:eek: You have got to be kidding.
To take just one of many, many instances, the 1882 pamphlet “What Science is Saying about Ireland”:
Or the diary of Fanny Kemble in 1832:
I mean, the “savage” slur was an absolute cliche about the Irish among people of English descent well into the 20th century. (Notice the contemptuous use of “potato-eating” in there too.)
Ignorance fought. I had never heard that.
I cannot believe you’re not familiar with pamphlets from 1882!
I knew that the Irish were discriminated against, but had never known “savages” to be applied to them – I thought that was reserved for people with darker skin.
“We’ll share the land with the <black people> and the <Chinese people>, but not the Irish!” <–Blazing Saddles.
Anyway, the example I found specifically contrasted “said your piece” and “hold your peace”:
Ironically, “potato eating savages” is the kind of humor that would be appropriate for a Cracked article, because there is a mutual understanding that they will be making those sort of jokes. A message board post is another story, even if it doesn’t deserve a warning.
If you remove (or ignore) all context, then yes it sounds a lot different. As is so frequently the case.
Also, “stupid” and “dumb” are somehow supposed to be analogous to “potato-eating” in those examples.
Anti-Irish slurs of “savagery” and the like are not an obscure phenomenon: I just went with the original source cites to attest to the way in which such slurs were actually used. If you google something like “Irish were called savages”, you can get millions of more modern references in secondary sources.
Thank you. I’m glad some people have been educated by this thread.
It’s true that Irish-Americans suffer minimal discrimination in the United States today, but that doesn’t mean they’ve entirely forgotten their past history of oppression. And anti-Irish sentiment is hardly a thing of the past in the UK.
Discrimination against Irish Catholics in the US has been a significant factor within my own lifetime. I recall that there was opposition against John F. Kennedy’s election due to prejudice against Catholics. Many thought at the time thought that a Catholic couldn’t be elected President. Among Irish-Americans, JFK’s election was nearly as big a deal as Obama’s election was for African-Americans, as a triumph over past discrimination. And the fact that the first (and only) Irish Catholic President was murdered was a great blow (even if the assassination had nothing to with his ethnicity); many older Irish-Americans still have pictures of JFK on their walls.
My own grandfather grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in the South Bronx in the late 1800s. His mother, father, aunt, uncle, two sisters, and a cousin all died of disease in the space of eight years, leaving him an orphan at the age of 11. He never spoke of this; we only found this out when we looked for his father’s grave and found it contained seven bodies. They could only afford the one grave, and had to stack them up like cordwood.
As I said, prejudice against Irish, particularly Irish Catholics, still exists in the UK, and many Irish Americans continue to identify with Ireland and its troubles. My brother has visited Ireland a number of times, in particular on scholarships to learn the Irish language, and my mother visited several times. Both my brother and I have read extensively on Irish and Irish American history, especially on the rebellions and the Great Famine (aka the Irish Potato Famine), which caused the starvation of one million and the emigration of a million others (my ancestors among them). I have nieces named Erin and Shannon. The Good Friday Agreement that ended most of the violence in Northern Ireland was only signed 22 years ago. During the conflict I knew people in the Bronx who contributed to the Catholic side in the conflict.
Given this, being referred to as “potato-eating savages” is not nearly as jocular as it may sound to those not familiar with this history.
Offended? Doesn’t seem the right word, I wouldn’t give a horseshit comment like that the pleasure of offending me.
I certainly don’t take it as some friendly banter though, it was definitely a dig at us using the same tired old cliches. Fucking potatoes again, how original.
Potato eating drunks. Cheese eating surrender monkeys. Greasy Italians. Fat racist Americans. How funny such generalizations are, oh how we laughed. :rolleyes:
As an “Irish-American” who’s known for a quarter century about the 19th century race riots in NYC both by and against Irish immigrants, who’s read about the plague ships in Canada, who’s looked at Typhoid Mary through the lens of anti-Irish bigotry, it’s not that we’ve forgotten our past history of oppression (on both sides of the truncheon), it’s that most of us recognize that in modern America it’s virtually vanished.
Yes, sixty years ago there were vestiges of it; but today you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the US with a genuine prejudice against the Irish. So treating a clearly-jocular and ironic reference to anti-Irish bigotry as equivalent to real and actual bigotry indicates a deep deficit when it comes to understanding, not history, but irony.
Colibri, in the past 20 years, the persona you’ve adopted here is one of a deeply humorless moderator. Repeatedly you’ve shown not just incomprehension of joking, but almost anger at people making jokes. I don’t know if that’s what you’re like in real life, but it does make me think that you above others should moderate with your finger outside the trigger guard when it comes to humor.
Frankly, I think you must be joking. This is utterly absurd. Anyone who follows my posts knows I make a lot of jokes, including in GQ. Per GQ rules, I moderate jokes made before the question has been answered, but not normally afterward, unless they are offensive. And I do moderate “jokes” containing ethnic slurs. If you feel that ethnic slurs are so hilarious that the should get a pass, I don’t know what to say to you.
I’m actually quite disappointed in your response to this thread. You have expressed strong opposition to bigotry, but somehow bigotry against the Irish gets a pass. I’ve explained at length why this is not a dead issue. Discrimination in the US is not the only issue. Your stance here seems wildly inconsistent with previous positions. I think you wouldn’t be so accepting of slurs against another group.
Maybe you joke in GQ. I don’t spend much time in GQ, based on my experiences there. This quote shows exactly how little you’re understanding the points being made, though. I don’t find ethnic slurs hilarious, and your belief that laughter is my motive is appallingly absurd. Rather, I recognize irony and how it works.
Contrast to this understanding:
If puddleglum were expressing surprise that savages could have gotten something right, first off, it wouldn’t have been an ironic usage, so you’re being inconsistent here. Moreover, his post would’ve been incoherent. His ethnic slur works only because he so obviously doesn’t mean it: he’s clearly praising the Irish.
Ethnic praise like that is itself problematic, but at least understand what the problem is.
God, I hate to disappoint you.
That’s not irony, that’s sarcasm, because I’m not really concerned about your disappointment.
I’ve tried to be clear always that bigotry should be evaluated in historical and modern context. And while historically of course there’s been vicious bigotry against the Irish in the US, your most recent example of it is more than half a century old, and for good reason: such prejudice is, in the modern US, vanishingly rare.
What’s not rare, however, is for fully-assimilated white folks to decide they want in on that sweet sweet oppressed identity swag, and to reach for an ethnic history that allows them to claim persecution.
I am not here for that nonsense.
It looks to me like this warning was based on a misunderstanding of an ironic usage, coupled with a misunderstanding of what actual bigotry looks like in the wild, coupled with a hair-trigger moderation.
Wait, do we have to check with LHOD for now on, on what people are oppressed and what counts as ethnically insulting?
How come I didn’t get that memo?
I’ve explained previously why the points you’ve made are incorrect. If you choose to ignore most what I’ve posted previously, I’m not going to get into a prolonged debate over it and keep rehashing the same points over and over.
It appears to be so. Like I said, he wouldn’t accept similar arguments made for other ethnic groups. It seem to me he is playing “Opposite Day.”
(That’s a joke.)
What a bizarre comment. Go by your own reading of the evidence: do YOU see evidence that Irish folks face any actual oppression in the modern US?
This is the sort of post people make when they don’t bring evidence or argument to the table.
Uh, no you haven’t. Before I wrote that, I read through all your posts in the thread, in case I’d missed any evidence of actual oppression in the US in the last half-century. You offered instead things like “I have relatives that don’t like potato jokes,” but that in no way addresses what I’ve said, much less show why it’s incorrect.
Yikes. Consider my opinion about your sense of humor appropriately adjusted.
If you read my posts, I’ve made the point that’s not the only issue. If you’re going to ignore that, there’s no point in engaging with you.
I believe the appropriate bridge between the positions of Colibri and LHoD (two posters I like) is that while anti-Irish sentiment is nowhere near as significant today as bigoted sentiments against blacks and many other groups, especially in America, that doesn’t mean that anti-Irish slurs have totally lost their power and should be used freely without care, and thus these slurs, like other ethnic slurs, are still inappropriate for most of the forums on this board.
This is an absurd characterization of what I’ve written.
Correct. I acknowledged in my posts that anti-Irish discrimination in the modern US is minimal. But it’s alive and well in other parts of the world that Irish-Americans identify with.