FWIW …
My wife’s long-deceased grandparents were all Italians who arrived in the US as adults between 1900 & 1910. Your story pretty well echoes what my aged MIL has said of her parents’ lives and her life growing up in the 20s & 30s.
If you had an accent you were unemployable in established “white” businesses which is why so many immigrants turned to entrepreneurship, even if it was just pushing a vegetable cart.
The next generation, my US-born MIL did OK as long as nobody knew they were Catholic. But still they had a fairly insular culture; definitely separate and not at all equal.
By my wife’s generation born in the 1950s Italian was just another mostly-irrelevant detail within white America. But slurs about mafiosi, greasy hair, or pasta were common experiences as a grade-schooler in the early '60s.
150+ years later Blacks are still stuck at square one when it comes to acceptance as a legitimate part of America. At least for many of them in much of our beknighted country.
Do we not still have a day where the whole country gets dressed up in “green face” and celebrates all the negative stereotypes of being Irish?! Do colleges still not use Irish caricatures as sports mascots?
Yes, but in day to day life the amount of discrimination faced by the Irish and Irish-Americans in the US is pretty minimal to non-existent. It is in no way comparable to what is endured not just by Black people but also Latinx, Asian, Muslims, and other groups.
The obvious massive fundamental difference is that the Irish didn’t come over as captured slaves against their will. They were economic refugees seeking a better life. Some were indentured servants, but that was it.
It would be interesting to delve in that sentiment more. I come from a Polish background and they also disliked the Irish, but it was because of the big anti-eastern European hated the Irish had for them.
I’m told (anecdotally by my family) the British class system came to the new world in full force than the Brits were at the top, the Scots and then the Irish. When the wave of Eastern European immigrants arrived in the start of the 20th century, the Irish took great pleasure in abusing them since they finally had people lower than them on them “pecking order”.
My father and uncles harboured huge anti-Irish sentiments all their lives. They had many stories and of being beat up daily by Irish gangs when in high school.
What day would that be? Because St. Patrick’s day doesn’t celebrate “all the negative stereotypes of the Irish.” Sure a lot of people get drunk, but they do that on Cinco de Mayo too. People celebrate the positive stereotypes too!
While it’s true that certain sports teams have a pugnacious ginger dwarf as a mascot, I’m not aware of any Irish-Americans who take offense at it.
As a slice of completely uninteresting western European Wonderbread. I almost take offense at this. Some of us toast nicely brown in the sun, and end up no more reflective than the average human when properly maintained.
I’ve never been precisely offended by such mascots, but I have been somewhat bemused by a person complaining about the Cleveland Indians, while wearing Notre Dame shorts and a Boston Celtics shirt.
This thing about discrimination against the Irish is usually brought up to imply that if Irish-Americans could overcome discrimination to become mainstream, then there’s no excuse for other kinds of Americans, in particular Black Americans, to fail to do the same thing. The implication is that it’s their fault for their failure to improve themselves.
This conveniently ignores a lot of other factors, including the fact that after a while, Irish-Americans were admitted into whiteness, as were Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, and other groups that were initially excluded. Black Americans have never been extended that privilege.
Chingon, I’ve instructed you previously to refrain from snarky remarks directed at other posters, and to confine yourself to factual responses in this forum. This is an official warning for failure to follow moderator instructions.
IMO one of the most interesting features of the SDMB is that one’s sex, sexual orientation, and race are largely obscure until / unless one chooses to lay it out. And by being obscure these factors begin by being irrelevant and can remain irrelevant far longer than IRL.
On a more lighthearted note there’s this famous editorial cartoon hosted at wikipedia.
On that note, my niece and nephew are Black Irish-Americans. My sister’s husband was from Guyana, and Black (with some South Asian mixed in). Although my niece’s name is Erin, I’m sure no one who meets her assumes she’s Irish-American.
