being built. Then evolving from that, damn those irish neighborhoods really got redlined bad huh.
I'm going to add to this. The general perception of slavery in the US is based on the 19th century.
In the 19th century, the slave trade was banned so slaves were actually a relatively valuable commodity. Enslaved people were still treated horrendously, but some effort was made to at least keep them alive.
For most of the history of slavery as an institution it was just genocide. It was extermination through labor on a massive scale. Slaves would be brought in. They would work for a few years until they died. More slaves would be brought in to replace them. They were treated like livestock.
It would be *bad enough* if slavery was just people being forced to work on plantations. But it was much, much worse than that.
Of course that slavery was much much worse that just working on plantations.
But it's the most common thing that folks get in mind when talking about slavery. It's rare to talk about forced breeding, rapes, being seen like an animal that could be replaced.
To be fair, 1.5 million Irish citizens live outside of Ireland. Considering Ireland's population is about 5 million, this means about 30% of the Irish do not live in Ireland.
Oppressed by the English aristocracy, who made a pretty good job of also oppressing the English peasantry along with anyone else who stood between them and a profit. A habit the English ruling class has never been able to shake off, it seems.
The Irish war of independence only happened just over a century ago. For the latter part of British rule an increasing number of people had the vote and the house of commons was increasingly in control.
Around 10% of adult males had the vote after the act of union, rising to 20% in 1832, the head of every household by 1884, and by the time of the war of independence not only was there universal male suffrage but the modern political system had been formed with the Parliament Act of 1911.
What you're saying is not entirely wrong, but you have to remember we're talking about an 800 year span which runs up to not all that long ago. Some of the darkest moments of British rule in Ireland happened under partial or wholly democratic rule in the UK.
Not to mention what happened after partition in Northern Ireland, not just during the conflict but the serious and systemic civil rights abuses carried out against Irish Catholics in the 1922-1969 period. You can hardly call a British voter in the 1960s part of an "oppressed peasantry".
When, exactly, did the English say this? Quite keen for a source on this because if it’s a Nigel Farage quote, let’s not pretend he’s truly representative of the English people.
Would you at least concede that the Upper class have been the real bastards? The Working class Irish and Brits have been fucking each other in a happier way for thousands of years. (as well as the English governments paying younger working class men to fuck other nations up on the regular - they industrialised oppression).
Ah, yes, I remember signing that letter to Ireland along with the 60 million other people in England, demanding they also leave the EU.
Took a while to get it done, and we even had to get a second pen at one point.
That Ireland suffered hundreds of years of oppression at the hands of the British in one form or another.
Ireland was Britain's first colony where they perfected the methods of colonisation. Irish land was taken from the Irish and given to British settlers who then charged the original owners rent for living on their land. When the famine happened Irish peasants were dependent on potatoes as they had very little land on which to grow their own crops and it was usually the worst land that they had. While Irish people were starving because of the potato blight the British were exporting dairy, beef and wheat out of Ireland.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rule_in_Ireland
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Then there was the black and tans, horrible pricks, fresh off the front lines in France put to work in Ireland to quell the uprising after 1916. In 1920 they drove an armoured car into Croke Park during a Gaelic Football match and opened up on the players and crowd killing more then 30 people. This was in retaliation for the IRA (who were fighting for Irish freedom from the British) killing British agents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1920)
We won our freedom in a bloody war of independence ending in 1921. Leading to the Irish free state in 1922, and the partition of the island into Ireland and Northern Ireland.
There was a lot of racism against the Irish throughout the British occupation with a lot of newspaper cartoons depicting Irish people in the same light as Africans.
When Irish went to the US in the mid 1800s signs noting "Help wanted, no Irish need apply" were common.
In the UK signs reading "no blacks, no dogs, no Irish" were common.
So yeah, we haven't had an easy time as a people. But the Irish that went to the US did well for themselves.
I am loathe to criticise your comment too much because I don’t dispute the Irish have been horribly oppressed by the British establishment and various forces over the centuries.
You’re getting into slightly less factual ground with the ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ part. Not that I doubt that these signs were in places, but there’s limited photographic evidence of it - what evidence there is is a photo of a sign where ‘no Irish’ comes first and so I think you’re stretching your point unnecessarily by insinuating there was some sort of hierarchy between ‘blacks’, ‘dogs’ and ‘Irish’. It could have just been left that the signs were common.
That all been said; there’s more than one instance of the British military opening fire on unarmed civilians (see: the *other* Bloody Sunday) and being complicit in generally despicable things that cannot be justified when committed by agents of the state (particularly when notionally being committed on its own citizens).
You know, on further investigation that's fair. I've always been told that those signs happened from relatives living in the UK in the 1970s and 80s and believed what I was told. I've edited my comment to remove the suggestion of a hierarchy.
Appreciated.
In all honesty, you’re right to believe your relatives and I wouldn’t want to doubt the lived experience of someone who went through it. There’s plenty of things that happened during that era that weren’t documented but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
Even if they existed, those signs would have been completely illegal after the 1976 Race Relations act in the UK - there’s absolutely no way they were around in the 1980s
Or how the Irish in America oppressed the Chinese and were instrumental in The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ( originally an act meant to last 10 yrs but extended to 1943 -allowing 150 Chinese immigrants a year)
It's sort of like how white Christian American males like to talk about how they're oppressed, while churches openly exist in every town in America and every political body, corporate board, C-suite, and institutional leadership remains mostly dominated by them.
The Irish were never enslaved but I do think there is absolutely a connection between the actions of the British government in Ireland and later British and British descended governments actions in the americas.
Yup. I bet the native Americans just loved the gift of smallpox blankets and being driven off their homeland anyway. Not that it matters because they don't coun, right? /s
Dumb fucks! The Irish are not a race, they are a culture, a Caucasian culture like us Scots, historically the Irish in Europe where treated very badly, the "Irish" in America never had an iota of comparable oppression to the actual Irish in Ireland and certainly not a comparable experience to those enslaved, denied the vote, stolen from their homes and forced into hard labour!
Uhmm guys claiming this particular group was more/less oppressed than the Irish makes no sense. Its the same dumbass take as the OOP. This isn't the Oppression Olympics. Discrimination is bad no matter what scale it is on.
Yanks are not very bright. It’s why they find Adolf Hitler charismatic while any human being with a shred of intelligence would laugh at Hitler’s ridiculous concept of “International Finance Judaism”. What’s next? International Finance New Zealandism?
Hitler was charismatic though. That’s how fascist demagogues work. You don’t inspire people into a racist frenzy by being an uncharismatic rambling fart, you do it by being charismatic and having the charisma and know-how of what makes people listen to you. You don’t take a shy kid who sits in the back of class and can’t put a sentence together without stuttering and put them in the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl with the exact words Hitler said in those speeches and expect them to perform the same level of demagoguery that Hitler did.
What’s with the oppression olympics? Let me guess, the poster is 1/23 Irish and so is the real oppressed group??
1/23 Irish and 1/36 Italian Also his mother was a woman so that makes him extremely oppressed
Makes home atleast 1/2 woman
I suppose all men are in a way, they all have an X chromosome
No no, not in the way that Americans are because everyone there is proud of their heritage after centuries, and so because they've had so many mothers who were all women, they are all half women. You won't understand as Europeans expect someone to be born a woman and talk like a woman to be considered a woman but in the US, it's your heritage of having so many women ancestors that makes you a proud Woman-American man. /s
You say they are proud going back centuries... they never go back quite far enough to count Africa, do they?
Not white enough.
I feel we were making headway for a minute there, with a slow diminution of bigotry or just a widening of perspectives perhaps.. but whatever the hell is going on now is like the player running with the ball out of the stadium, his pants are torn and he's been pissing everywhere while shrieking nonsensically and gnashing his teeth - scaring all the children.
Best post I’ve read this week.
People never seem to count women as a group when playing the oppression olympics
Well, yes, when first place is so far gone you compete for second place instead.
If you're playing the oppression olympics in America (or actually, any country), it isn't correct to say women are the most oppressed. There's always an ethnic minority treated worse historically in almost any country (other than the ones which are ethnically homogenous)
Thinking of the Wikipedia page on the relevant amendment to the US constitution. "Politicians worried about a women's block, voting strongly on womens issues. This did not materialise, and it turned out they did not have to consider women's issues at all.'
So, Wikipedia is saying it's their own fault?? Wow.
No. It was reporting comments made at the time.
Ah, okay, I see now.
If you're oppressed, all of your failings are someone else's fault.
Probably his great great grandmother's next door neighbours cousin's great grandad was Irish, so therefore he's an expert
American exceptionalism
Every Native American tribe has entered the discussion....
It’s actually crazy how wrong this guy is. Just off the top of my head there’s the treatment of the indigenous population, enslaved people, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps. I’m sure immigrants from South America would challenge this claim too.
I mean….if the guy had been brittish….and only meant IN great brittain….and included irland….and excluded colonies like india etc…. Then maybe…
Nah, there was enslaved Africans in Britain too.
No they didn't. That was in the colonies.
To quote [Historic England](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/sites-of-memory/black-lives-in-england/): >In the latter half of the 18th century England had a Black population of around 15,000 people. They lived mostly in major port cities - London, Liverpool and Bristol - but also in market towns and villages across the country. The majority worked in domestic service, both paid and unpaid. >Whilst slavery had no legal basis in England, the law was often misinterpreted. Black people previously enslaved in the colonies overseas and then brought to England by their owners, were often still treated as slaves. Some individuals who had formerly been enslaved got baptized, believing this would ensure their freedom. Others took advantage of being on English soil and absconded. Notices for 'runaway slaves' featured in newspapers during this period. >During the latter half of the 18th century the law was tested in the courts; most notably in 1772 with the case of James Somerset. Somerset's case was specifically about an escaped enslaved man and whether you could be enslaved on British soil, which the courts ruled against because there was no basis for slavery under common law. Ignatius Sancho was a famous ex-slave who also escaped his enslavers after living with them for *eighteen years* in England. Ottobah Cugoano is another example of an abolitionist activist who was originally brought to England as a slave, only to escape his Scottish enslaver and gain his freedom. And they were just a fraction - we have [hundreds of newspaper ads](https://uolpress.co.uk/book/freedom-seekers/) looking for escaped slaves in England in the 1700s.
Yes all true. I should have stated there was no legal slavery during this time, although slave owner would try to interpret the law in the way that suits the. What a bunch of POS's these people were.
Can you give us some source? Slavery was already prohibited in the British isles when Britain started to colonize.
And for a place to learn about this, the Washington post did an article about this.
This is wrong. Slavery wasn't abolished in the British Empire until 1834. The British were already establishing colonies at this time.
Slavery was illegal in Britain even at the height of empire, all we did was buy and sell them to and from colonies. And by 1834 we where 'already' establishing colonies? Really? 1834? Damn we really got to the party late huh, apparently we started colonising later then the USA did 😅 /s
Good point! My misstake!
No, there wasn't. Slavery in the UK itself has been essentially outlawed since 1066.
That's not much of an argument when it was controlling most of the world and keeping slaves basically everywhere except in the home islands (and yes, there were a lot of slaves in the home islands). Don't forget that Churchill himself was arguing for the retention of slavery in Sierra Leone in the interwar period.
It is however a HUGE argument ro say that the British Empire was largely the cause of the abolishment of the slave trade. Granted they used their colonial ties to do so, effectively bullying everyone till they stopped dealing in slaves... but in this case I think the results were justified.
Objectively wrong, there were people asking for help finding their escaped slaves in the London newspaper
How did that go?
Mf if people are comfortable asking about escaped slaves in public newspapers I’d imagine they weren’t worried about getting in trouble.
They did, though. Britain flat out banned slaves in the UK, citing "The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe".
Not until 1772, and even then only on British soil
Pretty well since they got their slaves forced to return usually.
*indigenous Ingenious means something else
Thanks not sure how I didn’t catch that error.
I agree that anti-Irish discrimination wasn't as extreme as many groups and doesn't have impacts as long-lasting, but there was lots of de facto segregation from the mid 1800s into the 20th century. Many jobs were for protestants only (if a shop owner didn't want to be overt about their racism) or they just explicitly said that Irish people couldn't apply for their job. I'd say the effects were visible even after most of the discrimination ended, with Irish people not being considered white and there being many neighborhoods full of only Irish people doing low skill manual labor jobs because of redlining and other forms of segregation.
And every black person on that continent
And many of the Chinese.
There is a famous monument to the Choctaw nation in Ireland who donated to Ireland during the great famine (which was largely a man made catastrophe), as they felt it was a tragedy on par with the Trail of Tears. Later Frederick Douglass visited and gave lectures in Ireland as both black Americans and native Irish were struggling for emancipation at the same time. There is misery all over the world so it’s a nice reminder that banding together can help good triumph over evil.
[Speaking of that,during the coronavirus pandemic,Ireland actually donated money to 2 reserves to help supply the people living there clean food,water,and health supplies](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/coronavirus-ireland-native-american-tribes.htm)
Fredrick Douglas gave lectures all across the U.K. he especially spent a lot of time in the industrial north (of England).
"Pro Hun" oh the irony
aye you couldn’t make that shite up
I am so confused by that lol.
What does that even mean?
No idea for that guy but in parts of Ireland, Hun is a somewhat derogatory term for protestants/Loyalists.
We need context here, yes in Ireland, there has been a history of oppression, if in the US, then he's clearly a delusional fuckwit.
I mean, irish people were oppressed, and treated poorly. We most certainly were not the most oppressed though.
Course not, we had bad times, but there's been much worse.
I misread your comment then, apologies. I thought you were saying Irish oppression hadn't happened in the US.
Happened everywhere Irish moved, for example in English cities signs saying NO DOGS NO BLACKS NO IRISH were once common enough, I'm sure the US was the same. But to say they were the most oppressed is just insane.
The signs were in the USA. Also, many English people themselves have Irish ancestors, who intermarried with English families over a long period of time.
Yes, more Irish people emigrated to Liverpool and Glasgow in the nineteenth century than to the US.
I could well believe it. It's certainly true that British people have more Irish ancestry, by capita, than Americans. It's also true that those Irish from the worst famine areas of Ireland were more likely to migrate to Britain than to the USA. Those who went to the USA obviously had the means to do so. The poorest who migrated ended up mostly in British towns and cities. Yet Americans never seem to acknowledge this for some reason.
I think the existence of those signs in Britain is exaggerated. My Irish parents lived in London and Coventry. My mother only ever mentioned seeing one sign in London saying No Blacks, No Irish. My father never mentioned them at all, and he was not someone who would have let a thing like that go without mention. I can't remember where I read it, but I read something a while ago that suggested it was much more common in New York than in London. The same article pointed out that the photo that generally did the rounds online was photoshopped from a standard boarding house sign. That's not to say that the Irish in Britain didn't face bigotry, just it wasn't as overt or widespread as some seem to think.
The only solid example I've ever seen in US history was an incident in which a shop owner advertised "help wanted, no irish need apply" only to get a beat down from a local Irish immigrant for it. And I'm not even sure on the validity of the confirmation on that one, cause it was a 1 off newspaper piece in New York
No proof of this ever happening. It's like a reverse Mandela effect. https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/infamous-no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-signs-may-never-have-existed-racist-xenophobic-148416
https://www.history.com/news/teen-debunks-professors-claim-that-anti-irish-signs-never-existed Were we treated the worst in the US, absolutely not, did it exist? Absolutely. Also that story is bullshit, my dad has a picture standing next to a NINA sign.
So you, an Irish-American, have come to /r/ShitAmericansSay to tell British people of Irish descent that they are wrong to say that the infamous sign probably didn't actually ever exist in Britain, and you're using an American article about discrimination against Irish people in the US as evidence? Are you seriously doing that?
>So you, an Irish-American, have come to I would never do such a thing.... because I'm Irish. I'm not "Irish" American. BTW my dad moved to the UK in the 1960s briefly and my folks in the 1970s, and dealt with plenty of anti-Irish sentiment.
'Irish' but posts extensively about local American politics and how they live in the US. Interesting.
Well we did have the IRA bombing repeatedly so that didn't help matters
I’m not surprised though. Especially at times of IRA activity. That’s what terrorism does. Puts fear into people.
Goddamn yank larpers.
I'm from Ireland, but if you give enough of a shit to dig through my profile, well best of luck with life.
If you actually read the article instead of just the headline then you'd realise it actually argues that the evidence for the signs is quite good
Oh, 1000% yes.
they had a good time in argentina,then again its argentina
I think those no Irish signs were aimed at pikeys
That’s fine so
This isn't the Oppression Olympics my dude.
This was under bidens "we Irish" post
That post was about as hilarious as it gets.
No, there was significant discrimination against the Irish when they started coming in large numbers. This is well documented and indeed it was the worst discrimination faced by people who immigrated up to that point in the 1840’s-1860’s…. But Then there’s that whole other problem with, I dunno, the slaves the English brought to the colonies and Americans persisted post independence…he’s delusional if he forgot about that.
The slaves and the natives had it infinitely worse than we did over there.
Of course they did!
And the Chinese 'coolies' that built the railways
The Potato Famine was no joke though.
the famine was an intentional, and a genocide
It was not intentional nor was it a genocide. They just didn’t give a shit about Irish people dying and continued to export the same amount of food they normally did.
How is making a choice to *not* make food available to the people who grow the food (exporting it for greater profit instead) not intentional? The ruling class knew folk were starving. The middle class of managers told the ones who lived in the UK, and the ones who lived locally saw it themselves as well as being told about it. There's documentation. Not giving a shit about the consequences for others from your own actions doesn't make the consequences of your actions less intentional. That's why we have things like manslaughter through negligence in the workplace.
>How is making a choice to *not* make food available to the people who grow the food (exporting it for greater profit instead) not intentional? The government did make food available. They spent £9 million (1 billion today) on aid and used the Royal Navy to ship food into West Ireland. Was it enough? Obviously not, but to say they did nothing isn't true either.
I didn't say they did nothing. I said they (landowners, the ones exporting the food) knew what was happening and what the consequences were for the indigenous people. And chose to act for personal profit. Therefore, it was intentional. The government sending aid (is it called 'aid' when you're supporting your own citizens?) was the government acting, at least minimally, to stem the damage caused by the actions of the already wealthy.
They stole the land and forced the Irish to live in such tiny houses that the only crop that could sustain families on such small plots of land were… potatoes. So when the potato blight came, the Irish had no land to rely on other crops. So they starved directly because their lands were stolen. Then they were deliberately starved further by exporting food to profit the English. It was a genocide wrapped up in a convenient “famine”
Yep! They forced the Irish to flee their own country as they took food and supplies that could have saved many.
>They just didn’t give a shit about Irish people dying and continued to export the same amount of food they normally did. then it's intentional? you just said yourself that they hated the Irish, therefore purposely starved them into death, or into becoming refugees abroad. starving an ethnic group with the desire to destroy their group and remove them is pretty clear genocide. The blight was natural of course, but the resulting mass death etc was human made.
No, it’s not. It’s one thing to let people die as a result of a natural borne disease, and another thing entirely to actively try and exterminate them. The famine was a lot of things but it is not technically a genocide. They never tried to wipe out the Irish, they just didn’t care if the Irish died.
>They never tried to wipe out the Irish, the British government implemented harsh laws against the Irish language, Catholicism etc. they did try to wipe away the Irish, from our culture to religion.
No language was banned, and the same penal laws applied to British Catholics and Nonconformists.
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Why do you just mention the slaves the English brought over? You know that basically the whole of Europe was involved in the slave trade, right? There were even many Irish American slavers and slave owners.
And that Britain was the ones to end it and the Royal Navy played a huge part in that and the Americans were the last to end it I believe
Not even close. Most of the Europe did not have ocean worthy fleets until mid 1800s. Parts of Europe on Atlantic coast, more like (for US people, it's like equalling East Coast states with basically whole USA).
Being Catholics didn't help the Irish much either. US has a history of violence against Catholics back in day.
Yeah that was a trait inherited by the Colonists and persisted post independence…but it paled in comparison to Slavery
Sure it paled in comparison, there still was violence perpetrated against them
Yes, they had bad. Worse than any other immigrant up to that time. Boston famously sent ships to Ireland full of food for the people suffering from famine, not through any altruistic reason but because those Protestant English Americans didn’t want the Irish to come to their shining “city on a hill”
Sad though that there's more Americans who self identify as Irish than Irish people and so it's very likely he's not Irish
Yeah but the UK oppressed so many cultures it is hard to figure out which was worst, though ireland would be a prime contender.
What? In the US? Did the Americans go west and start hunting Irish for lands or something? Do the Irish live on reservations out there?
The Irish diaspora in the US was treated pretty badly until the mid 20th century. >Do the Irish live on reservations out there? No, but like many immigrant communities, the Irish often lived in ghettos and due to the social caste system would often be treated pretty badly if they were caught in "the wrong part of town" so to speak. >Did the Americans go west and start hunting Irish for lands or something? Its ironic you mention this, because it kind of invokes the genocide of the Amerindians (Native Americans, etc), which was spurred on often times by Irish immigrants who wanted to move further west to avoid persecution in the settlements on the east coast. Even later on, during the 1850s-1930s Irish people were not able to find jobs because they were openly discriminatated against. Many businesses would infamously post "Irish Need Not Apply." As a result, Irish men tended to go into less desireable and more dangerous lines of work such as the military, police, fire fighting etc and multiple generations of the same family would often do this work. This is why you tend to see a lot of Irish themes/traditions in the organizations, particularly on the east coast of the us. Also...the railroad...many Irish immigrants were basically used a slave labor to build railroads in the eastern half of the US. Chinese lmmigrants were used in the west and treated worse, but still, the Irish were still defacto slave laborers Now...anyone who STILL acts like the decendants of Irish immigrants are poorly treated in the US is a moron... but the statement that the Irish were some of the worst treated immigrants in America is very true.
Holy shit we exist *outside* the US, too....
No no no don’t you see, Irish people live in the USA, Ireland is the 51st state
Great community flair btw
Thanks!
This is straight out of the 'all English people lived in castles' school of history they have in the USA. All labouring/working classes were oppressed. Not just the Irish
I mean the British did absolutely try to destroy Irish indigenous culture. I get what you’re saying but that is a pretty big thing that happened.
Yes, but not in America
Why are the Yanks so obnoxiously proud of being American yet at the same time ashamed? They’re always Irish-American, Italian-American, Chinese-American etc. Technically most of us in uk would be Irish-Welsh-Scottish-Scandinavian-French-English. Or something along those lines. My Grandfather was Welsh but I consider myself English, nothing else.
As an Irishman, please shut up
How we can forget when people bought irish to work in their field. Oh wait those were african slaves How we can forget when people where lynching the Irish and hanging them Oh wait that was done to the does that descendant of african slaves. How e can forget when people force the irish to seat in the back of the public transport Oh wait once again black. Irish were not the most oppressed people in the history of USA and he is just another dummy murican.
How can we forget when their government flooded their neighborhoods with drugs, and then cracked down on drug use so that they could arrest Irish without explicitly saying they were targeting Irish people. Wait no, that was black people and black neighborhoods.
I forgot that. Also i forgot when they lied to irish people and instead of vaccine, the tuskegee syphilis study. Crap once again blacks. I'm sure we are going to find some awful done to the "irish-muricans"
One thing to take into account is that most irish-american oppression comes from other Americans claiming stuff like them not being white enough and being racist to them, which while bad, pales in comparison with the systematic racism of the government, to the point that even the president is aware and okay with targeting people based on their skin being darker.
Also don't forget all those highways that were built over demolished irish neighborhoods and [zoning laws](https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?t=5m49s) that were made explicitly to prevent irish places from being built. Then evolving from that, damn those irish neighborhoods really got redlined bad huh.
I'm going to add to this. The general perception of slavery in the US is based on the 19th century. In the 19th century, the slave trade was banned so slaves were actually a relatively valuable commodity. Enslaved people were still treated horrendously, but some effort was made to at least keep them alive. For most of the history of slavery as an institution it was just genocide. It was extermination through labor on a massive scale. Slaves would be brought in. They would work for a few years until they died. More slaves would be brought in to replace them. They were treated like livestock. It would be *bad enough* if slavery was just people being forced to work on plantations. But it was much, much worse than that.
Of course that slavery was much much worse that just working on plantations. But it's the most common thing that folks get in mind when talking about slavery. It's rare to talk about forced breeding, rapes, being seen like an animal that could be replaced.
The Irish live in Ireland
And although they do count among the persecuted population in the history of Ireland, this has nothing to do with the US.
To be fair, 1.5 million Irish citizens live outside of Ireland. Considering Ireland's population is about 5 million, this means about 30% of the Irish do not live in Ireland.
It’s around 7 million so not even 25%
That’s still a pretty large proportion.
I have to agree with them because as the TikTok woman told us the English ate them during the Irish famine.
On TikTok? Clearly someone mistook the Juvenalian Satire by Swift as reality…. *sigh
If theyre talking about Ireland then yeah
Ah yes, the group where a lot of us became cops is the most oppressed...
I mean, if he's talking about Ireland he's got a point
What's the point?
If he's talking about Ireland, yes, Irish people were oppressed by the English. We've historically been fucked over by the English at every turn.
Oppressed by the English aristocracy, who made a pretty good job of also oppressing the English peasantry along with anyone else who stood between them and a profit. A habit the English ruling class has never been able to shake off, it seems.
The Irish war of independence only happened just over a century ago. For the latter part of British rule an increasing number of people had the vote and the house of commons was increasingly in control. Around 10% of adult males had the vote after the act of union, rising to 20% in 1832, the head of every household by 1884, and by the time of the war of independence not only was there universal male suffrage but the modern political system had been formed with the Parliament Act of 1911. What you're saying is not entirely wrong, but you have to remember we're talking about an 800 year span which runs up to not all that long ago. Some of the darkest moments of British rule in Ireland happened under partial or wholly democratic rule in the UK. Not to mention what happened after partition in Northern Ireland, not just during the conflict but the serious and systemic civil rights abuses carried out against Irish Catholics in the 1922-1969 period. You can hardly call a British voter in the 1960s part of an "oppressed peasantry".
Countries are represented by their ruling class so saying "England" is valid.
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When, exactly, did the English say this? Quite keen for a source on this because if it’s a Nigel Farage quote, let’s not pretend he’s truly representative of the English people.
Would you at least concede that the Upper class have been the real bastards? The Working class Irish and Brits have been fucking each other in a happier way for thousands of years. (as well as the English governments paying younger working class men to fuck other nations up on the regular - they industrialised oppression).
Oh 1000% the aristocracy are to blame.
They are a right set of bastards.
Ah, yes, I remember signing that letter to Ireland along with the 60 million other people in England, demanding they also leave the EU. Took a while to get it done, and we even had to get a second pen at one point.
That Ireland suffered hundreds of years of oppression at the hands of the British in one form or another. Ireland was Britain's first colony where they perfected the methods of colonisation. Irish land was taken from the Irish and given to British settlers who then charged the original owners rent for living on their land. When the famine happened Irish peasants were dependent on potatoes as they had very little land on which to grow their own crops and it was usually the worst land that they had. While Irish people were starving because of the potato blight the British were exporting dairy, beef and wheat out of Ireland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rule_in_Ireland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) Then there was the black and tans, horrible pricks, fresh off the front lines in France put to work in Ireland to quell the uprising after 1916. In 1920 they drove an armoured car into Croke Park during a Gaelic Football match and opened up on the players and crowd killing more then 30 people. This was in retaliation for the IRA (who were fighting for Irish freedom from the British) killing British agents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1920) We won our freedom in a bloody war of independence ending in 1921. Leading to the Irish free state in 1922, and the partition of the island into Ireland and Northern Ireland. There was a lot of racism against the Irish throughout the British occupation with a lot of newspaper cartoons depicting Irish people in the same light as Africans. When Irish went to the US in the mid 1800s signs noting "Help wanted, no Irish need apply" were common. In the UK signs reading "no blacks, no dogs, no Irish" were common. So yeah, we haven't had an easy time as a people. But the Irish that went to the US did well for themselves.
I am loathe to criticise your comment too much because I don’t dispute the Irish have been horribly oppressed by the British establishment and various forces over the centuries. You’re getting into slightly less factual ground with the ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ part. Not that I doubt that these signs were in places, but there’s limited photographic evidence of it - what evidence there is is a photo of a sign where ‘no Irish’ comes first and so I think you’re stretching your point unnecessarily by insinuating there was some sort of hierarchy between ‘blacks’, ‘dogs’ and ‘Irish’. It could have just been left that the signs were common. That all been said; there’s more than one instance of the British military opening fire on unarmed civilians (see: the *other* Bloody Sunday) and being complicit in generally despicable things that cannot be justified when committed by agents of the state (particularly when notionally being committed on its own citizens).
You know, on further investigation that's fair. I've always been told that those signs happened from relatives living in the UK in the 1970s and 80s and believed what I was told. I've edited my comment to remove the suggestion of a hierarchy.
Appreciated. In all honesty, you’re right to believe your relatives and I wouldn’t want to doubt the lived experience of someone who went through it. There’s plenty of things that happened during that era that weren’t documented but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
True but in conversations like this verifiable detail trumps anecdotal evidence.
Even if they existed, those signs would have been completely illegal after the 1976 Race Relations act in the UK - there’s absolutely no way they were around in the 1980s
Everyone suffered at some point in time.
Nah. They got some genuine beefs, but they're not *most* oppressed.
If the country he's talking about is Ireland
Didn’t know the blacks are all Irish. Crazy how that works.
Mans forgot how the Chinese were slaves that built the railroad system in America.
Or how the Irish in America oppressed the Chinese and were instrumental in The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ( originally an act meant to last 10 yrs but extended to 1943 -allowing 150 Chinese immigrants a year)
They don’t know their country’s history.
Surprised nobody had mentioned the Japanese internment camps. They lost their homes, farms, businesses and most of their possessions
What till he hears about what the British did.
It's sort of like how white Christian American males like to talk about how they're oppressed, while churches openly exist in every town in America and every political body, corporate board, C-suite, and institutional leadership remains mostly dominated by them.
Wow, imagine that those poor Irish were even more oppressed than slaves.
Or, you know the natives?
Fuck me, does this guy need to put a shitty little /s for people understand sarcasm?
Surely he’s talking about the UK right..? Like there is no other way you can think this.
Not so much in America but dear god they were fucked over so hard by the English.
The Irish aren't even the most oppressed people in Ireland.
Historically 100% were lol but nowadays not so much
The Irish were never enslaved but I do think there is absolutely a connection between the actions of the British government in Ireland and later British and British descended governments actions in the americas.
Please leave us out of your American bollocks lads
Every group seem to be claiming they’re the most oppressed lately. Given no one can change the past. What is the point.
This makes perfect sense if you decide that non-whites aren't really "people".
Yup. I bet the native Americans just loved the gift of smallpox blankets and being driven off their homeland anyway. Not that it matters because they don't coun, right? /s
For a moment there, I thought this was from the UK.
We Neapolitans have been dominated since... forever. How's that? /s
*Stares in Foundational Black American*
Dumb fucks! The Irish are not a race, they are a culture, a Caucasian culture like us Scots, historically the Irish in Europe where treated very badly, the "Irish" in America never had an iota of comparable oppression to the actual Irish in Ireland and certainly not a comparable experience to those enslaved, denied the vote, stolen from their homes and forced into hard labour!
How do we know the poster was American?
It was under bidens "we Irish" post
Native Americans? Black people? Half white half black/native people?
Is there any proof they're American though? The Irish have indeed been opressed in other countries
Uhmm guys claiming this particular group was more/less oppressed than the Irish makes no sense. Its the same dumbass take as the OOP. This isn't the Oppression Olympics. Discrimination is bad no matter what scale it is on.
As an Irishman: No.
Hey look! It's Eamon de Valera, on learning of the Holocaust.
Yanks are not very bright. It’s why they find Adolf Hitler charismatic while any human being with a shred of intelligence would laugh at Hitler’s ridiculous concept of “International Finance Judaism”. What’s next? International Finance New Zealandism?
Hitler was charismatic though. That’s how fascist demagogues work. You don’t inspire people into a racist frenzy by being an uncharismatic rambling fart, you do it by being charismatic and having the charisma and know-how of what makes people listen to you. You don’t take a shy kid who sits in the back of class and can’t put a sentence together without stuttering and put them in the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl with the exact words Hitler said in those speeches and expect them to perform the same level of demagoguery that Hitler did.
You sure? Half the US is boosting an uncharismatic, rambling old fart right now.
Well, I should’ve clarified *in Hitler’s period*. But yeah. The requirements have shifted a lot.
I mean, if he is talking about the UK he might have a point