this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Yeah but as someone from southern new england I can assure you the irish immigrants still aren't accepted there totally either. Day to day interactions no one targets you for being Irish descent but structurally being Irish American is considered to be barely white, more like poor white which is barely white among elite circles (ughh Boston is full of the descendents of the original immigrant european religious fanatics and it shows sometimes).
Doesn't make any of this right but notice the way oppression must metabolize and neutralize solidarity in a fractal process of targetting vulnerable groups along whatever axis they are exploitable along. Irish Americans must be both the oppressed and the oppressor for the system to work, and it is the same thing just more dogpiled the further you go down the ladder of real privilege.
There was no damn potato famine, there was just England prototyping modern colonialism and capitalism on Ireland.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, but interested in more info. What practical ways does this manifest for these folks? Are they subject to additional law enforcement scrutiny, denied job opportunities, or historically discriminated against in mortgage lending? Or are there other ways I'm not thinking of?
I mean, the thing with Irish Americans is that they have been shit on for most of their experience in the US but then in the last 40 years or so ceremonially brought into the "white" club, but this club has no real rules other than it only temporarily brings minorities in, however the club wants to define minorities.
You won't see structural discrimination against Irish Americans as easily perhaps as other more obvious examples of US racism but it is there, mostly in terms of classism. Irish Americans are the stupid hardworking drunks you do all the manual labor and leave the WASPs to run everything.
Things are changing, but I think to begin a conversation about why Irish Americans can have such disappointing politics compared to Irish people proper you have to understand the way the white elite in the U.S. has been playing poor-person-in-the-middle with groups like the Irish for decades.
It’s interesting because virtually none of that anti-Irish sentiment exists on the West Coast. Someone of fair complexion here is considered “white”, full stop.
I'll echo this from the midwest. Thats why this post about discrimination against the Irish was so surprising to me. Chicago in particular goes all out on St Patrick's day, and having any sort of Irish heritage is celebrated and cache that day.
It is celebrated in southern new england, I don't think I have ever seen anyone insult someone seriously because they were Irish or use slurs or anything (other than the incredibly prevalent joke that Irish people are all alcoholics? Like kind of yes but so is every other demographic basically...? At a bare minimum the Irish certainly aren't alone there...) but I am not talking about big boisterous celebrations here, I am talking about structures of society and those can go entirely unreflected upon even as symbols of equality are flourished all over the sky, I ask myself with respect to Irish-Americans have those structures changed? I am not so sure and even if they have they left their mark on Irish-American culture, at least the parts I have experienced.
I don't mean to claim I am an expert, I am not significantly of Irish descent and I am not Catholic, I hope I am wrong and I am seeing more into things than I have any right to but it just makes sense to me based on my lived life experience and what I know intellectually.
You're speaking in abstracts, which there is certainly a separate welcome conversation on, but how are those of Irish descent treated differently? Can you give me a concrete example, even anecdotal, where someone of Irish descent in New England was treated worse simply because they were of Irish descent?
Structural Racism look it up
I can barely give you an example off the top of my head of a white person acting racist towards a black person in front of me, but that doesn't mean the landscape around me wasn't shaped by a racism towards black people....? It just means I have been fortunate? enough to be shielded from seeing it most of the time when it actually rears its ugly head....
I'm well aware of it, and I gave you three examples of how structural racism discriminates in my first post to you. Your answer was:
Even if I go on a deep search about the definition of structural racism, I won't have your personal knowledge about which you are saying occurs to those of Irish heritage. That's why I'm asking you. If you have seen it, have experienced, it or even been told about how it has affected those of Irish heritage, I'd think this should be easy to have an example. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. Far from it! I'm saying I don't have your knowledge and experience as it relates to Irish aspects and I'm interested in learning it.
Really? I can think of a lot off the top of my head and I'm pasty white guy:
You aren't listening to me if you think I am saying I haven't been in an environment that was actively being racist towards black people, I am saying I can't easily point to a single place and say "look there! Racism against black people! Catch it!" because I am fortunate to live in a fairly progressive place.
The racism is still VERY much there, but it is structural often, harder to point to, that is my point.
Or in the case of our conversation impossible to point to.
I had a huge reply typed up citing sources on both the ease of which there is to find examples of structural racism against people of color in the USA, and the lack of any sources on the same for those of Irish heritage in the USA but I deleted that post . You say its there, can't point to any scholarly work or even anecdotal examples. I'm not sure what to do with that. I find no sources to learn of this from, and you aren't able to provide any yourself. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm not saying you're making this all up, but I'm also not seeing any corroboration anywhere. There's nothing to act on. Nothing to learn. Nothing to change.
If there is injustice in our society, I want to do my part in working against it, but there's nothing to even start with on on modern day discrimination against Americans of Irish descent.
If you have any more to offer on this, I'm interested, but otherwise it feels like we've exhausted the topic to the ends of our collective knowledge.
I honestly think it is as simple as the elite white class of easterners wanted desperately in some way to be like mindfuckingly rich european elites and so why the hell would they go west when their parents already in their minds went farther west then they the children wanted to and were now having to commit genocide and other attrocities to drag a fabrication of that fantasy into reality here in the US?
You have to look at the cowboy trope and interpret it quite literally as the US collective psyche, racism, stereotypes of westerns and all because it really does explain the behavior of the US right now.
The west was not built by blonde hair blue eyed european descent cowboys taming the savage wilds, it was built despite them trying to kill the very soul of the landscape and despite the fact that retroactively cowboy imagery was violently whitewashed and plastered over a vibrant if brutal tapestry of history in order to simplify problematic questions about the "american project" into easy answers.
Edit John Company the board game explains this exhaustively in that the game is meant to express a similar process that went on with the Colonial elite of India under occupation by the British empire.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/332686/john-company-second-edition