John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance

Chapter 2: The Subordination of Irish Catholics and African Americans

2 The Subordination of Irish Catholics and African Americans The Colonial Experience Ireland The oppression of the Catholics of Ireland has been described as an almost “ideal‑typical” case of colonialism, providing the English valuable experience that they later used to colonize Africa and other parts of the world.1 The English conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century inaugurated centuries of subordination that did not come fully to an end until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and continues to some extent even today with British control of northern Ireland. Although phenotypically identical, English attitudes toward Irish Catholics resemble in some ways those displayed toward Africans and other peoples of color. David Brion Davis writes, “However unflattering the usual African stereotype may have been, it was probably less derogatory and venomous then that applied at this time to the Irish, who were undoubtedly white.”2 The English generally regarded the Catholic Irish as a barbaric, inferior people who were an embarrassment to the race. A nineteenth‑century Cambridge University historian traveling in the Irish countryside wrote, “But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel so much, but their skins, except tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”3 In 1695 the English imposed on Ireland the Penal Laws. Not fully repealed until Catholic emancipation in 1829, the aim of these laws was the destruction of Catholicism in Ireland. Edmund Burke wrote of the 13 14 Chapter 2 Penal Laws, “A machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever preceded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”4 The Penal Laws have in their depravity sometimes been compared to the slave codes in the United States.5 Although the English in Ireland for sure did not go as far as their cousins in the American South, “there did sprang [sic] up in those days the infamous trade of priest‑hunting, ‘five pounds’ being equally the government price for the head of a priest or for the head of a wolf.”6 Among the provisions of the comprehensive code, the Catholic Irish were forbidden to: receive education; exercise his religion; enter a profession; hold public office; engage in trade or commerce; live in a corporate town or within five miles thereof; own a horse of greater value than five pounds; purchase land; lease land; accept a mortgage on land in security for a loan; vote; keep any arms for his protection; hold a life annuity; buy land from a Protestant; receive a gift of land from a Protestant; inherit land from a Protestant; rent any land worth more than thirty shillings a year; reap from his land any profit exceeding a third of the rent; be a guardian to a child; leave his infant children under Catholic guardianship when dying; attend Catholic worship; and [were] compelled by law to attend Protestant worship. The priest was banned and hunted with bloodhounds. The schoolmaster was banned and hunted with bloodhounds.7 While not seizing the bodies and babies of the Catholics as their counterparts did with respect to the Africans in the United States, the English in Ireland did seize the land and destroy the language. By the mid‑eighteenth century, the English held more than 90 percent of the land of Ireland,8 and in order to accommodate English dominance, the Irish had to gradually abandon Gaelic and embrace the English language in order to survive. In one sense the penultimate manifestation of English oppression came with the “Great Hunger.” Although not a genocide (in the strict sense of an effort to eliminate a specific ethnic group), from 1846 to 1851 experts estimate that between 1 million and 1.5 million Catholics died from starvation or from diseases related to malnutrition.9 The spectra of genocide are raised because while the people of Ireland were “eating the bark off trees,” huge amounts of food were shipped from Ireland to England.10 Although the British government may have made 15...