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This topic contains controversial issues, some of which have reached a consensus for approach and neutrality, and some of which may be disputed. Before making any potentially controversial changes to the article, please carefully read the discussion-page dialogue to see if the issue has been raised before, and ensure that your edit meets all of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Please also ensure you use an accurate and concise edit summary. |
Every few months or so I check up on this page to see if it's improved, and every time it's the same situation: some parts are better, others are worse, much of it is the same. In addition to several NPOV violations and the use of dated and/or non-academic and questionable sources, the biggest problem with this article is its readability: it reads as if it was edited by dozens of different people who did not even make an attempt to collaborate with other editors before making changes (which is fine, for the most part, except it's not supposed to be obvious, and the content should always be reliably sourced, especially if it's controversial).
I would recommend rewriting whole sections and maybe even the entire article, but also to reach a consensus on sourcing and what topics this article should cover before making any major changes. Before doing that however, this line right here needs to go immediately:
"Although, native Irish names and surnames are pretty common among the African American people, who are mostly Protestant, this is due to the two communities intermarrying. These intermarriages took place mostly in the 19th century, as members of both communities were treated as second class citizens in the United States."
I really don't know how to go about unwinding this disaster, but a few points I would stress:
And if that's not bad enough, the Irish historian Liam Hogan performed a relatively recent analysis of Irish surnames and slave ownership, and here's what he found:
539 unique Irish surnames are on the 1850 slave owning census, who collectively owned 99,129 slaves in 17 states. On the 1860 census, the collective ownership for these names increased to 115,894 slaves (a 16.9% increase) [2]. It'd be preposterous to suggest that anywhere approaching even half these numbers for marriages between Irish-American men and African-American women.
Liam Hogan excluded common Irish names that have ambiguous origins (and are thus not always reliably Irish), so this is surely an undercount in the number of Irish-American slaveowners for the period. On the other hand, the statement in question says nothing about ancestry or genealogy or anything of the sort - it's a statement about Irish surnames and African Americans (it may very well be true that many of the names on Liam's list belonged to people who had small amounts of distant Irish ancestry, for example, rather than immigrants or second generation Irish Americans).
In other words, the reason why some African Americans have Irish surnames is simply because a number of them are descended from slaves who were owned by white masters who had Irish names. There is no dancing around this.
Whoever wrote that article has a comic book-level understanding of this history and should've never been used as a source anywhere in this article. Please remove it. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 21:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
The Columbia Guide to Irish American History, by Tim Meagher, discusses regional variations in immigrant experiences, although this work has been removed from the internet and will have to be retrieved (it's in the chapter on race, p. 214 I believe). The gist of it is that anti-Irish prejudice wasn't a significant thing in the South, partly because Irish numbers were small, but also because the slave threat superseded white ethnic tensions. Joe Regan's thesis echoes this argument: Most Irish immigrants were willing to uphold the social order, and by accepting slavery, they eased their assimilation into society as “hard-drinking, gambling, horse-racing, cock-fighting and tobacco-chewing Southerners.” p. 216 [3]/
Out West, too, Meagher argues that white solidarity prevailed, as Irish Catholics were among the earliest settlers who brutally displaced the natives. Malcom Campbell's study of the Irish in California agrees with this [4].
And back in the 1990s, Reginald Byron's study of the Irish in Albany, NY, (Irish America) turned up no evidence of anti-Irish prejudice for the period in question (this will have to be retrieved as well [5]).
That leaves us with a predominately big-city urban phenomenon, on the Northeastern seaboard, which peaked in the 1850 -1870 period. But only a minority of Irish immigrants settled in big cities in these decades, which would also have to be taken into account when discussing discrimination. [6]. The demographics of big cities in the antebellum and reconstruction era were statistically unrepresentative of the rest of the US.
The discrimination section could use more nuance (it is light on detail and needs context), while the currently unsourced statement (or improperly sourced) which claims the prejudice or 'sentiment' (whatever that means?) was "rampant in the US" is directly contradicted by more than one RS, including Gleeson's work on the Southern Irish (cited in article). Jonathan f1 ( talk) 15:54, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
Even assuming it's true that "most Irish Americans" descend from "!9th Century" immigrants (sounds reasonable, but is it in fact what most sources say?) to describe Irish-Americans as "ethnic Irish" is total nonsense -whoever wrote this doesn't seem to have any idea what "ethnic" means. Having an ancestry doesn't imply "ethnic" -if most of these Americans have 19th Century immigrant ancestors, then they assimilated many moons ago. Having Irish ancestry and being ethnically Irish are two completely different things. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 21:49, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
Is there any particular reason why everyone who edits this article seems to be incapable of looking a word up in a dictionary and realizing that it is not being used properly in the lead? This article is not merely about "ethnic Irish" in the US, but is much broader and covers all Americans who have or had Irish ancestors, in some cases a trivial or distant amount of Irish ancestry. There are dozens of people cited in this article who are or were in no sense "ethnic". What's so difficult to understand about the idea that an ancestry category and an ethnicity may overlap but are not always the same thing?
Another issue I've raised here, some time ago, is the claim in the discrimination section that anti-Irish prejudice was "rampant" throughout the entire US. Please refer to Tim Meagher's Columbia Guide to Irish American History where he details variations in Irish immigrant experience in 19th C. America. He writes that bigotry against the Irish was most intense in the Northeast (and particularly in big cities) but not a significant factor in Southern culture and places out West (like California). He also differentiates immigrants by period: the Irish who arrived during the Famine years were significantly poorer, less skilled and educated than the Irish who arrived in the late 19th Century, and the earlier group was indeed overrepresented in jails and insane asylums. After the Famine, Ireland pursued massive educational reforms and Irish primary schools aggressively promoted English-language literacy (some even banned the Irish language in classrooms), so that by the end of the century the average immigrant was fluent in English and primed for middle-class assimilation. You may also want to refer to Dave Wilson's piece on Irish experience in North America here [8], or a more recent talk by historian Kevin Kenny (who happens to be an expert in this particular niche) where he argues that, despite encountering some nativist hostility, 19th Century America was still a pretty good place to be if you were European, even an Irish Catholic European. [9] Contrast the arguments of these scholars with the language used in the discrimination section of this article, which essentially promotes the myth of the Irish-American perpetual ethnic victim (although it stops short of making the idiotic claim that Irish immigrants were treated like black people, one could easily walk away from that section with this impression).
And of course, in typical fashion, much article space is reserved for content about prejudice/discrimination, but nothing is said of the relatively large role the Irish themselves played in American racism. Most of Liam Hogan's work on Irish involvement in chattel slavery, colonization and anti-black (and anti-Chinese) racism in the US is freely available online so there's no excuse for not being able to access any sources [10] [11] [12]. It's articles like this why the average person is unaware of this history and "shocked" to learn the Irish played any role in colonialism and American racism, despite the fact that most historians have known this for a long time.
I'd improve these sections myself, but I am still being "punished" for earlier editing behavior when I was relatively new on here, although I've corrected my conduct and should probably appeal soon. For now I would request that a more objective editor, who knows how to review scholarship and edit neutral encyclopedic content, consider my arguments and sources and improve the aforementioned sections, starting with a change in the lead description. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 22:07, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
I tried to open a DRN discussion for more constructive dialogue, but the moderator decided these issues have not yet been properly discussed in talk, since there've been "no real exchanges" (he is, of course, correct). Rather than pile on 3 criticisms in one section, I will (try to) briefly raise them one-by-one (assuming we get anywhere on the first go), starting with some content in the "stereotype" section.
"There were also Social Darwinian-inspired excuses for the discrimination of the Irish in America. Many Americans believed that since the Irish were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons, they were racially inferior and deserved second-class citizenship. The Irish being of inferior intelligence was a belief held by many Americans.. The racial supremacy belief that many Americans had at the time contributed significantly to Irish discrimination." (sourced to a chapter by Kevin Kenny that starts on p. 364 here [13])
This is quite an embellishment, even by the standards of the strange little world of Irish race-porn. It also grossly distorts the arguments and views of the author.
On p. 376, Kenny writes: "In this essay I have been concerned only with the first task, discerning why some Americans disliked the Irish and expressed their contempt racially." At no point in this chapter does he use the phrase "many Americans". On p. 375 he narrows the culprits down to "urban, middle-class" publishers and consumers of the literature in question (at a time when most Americans were rural, I would add [14]).
The author doesn't even believe the American Irish suffered racial discrimination. On p. 375 he draws a distinction between "prejudice" (which the Irish encountered) and "racial discrimination" (which they did not), and warns against the dangers of conflating the two. Kenny's view is that there was a "disparity" between "rhetoric" (verbal- and image-based racialization) and "impact" (the actual effect it had on Irish immigrants). [15]
Elsewhere in this chapter he writes that "The forms of racial representation under consideration had a relatively brief heyday" (p. 366); that the attempts to racialize the Irish "did not do them much harm" (p. 376); and that the American Irish "did very well, very quickly" (also p. 376)
Does anyone really believe the quoted text accurately reflects the source? Jonathan f1 ( talk) 23:06, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Irish Americans article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8Auto-archiving period: 365 days |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This topic contains controversial issues, some of which have reached a consensus for approach and neutrality, and some of which may be disputed. Before making any potentially controversial changes to the article, please carefully read the discussion-page dialogue to see if the issue has been raised before, and ensure that your edit meets all of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Please also ensure you use an accurate and concise edit summary. |
Every few months or so I check up on this page to see if it's improved, and every time it's the same situation: some parts are better, others are worse, much of it is the same. In addition to several NPOV violations and the use of dated and/or non-academic and questionable sources, the biggest problem with this article is its readability: it reads as if it was edited by dozens of different people who did not even make an attempt to collaborate with other editors before making changes (which is fine, for the most part, except it's not supposed to be obvious, and the content should always be reliably sourced, especially if it's controversial).
I would recommend rewriting whole sections and maybe even the entire article, but also to reach a consensus on sourcing and what topics this article should cover before making any major changes. Before doing that however, this line right here needs to go immediately:
"Although, native Irish names and surnames are pretty common among the African American people, who are mostly Protestant, this is due to the two communities intermarrying. These intermarriages took place mostly in the 19th century, as members of both communities were treated as second class citizens in the United States."
I really don't know how to go about unwinding this disaster, but a few points I would stress:
And if that's not bad enough, the Irish historian Liam Hogan performed a relatively recent analysis of Irish surnames and slave ownership, and here's what he found:
539 unique Irish surnames are on the 1850 slave owning census, who collectively owned 99,129 slaves in 17 states. On the 1860 census, the collective ownership for these names increased to 115,894 slaves (a 16.9% increase) [2]. It'd be preposterous to suggest that anywhere approaching even half these numbers for marriages between Irish-American men and African-American women.
Liam Hogan excluded common Irish names that have ambiguous origins (and are thus not always reliably Irish), so this is surely an undercount in the number of Irish-American slaveowners for the period. On the other hand, the statement in question says nothing about ancestry or genealogy or anything of the sort - it's a statement about Irish surnames and African Americans (it may very well be true that many of the names on Liam's list belonged to people who had small amounts of distant Irish ancestry, for example, rather than immigrants or second generation Irish Americans).
In other words, the reason why some African Americans have Irish surnames is simply because a number of them are descended from slaves who were owned by white masters who had Irish names. There is no dancing around this.
Whoever wrote that article has a comic book-level understanding of this history and should've never been used as a source anywhere in this article. Please remove it. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 21:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
The Columbia Guide to Irish American History, by Tim Meagher, discusses regional variations in immigrant experiences, although this work has been removed from the internet and will have to be retrieved (it's in the chapter on race, p. 214 I believe). The gist of it is that anti-Irish prejudice wasn't a significant thing in the South, partly because Irish numbers were small, but also because the slave threat superseded white ethnic tensions. Joe Regan's thesis echoes this argument: Most Irish immigrants were willing to uphold the social order, and by accepting slavery, they eased their assimilation into society as “hard-drinking, gambling, horse-racing, cock-fighting and tobacco-chewing Southerners.” p. 216 [3]/
Out West, too, Meagher argues that white solidarity prevailed, as Irish Catholics were among the earliest settlers who brutally displaced the natives. Malcom Campbell's study of the Irish in California agrees with this [4].
And back in the 1990s, Reginald Byron's study of the Irish in Albany, NY, (Irish America) turned up no evidence of anti-Irish prejudice for the period in question (this will have to be retrieved as well [5]).
That leaves us with a predominately big-city urban phenomenon, on the Northeastern seaboard, which peaked in the 1850 -1870 period. But only a minority of Irish immigrants settled in big cities in these decades, which would also have to be taken into account when discussing discrimination. [6]. The demographics of big cities in the antebellum and reconstruction era were statistically unrepresentative of the rest of the US.
The discrimination section could use more nuance (it is light on detail and needs context), while the currently unsourced statement (or improperly sourced) which claims the prejudice or 'sentiment' (whatever that means?) was "rampant in the US" is directly contradicted by more than one RS, including Gleeson's work on the Southern Irish (cited in article). Jonathan f1 ( talk) 15:54, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
Even assuming it's true that "most Irish Americans" descend from "!9th Century" immigrants (sounds reasonable, but is it in fact what most sources say?) to describe Irish-Americans as "ethnic Irish" is total nonsense -whoever wrote this doesn't seem to have any idea what "ethnic" means. Having an ancestry doesn't imply "ethnic" -if most of these Americans have 19th Century immigrant ancestors, then they assimilated many moons ago. Having Irish ancestry and being ethnically Irish are two completely different things. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 21:49, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
Is there any particular reason why everyone who edits this article seems to be incapable of looking a word up in a dictionary and realizing that it is not being used properly in the lead? This article is not merely about "ethnic Irish" in the US, but is much broader and covers all Americans who have or had Irish ancestors, in some cases a trivial or distant amount of Irish ancestry. There are dozens of people cited in this article who are or were in no sense "ethnic". What's so difficult to understand about the idea that an ancestry category and an ethnicity may overlap but are not always the same thing?
Another issue I've raised here, some time ago, is the claim in the discrimination section that anti-Irish prejudice was "rampant" throughout the entire US. Please refer to Tim Meagher's Columbia Guide to Irish American History where he details variations in Irish immigrant experience in 19th C. America. He writes that bigotry against the Irish was most intense in the Northeast (and particularly in big cities) but not a significant factor in Southern culture and places out West (like California). He also differentiates immigrants by period: the Irish who arrived during the Famine years were significantly poorer, less skilled and educated than the Irish who arrived in the late 19th Century, and the earlier group was indeed overrepresented in jails and insane asylums. After the Famine, Ireland pursued massive educational reforms and Irish primary schools aggressively promoted English-language literacy (some even banned the Irish language in classrooms), so that by the end of the century the average immigrant was fluent in English and primed for middle-class assimilation. You may also want to refer to Dave Wilson's piece on Irish experience in North America here [8], or a more recent talk by historian Kevin Kenny (who happens to be an expert in this particular niche) where he argues that, despite encountering some nativist hostility, 19th Century America was still a pretty good place to be if you were European, even an Irish Catholic European. [9] Contrast the arguments of these scholars with the language used in the discrimination section of this article, which essentially promotes the myth of the Irish-American perpetual ethnic victim (although it stops short of making the idiotic claim that Irish immigrants were treated like black people, one could easily walk away from that section with this impression).
And of course, in typical fashion, much article space is reserved for content about prejudice/discrimination, but nothing is said of the relatively large role the Irish themselves played in American racism. Most of Liam Hogan's work on Irish involvement in chattel slavery, colonization and anti-black (and anti-Chinese) racism in the US is freely available online so there's no excuse for not being able to access any sources [10] [11] [12]. It's articles like this why the average person is unaware of this history and "shocked" to learn the Irish played any role in colonialism and American racism, despite the fact that most historians have known this for a long time.
I'd improve these sections myself, but I am still being "punished" for earlier editing behavior when I was relatively new on here, although I've corrected my conduct and should probably appeal soon. For now I would request that a more objective editor, who knows how to review scholarship and edit neutral encyclopedic content, consider my arguments and sources and improve the aforementioned sections, starting with a change in the lead description. Jonathan f1 ( talk) 22:07, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
I tried to open a DRN discussion for more constructive dialogue, but the moderator decided these issues have not yet been properly discussed in talk, since there've been "no real exchanges" (he is, of course, correct). Rather than pile on 3 criticisms in one section, I will (try to) briefly raise them one-by-one (assuming we get anywhere on the first go), starting with some content in the "stereotype" section.
"There were also Social Darwinian-inspired excuses for the discrimination of the Irish in America. Many Americans believed that since the Irish were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons, they were racially inferior and deserved second-class citizenship. The Irish being of inferior intelligence was a belief held by many Americans.. The racial supremacy belief that many Americans had at the time contributed significantly to Irish discrimination." (sourced to a chapter by Kevin Kenny that starts on p. 364 here [13])
This is quite an embellishment, even by the standards of the strange little world of Irish race-porn. It also grossly distorts the arguments and views of the author.
On p. 376, Kenny writes: "In this essay I have been concerned only with the first task, discerning why some Americans disliked the Irish and expressed their contempt racially." At no point in this chapter does he use the phrase "many Americans". On p. 375 he narrows the culprits down to "urban, middle-class" publishers and consumers of the literature in question (at a time when most Americans were rural, I would add [14]).
The author doesn't even believe the American Irish suffered racial discrimination. On p. 375 he draws a distinction between "prejudice" (which the Irish encountered) and "racial discrimination" (which they did not), and warns against the dangers of conflating the two. Kenny's view is that there was a "disparity" between "rhetoric" (verbal- and image-based racialization) and "impact" (the actual effect it had on Irish immigrants). [15]
Elsewhere in this chapter he writes that "The forms of racial representation under consideration had a relatively brief heyday" (p. 366); that the attempts to racialize the Irish "did not do them much harm" (p. 376); and that the American Irish "did very well, very quickly" (also p. 376)
Does anyone really believe the quoted text accurately reflects the source? Jonathan f1 ( talk) 23:06, 26 January 2024 (UTC)