That wasn’t the point I was making. I’ll try and make the point using some stats from The Innocence Project:
A shocking and disturbing number of African American men are convicted of crimes they did not commit. The numbers of false convictions and exonerations of Irish American women is significantly less (actually I couldn’t find a single case).
Why do you think it is that so many black men are convicted of crimes that they did not commit? Why would people sitting on a jury be more likely to wrongly convict an innocent black man than they would be to wrongly convict an innocent white woman?
These innocent black men, who have been exonerated thru dna, were not in prison “because they have an attitude” or " because there are more black lawbreakers". Rather, members of the jury who may have had an “internal negative reaction to most black people” made false presumptions about them because of the color of their skin.
So when you say things like “these things happen to all people, not just blacks” it confirms that you don’t have your facts straight. Your experience in America, as challenging as it may have been, cannot be compared to the experiences of most blacks Americans.
You do make some points I agree with. I agree that race *shouldn’t *matter. It shouldn’t matter if a person is black, white or anything else…*but it does *(see statistics above).
When it comes to governmental and social institutions bending over backwards to accommodate minorities, here in So Cal, it’s been large scale illegal immigration, combined with a corresponding mandatory Spanish English bilingualism, as well the aforementioned affirmative action for Latinos in government, education, and corporations. This far outweighs any other change in the California landscape. It’s put a huge strain on all of the state and local institutions - schools, the justice system, public transportation, and the health care system.
The only way curlcoat could have missed it is to have not been paying attention. Either that or she lives in a fantasy world.
Here in So Cal, pretty much every ethnic group demands and gets special accommodation for their cultural needs and recognition for their historical grievances. Government publications made available in Korean, Russian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Armenian, Spanish, Chinese etc. Government funded translators made available in these languages for trials and public hearings.
Legislative recognition for Armenian genocide, Cambodian genocide, Holocaust memorials, reparations for Japanese internees, special sovereignty arrangements for Indian casinos. The list goes on and on. Black Americans by comparison are mainly interested in not getting beaten by the police, not being randomly targeted for murder by Latino gang members, and maintaining English as the lingua franca everywhere in the US.
After the end of slavery in the 1860’s, the US went through an entire century where black Americans were denied citizenship rights and equality before the law. They were commonly subject to ethnic cleansing, as well as countless individual cases of abuse and persecution.
In the South, this was formalized under the name of Jim Crow, but it was just as vicious in the North. One element largely absent in the South but common in the North was the sundown town, where black people who lived in a town in question were driven out by law, arson, assault and murder, with future black settlement being banned.
This is why, until just a few decades ago, it was impossible for black Americans to live “just like everybody else”. I don’t even think you’re interested in black Americans joining mainstream US society, since so many millions have, you pretend they haven’t. You want someone to feel superior to, to alleviate your own self contempt.
Your last sentence is exactly correct. Simple ststistics do not tell the whole story. To get the whole story, one needs to recall (or discover) that the number of blacks living in poverty indicates from the outset that their percentage of people convicted of crimes will be higher, (as has been true of every ethnic group passing through the American system from the beginning–including the Irish, of course), that law enforcement targets blacks more than any other group for a number of crimes, and that, once in the criminal justice sysyem, blacks are more likely to be dealt with more harshly than other groups for the same crimes. (See for example, this news article and its followup.)
This is interesting. In most major cities in the Rust Belt, there are Irish-American clubs, (Cleveland has two), as well as Italian-American, Polish-American, German-American, etc., clubs and associations. One of the reasons offered by Jesse Jackson in 1989 when he announced the preference for African-American over black was that his group wanted blacks to be seen as more like their neighbors of other ethnic backgrounds. I have, in the past, suggested that that was not a good choice, specifically because the term ethnic-American is used far more frequently in the cities of the industrial Northeast and more rarely outside of that region, so that people in California, for example, may be put off by a phrase that is alien to them, even though it is used daily and comfortably in the cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes.
This is not a criticism of your choice of identification or your reaction to the term African-American, but it indicates why it is not, actually, “throwing slavery in the face” of anyone who hears it. It was an attempt to have a term that resembled the terms that other ethnic groups (in a specific region) use all the time.
First, very few blacks want “separate but equal,” so generalizing about what they all want based on a few is not helpful. Some whites want blacks sent back to Africa, but I would not consider that a “white” problem based on the attitudes of a few people.
Then, it was not a matter of “one or two of their ancestors were probably slaves in some country”; it was a matter that all their ancestors were slaves in this country. (And after slavery was ended, they were still oppressed as a group for over a hundred years, not subjected to random discrimination for a couple of decades.)
I do not wish to assume you are completely clueless, but I do react to the fact that you have displayed a serious lack of knowledge regarding the histories both of blacks and Irish in this country.
I know this from reading history and listening to the tales of my Irish ancestors. I know that there are no laws that penalized a person for being Irish. If a man could lose his brogue and present himself to an employer where he was not recognized as Irish, he could be treated like any other white person. A black person could not escape beiing recognized as a black and treated as such.
Was it probably as bad for anyone who was ground into the subservience of living in company towns, (either for mines or for factories), as being a black slave? Probably on a day to day basis. On the other hand, company towns could not break up families and sell their members to other places as happened to black slaves. There were no laws prohibiting them from learning to read. (A lack of opportunity for an individual is not the same hardship as prohibiting an entire group from doing something.) And the children of that company town always had the chance to move away and find different work or get an education or be treated as persons–something that was forbidden to the chldren of black slaves.
Actually, we still have nothing but your family’s anecdotes that your ancestor, (one of 8 or 16 or 32 ancestors in that generation) was actually a slave after he reached adulthood. (The “selling” of children went on in some cases, but was never endemic to the country and no white kid could have been held as a slave after they grew up.) I will even grant that it happened as you say. However, your single ancestor’s experience was not typicval for all the Irish and the period of persecuting the Irish in the U.S. only lasted a few decades. The entire black population was brought over as slaves and held as slaves for generations. When they were finally permitted their freedom, they were immediately subjected to limits on their rights, often being prevented from voting for a hundred years. Your individual ancestor may have not learned to read, but I would be surprised if his wife did not and I suspect that all his children were educated in public schools. For generations, blacks were prohibited, by law, from getting an education–a situation that never was imposed on the Irish in the U.S.
The black experience was very different from that of your family.
= = =
Now, I have not argued for reparations for blacks in this thread–you brought up the topic–but you also need to recall that it is not just slavery that is the issue. Once blacks were freed, laws were passed that made it impossible to vote. Actions were taken to prevent them from getting a decent education. Blacks who were perceived to be too “uppity” risked being frozen out of the economy of their towns or even lynched. When, despite every other obstacle, blacks actually managed to become prosperous, they risked being driven from their homes en masse as happened in Tulsa, OK and Springfield, IL in the 1920s. Blacks were rarely protected by the law, which was often complicit with the people persecuting blacks. (For example, in 1943, the government was building houses in Detroit to provide homes for all the new workers needed in the factories for the war effort. Whites rioted to drive blacks from their homes because the whites did not want to live near the blacks. At the end of the riot, the blacks were blamed by the police for defending their homes from being burnt down and not simply fleeing, leaving their possession to be destroyed. No condemnation was spoken by the police against the whites who actually started the riot.)
Things are much, much better now and it is probably true that it is not well to “dwell on” the past, but pretending that none of the past had any part in creating the current situations is not helpful, either.
I don’t know, tho your question would make more sense if you had used an innocent white man, since bringing the sex of the unjustly convicted person adds even more facets to the issue. Anyway, I cannot imagine that just the race of the person is why this happens, but OTOH I would not be surprised to hear that it is far more common in certain areas of the country. Other factors like quality of the defense these men got, whether they had commited crimes prior to this, whether they had been in prison prior to this and other things I cannot think of off the top of my head would also be a factor as to why any innocent person ends up convicted. The fact that juries are composed of average Joes off the street is probably a big factor too.
I hate to say this since I’m sure you’ll turn it against me, but if one looked into each individual case of these wrongly convicted men, you might find that most were very poor, had commited previous crimes and had only a public defender for an attorney.
Except, you don’t know that. It is entirely possible that the jury was swayed to convict because the defendent acted like an ass thruout the trial. I am well aware that people make false presumptions based on color, just as they do based on sex, but you are going too far to the extreme, that these men were convicted just because they are black.
Um, what? Are you saying that only blacks are wrongfully convicted? Besides, when I said the above, it was in a historical context not just right now or even in this century.
Again, it would help if people would just read what I write and not add their own biases in. I am well aware that illegal immigration is killing us here, or rather the fact that for some bizarre reason the government thinks on one hand these people should be thrown out but on the other hand keeps giving them handouts. However, it is much rarer that I see any of the Mexicans (particularly the illegal ones!) demanding anything of us. I don’t know what mandatory bilingulaism you are talking about - perhaps No Child Left Behind? That was federal, you can thank Bush for that one.
Yes, the huge number of children these guys have does sap our government programs but they are just using what is there and do not generally go about demanding more.
This hardly sounds like Latino gang members are just going about killing black people for no reason - The reason for this, Rafael has found, is that a longstanding prison gang war between the Mexican Mafia and the African-American prison gang, Black Guerilla Family, has led to a deep racial loathing between the gangs that has spilled over into the streets of Los Angeles County. As for being beaten by the police, that also is not just black people and I don’t remember seeing any report where the person beaten hadn’t created a dangerous situation. Not that it is any reason to get beaten, but police are human and when faced with a large person on drugs, with a weapon or whatever, shit happens.
Black Americans want English to be our official language?
Exactly. I believe I already said something to that affect.
Note in that story that the white guy was able to hire his own attorney. Again, this is a matter of whether a person is poor, not his skin color. Tho, this does go back to my original (incorrect?) belief that black people in this country tend to be poor. Perhaps it is just black criminals that tend to be poor.
This is interesting to me in that I had never heard of any Irish-American clubs, etc that were actually called “Irish-American”. The first, and for a long time only, “whatever”-American I heard was Afro, then African-American, and much more lately we have others, tho those seem to be restricted to the media.
I agree that very few blacks would want separate but equal since that was a segregation term. However, there just doesn’t seem to be another good way to explain the attitude they project - “I am just as good as you, as well as better”, “we are equals but I don’t have to follow the same rules”, etc
So far the only thing you all say I was clueless about was the fact that most blacks in this country descended from slaves. Which I thought because I was never taught in school that immigration from Africa was essentially non-existent until recently. What else am I wrong about regarding black and Irish US history?
I don’t know how well that worked if he was also redheaded and “looked Irish” but you do agree that even with actual laws it was difficult for the Irish to get actual employment for quite some time here?
Well, unless he was “passing”, but yes I agree.
The difference between being forbidden to do something and having that something be essentially impossible is not very big. My grandmother did not go to any sort of school until after she married my grandfather, at which time she had the time to go to a sort of tutor set up at their church.
Of course it was different, but the whole point I am trying to make (again) is that the blacks were not the only people in this country who had a rough beginning, and some of that is still affecting today. I use my family as an example because that is what I know - my father was the first of my ancestors to go to college but even so, I didn’t get to go and neither did two of my three brothers because there simply wasn’t any money for it. Each one of our generations is improving tho - I married up, my eldest brother paid his way thru law school, & the next brother down went to trade school. The last one, I don’t know as I have lost touch with him - last I heard he was in Japan.
One must remember and learn from the past, but continuing to try to lay blame, particularly on people who had zero to do with anything that happened back then, is simply not healthy.
I think you need to go back and read both articles again. Some of the whites (plural) in the article were able to get their own lawyers, but it was not true that every white was able to afford a private attorney while no black was. The pertinent information in the articles is that a law that was intended to provide discretion to judges has become a situation in which the judges believe that they are only permitted to offer leniecy if it is recommended by the prosecutor’s office (not requested by the defendant’s lawyer), and the prosecutor’s office routinely recommends that the judge choose the less harsh option for white defendants while rarely, if ever, offering the option for black defendants.
Without considering you clueless, I will note that you would seem to have a good opportunity to learn some of the pertinent facts regarding the respective levels of persecution or oppression suffered by blacks vs Irish immigrants. You were clearly unaware of the frequent and widespread use of terms such as Irish-American, and, as a result, drew an incorrect conclusion as to what the term African-American actually meant. You held a rather distorted view regarding the percent of the black population that actually lives in poverty. (And you might want to do some research to discover just what the term “slave” indicated when used to refer to your ancestor.)
I see no reason to agree to that claim. It is true that Irish were often treated with contempt and might have been denied entrance to some specific occupations in specific locations, but the Irish, in general, found a lot of employment building canals, roads, and railroads. They also entered the military and police forces in large numbers, eventually dominating many police departments. Those Irish who remained in city slums probably faced more difficulties finding work when economic downturns reduced the available jobs, but there was no time in U.S. history when Irish were pervasively prevented from finding employment. (Even the NINA signs appear to be based on stories brought over from Irish who spent time in England, where such signs were posted and there is not yet any documented evidence of any such signs being posted in the U.S.)
However, when an Irish immigrant failed to get an education, it was the result of random acts of luck in disparate locations. Catholic parochial schools were established by the 1850s and were pervasive throughout the country by the 1890s. This is in contrast to the black situation in which they were prohibited from reading until 1865 and then were only provided the poorest schools from that point on.
So then the fact I didn’t know that African-American wasn’t the first time a “whatever”-American label was used wasn’t because I am stupid, but because I didn’t get east of Denver until I was over 30?
OK, well, since I am neither an attorney nor living in N Cal, I’m not sure why you would think I would have know about this. Heck, I didn’t even move to California until 1993.
Either I got to the wrong article or I missed a link to the next page - all I saw was an article on two black guys and one white guy. You are saying that prosecutor’s offices in all states tend to routinely deny leniency to black criminals?
I’m not sure that Irish-American is all that widespread since it appears to be mostly in the east. Anyway, my intent with regards to my great grandfather was to illustrate that there were other races/religions/whatever that suffered, yet for whatever reason it was only (as I thought at the time) the blacks that wished to separate themselves by calling themselves AA; and that just about every non-British subset that has arrived on these shores had to start from abject poverty and no education yet it appears that of all of them only the blacks are still claiming negative affect from it. I am aware that even after slavery ended blacks still didn’t have anything close to an equal footing for quite some time, but right now in real time the Mexicans here are living thru pretty much that same thing (not the slavery, the aftermath) yet they just do their thing. I don’t get why some blacks still claim damage.
All I did was Google for images of No Irish Need Apply and I got this - http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~el6/presentations/Irish_Americans_S2_WS2003/reality_vs.htm There are many other examples, so who is right? Given the history, I’d say that when the original British colonists had uneducated Irish showing up on their doorstep, given how the British treated the Irish on the other side of the pond, I’d say that NINA did exist. Yes, the Irish did find a lot of employment on canals, railroads and mines, but this was because no “regular” citizen wanted these dangerous jobs. The Irish did end up dominating the east coast police forces for quite some time (maybe still?) but I don’t know how that happened and at this time don’t have time to search - I really need to get to bed.
The only difference there is the length of time that blacks were denied education.
Honestly, this is really neither here nor there - I don’t believe I ever said or even inferred that the Irish and black US histories were exactly the same.
In any case, the fact is that curlcoats’s attitude about Hyphenated Americans (if she actually does consistently apply it to all ethnic/racial/cultural groups) has a long history, as does the use of the hyphen by American subgroups.
Okay, I know that was a big “if”. But FWIW anyway. And in an attempt to bring this back to the op … do we “over-identify” race more than we “over-identify” any of the other of our granfalloons?
I used the white woman analogy since you presented yourself as a white woman and I was attempting to help you to understand the black perspective. But I could certainly substitute ‘white man’ in that sentence and it would still be true. It is a fact that black men are wrongly convicted at a much higher rate than white men are wrongly convicted.
And since you live in southern California, then surely you have seen the periodic reports of famous black actors being stopped for driving their luxury cars (Blair Underwood comes to mind). I think even Barack Obama claims to have been stopped in the past just for being black (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this point, but I seem to remember such a story).
And I find it incredible that you thought only African-Americans used the (Insert Ethnic Group)-Americans label. I was born and raised in the west and I hear it all the time. Haven’t you ever been to the Japanese-American museum or the Irish-American Fair in Los Angeles? I’m always hearing about Irish-American, German-American, Asian-American, African-American, etc…it was impossible to avoid if you watched any political coverage. But nevertheless, now you know and maybe that will help to alter some of your misperceptions.
If you examine the statistics it is still much more likely for poor AA men using public defenders to be wrongly convicted than poor white men using public defenders, all other things being equal. If you study the statistics of wrongful convictions you can confirm this for yourself.
Again, you need to do some research and fight your own ignorance.
Once again, I’m not saying that only blacks are wrongly convicted. I am saying that blacks are wrongly convicted at a much higher rate than any other ethnic group. It’s a fact.
There are countless other examples, but I hope I’ve made the point that ethnic American groups of all types are all over the place right here in southern California.
I sincerely hope that your misunderstanding of the term African-American has been quashed.
I am aware that there are now a ton of whatever-American labels out there, what I thought was that African-American was first, and the only one for quite some time.
OK. Has anyone tried to find out why this is, other than assuming it is because of bigotry?
Uh, ok. How do I find out how a defendent acted during his trial?
I accept, and am not really surprised, that this is a fact. What I would like to know if there can be any other reason than a majority of the juries these men faced were full of knee jerk bigots.
Well stated. IMNSHO, the minute someone refers to someone else’s skin color as if it had meaning or value (outside of physical identification), then that person demeans the other and makes a fool of themself into the bargain.
Not that infrequently, when I’m listening to a talk radiio show, I’ll hear a caller start off by saying “I’m a black man” or “I’m an African American”, and then discuss a topic that is not even closely related to race. I’m thinking “What does being black have to do with paying $15 for a checked-in bag on American Airlines?”
You definitely missed something in the two articles to which I linked that discussed multiple arrests and prosecutions as well as providing interviews with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges.
At any rate, the program is local to the Cleveland area, not nationwide. I provided it as an example of the sort of phenomenon that tends to skew the statistics on black crime and incarceration rather than as the single explicit situation.
Mexican immigrants are not being lynched if they get “uppity.” If they become citizens, they are not denied the right to vote. Mexican immigrants who do well and prosper are not compelled to live in specific poorer neighborhoods the way blacks who made it into the middle class were. Mexican immigrants do not face the prospect of being denied loans for houses based on the color of their skin. Mexican immigrants have not suffered from the cycle of being the last hired, the first fired when the economy fell, and then watching as their old jobs were given to newer immigrants when the economy swung back up again. The same is true of all the other European immigrants who preceded them. Blacks have suffered all those things in repeated cycles.
Now, things have improved tremendously in the last forty years and a great many blacks have moved into the middle class, breaking that cycle. However, the effects of the things they suffered–which were both different and worse than what immigrants suffered–has had an effect that has not yet been erased.
There are some black people who want more handed to them, (just as there are some white people who want to be “protected” from black people or demand the “right” to live in a society where no black people live), but those views do not include a majority of blacks or whites and it is pretty much a phony argument to make a big deal about the few loud people who are not part of the mainstream of either group.
The only difference between the site to which I linked and the site to which you linked is that your site repeated the claim about NINA without providing any evidence that it actually occured. (The two “NINA” related photos say nothing. The first is of the lyrics for the song discussed in the article to which I linked with no outside testimony to support a claim that NINA actually happened. The second is of a sign with no provenance. It is a sign using a modern font that appears to have been created to “commemorate” the belief in NINA rather than being an actual sign from the 1840s or 1860s.) Other than that, both of our sites talk about prejudice against the Irish, their clannish nature, their willingness to accept difficuklt and even dangerous labor, and the horrible living conditions of living in the slums of the major cities. Beyond that, your site repeats the old belief about NINA without providing any evidence that it occurred (in direct conflict to the claims that the Irish were employed in many jobs) while my site notes the problems with those claims and points out the evidence against and the lack of genuine evidence for the belief in the NINA signs or attitudes.
Except, of course, that the Irish had education available to them (as a group) by the 1860s while blacks in most parts of the country where they lived were kept away from a decent eduction until the 1960s.