This week, Brian Dooley writes exclusively for Shared Ireland.
“The doors burst open and this guy came down the middle of the hall with this [Irish] tricolour and then he realised it was me and he stopped. ‘I said if you take another step forward I’ll ram that thing so far down your throat that it will come out your arse,’ [and] the vulgarity of it stopped them…it changed the agenda and I always believed that we could have changed the agenda, in small ways at least, by making the Irish Americans who picked their side on Ireland pick the same side on America by quite forcibly setting the confrontations out”.
There’s no one voice that speaks for Irish America. Whether about the best path to a united Ireland, or about which presidential candidate to support, or about abortion, there have always been multiple, competing views.
And now Irish America is responding to the Black Lives Matter protests with a complicated jumble of reactions. Like in the pivotal decades of the 1840s and 1960s, there’s tension between reactionary and progressive Irish American views on structural racism.
Because of its size and power, and its history on running police forces, Irish America comes under greater scrutiny on this than, say, Polish America or German America, and it’s not rocket science to see where Irish America’s racist reputation comes from, or why it’s been around for so long.
Irish American Police officers association band
Irish-based political activists have long challenged Irish Americans about their racism. In 1843 Daniel O’Connell berated Irish Americans who refused to condemn slavery, calling them “pseudo-Irishmen,” saying it was “heart-rending … to think that so many of the Irish in America should be so degenerated as to be among the worst enemies of the people of colour”.
And Bernadette Devlin McAliskey told me how Irish Americans interrupted a political rally in Boston during the 1970s where she was speaking with Black radical leader Stokely Carmichael.
“The doors burst open and this guy came down the middle of the hall with this [Irish] tricolour and then he realised it was me and he stopped. ‘I said if you take another step forward I’ll ram that thing so far down your throat that it will come out your arse,’ [and] the vulgarity of it stopped them…it changed the agenda and I always believed that we could have changed the agenda, in small ways at least, by making the Irish Americans who picked their side on Ireland pick the same side on America by quite forcibly setting the confrontations out”.
And set out the confrontations she did, consistently pointing out to Irish Americans the contradictions of supporting civil rights in Ireland but not in the US. She visited prominent Black activist Angela Davis in prison, and gave the keys of New York City to the Black Panther Party after she’d been presented with them by the city’s mayor.
In Detroit in 1969 she spelled out the problem frankly. “I cannot understand the mental conflict of some of our Irish Americans who will fight forever for the struggle for justice in Ireland, and who yet play the role of the oppressor and will not stand shoulder to shoulder with their fellow Black Americans.”
It’s all too easy to find examples of Irish American racism across the centuries, but the wider picture is more muddled. Irish Americans aren’t exclusively white, and they don’t all think the same thing.
Frederick Douglass Mural Belfast
Kelly’s Irish Times is a bar in the heart of Washington DC, opposite the main train station. It has the usual memorabilia of Irish American pubs across the country – the badges of various American fire departments and the big city police forces, for so long the spine of Irish American employment and power.
The walls display the usual portraits of Irish, and Irish American, icons – of John F. Kennedy, of Michael Collins, of James Joyce. But up there too in the pantheon is a large, framed picture of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. It’s been there at least 30 years. Douglass went on speaking tours of Ireland in the 1840s and was close, personally and politically, to Daniel O’Connell.
Irish America isn’t one dimensional. It’s more confused, contradictory and messy than that. Is its reputation for racism misplaced? Not really, but there’s always been more than one Irish America, more than one tradition or legacy, with a layered record over the centuries.
Liam Hogan’s great piece outlines how some Irish Americans were often in notorious slave catchers in the 1800s, while others were part of the Underground Railroad that smuggled escaped slaves through the US and into Canada.
By the 1920s American military intelligence was worried about the increasing co-operation between Irish Americans and the grandfather of Black nationalism, Marcus Garvey. Special Agent P-138 reported on an alarming meeting in New York “where some Irish leaders spoken high terms of Garvey and his movement and pledged their support.”
Marcus Garvey in Parade Uniform
This identification by Black American activists with Irish politics has a long tradition. Douglass spoke publicly in Ireland with O’Connell, and later with Charles Stewart Parnell, to call for Home Rule. In 1920 Marcus Garvey telegrammed Eamon De Valera on behalf of “25,000 Negro delegates,” urging him “keep up the fight for a free Ireland,” and former Black Panther Party official Kathleen Cleaver told me that in the 1970s “all our sympathies were with the IRA…because they took such a clear cut position on armed struggle.”
But the relationship between Black Americans and Irish Americans has been more complicated. While many Boston Irish fuelled the white supremacist stereotypes during the 1970s by chanting racist slogans, a national opinion poll taken that decade showed that 89 per cent of Irish Americans said they would vote for a Black president.
But, like in the 1840s and 1960s, Irish America is finding it hard to shake off its racist reputation.
The Chicago police force, so long dominated by Irish Americans, was found by an official report in 2016 to have been plagued by long-term systemic racism.
And while Chief of New York Police Department’s Terence Monahan took a knee in solidarity with protestors this month he also said “I don’t believe racism plays a role in New York [policing],” and cited the old anti-protestor trope – without citing evidence – that the “vast majority” of those causing trouble “are coming from outside of New York.”
NYPD chief Terence Monahan kneeling with protesters
The reaction from institutional Irish America is predictably mixed. From the website of the “largest and oldest Irish Catholic organisation in America,” The Ancient Order of Hibernians, you’d have no idea that the country was facing a crisis of racial injustice, or that there was any problem at all.
“we are faced with the growing awareness of the deep injustices that the Black community has faced throughout its history…,”
Irish America magazine isn’t ignoring the unrest, and has been running regular articles addressing the issue. Editor Patricia Harty explains “we are faced with the growing awareness of the deep injustices that the Black community has faced throughout its history…,” while the Rain Immigrant Center in Boston, formerly the Irish International Immigrant Center, says “We are committed to fighting for racial justice, and we stand with the Black community, and people of color in protesting the injustice and violence they face.”
Irish America is way more than 40 shades of green, and while President Trump’s White House is jammed full of Irish American reactionaries in senior positions, Irish America itself is changing fast. A survey of Irish Americans aged 18-30 published in March this year found they were much more likely to support Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren than Trump.
“We have many Irish Americans who remember their history but fail to continue the tradition…Then we have younger people who are continuing the tradition but are afraid of their history”.
Irish American Kieran Murphy, host of the New American Left podcast, said of Irish America’s response to the racial injustice emergency: “We have many Irish Americans who remember their history but fail to continue the tradition…Then we have younger people who are continuing the tradition but are afraid of their history”.
There is a lot to be scared of, and shameful about, in the history of Irish America’s response to racial injustice. But Irish America shouldn’t let itself be solely defined by an embarrassing past. There are strands to be proud of too, lessons on how to be good allies to those struggling for their rights. That’s part of Irish America’s tradition too, and that legacy should be held onto, nurtured, and followed.
Brian is a friend of Shared Ireland and has done a podcast with us previously which you can find here.
Brian Dooley is author of Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America and you can read his bio and blog here.
