The Irish slaves myth is a conflation of the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries on one hand, and the chattel slavery of Africans kidnapped for the Atlantic slave trade and their descendants on the other, usually in order to undermine contemporary African American demands for equality and reparations. The myth is also employed by some Irish nationalists, both to highlight historical British oppression of Irish people and to obscure the fact that many Irish people benefited from the African slave trade.
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Background
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, tens of thousands of British and Irish indentured servants emigrated to British North America. The majority of these entered into indentured servitude in the Americas for a set number of years willingly in order to pay their way across the Atlantic, but at least 10,000 were transported as punishment for rebellion or other crimes, then subjected to forced labour for a given period. During this same period, the Atlantic slave trade was enslaving millions of Africans and bringing them to the Americas, including the British colonies, where they were put to work.
Outline and propagation
One version of the myth asserts that the first slaves in North America were Irish and that this has been covered up by liberal historians. It often insists that these slaves were treated worse than African slaves (one reason given for this is that the Africans weren't Catholic). Variations of the myth insist that Ireland was heavily depopulated by Oliver Cromwell, who is said to have sold hundreds of thousands of Irish people as slaves to plantations in the Caribbean. Other variations blame the beginning of the Irish slave trade on the English kings who preceded Cromwell.
The myth is especially popular with apologists for the Confederate States of America. According to research librarian and independent scholar Liam Hogan, the most influential book to assert the myth was They Were White And They Were Slaves: The Untold History of The Enslavement of Whites In Early America, self-published in the US in 1993 by Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II (who blamed Jews for the African slave trade).
This was followed in Ireland in 2000 by the book To Hell Or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan, which continued Hoffman's themes and introduced the concept of Irishwomen being forcibly bred with African men in order to produce mulattos, who are represented as being more valuable than slaves of purely African ancestry. It is not made clear why this is the case, or why it wasn't possible to achieve the same result with the physical union of European men and African women, a far more frequent interracial union.
Other authors repeated these lurid descriptions of Irishwomen being compelled to have sex with African men, which have no basis in the historical record.
Some academic sources, such as The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, have described some Irish indentured servants in the Caribbean as slaves. Robin Cohen states that "a few" Irish laborers were slaves in a narrow sense.
Viral meme
The myth has been a common trope on the white supremacist website Stormfront since 2003. It has circulated widely in the United States, and has recently begun to become common in Ireland after the "Irish slaves" meme went viral on social media in 2013. Its major online source has been a 2008 article by John Martin on the Canadian conspiracy theory website, Globalresearch.ca, which had been shared almost a million times as of March 2016, followed by an article referencing Martin's on the popular Irish American website Irishcentral.com in 2014. After the 2014 arrival of the Black Lives Matter movement, the myth was frequently referenced by right-wing white Americans attempting to undermine it and other African-American civil rights issues, according to Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International.
In August 2015, the meme was referred to in the context of debates about the continued flying of the Confederate flag, following the Charleston church shooting.
In May 2016, it was referenced by prominent members of the Irish republican party Sinn Féin, after their leader Gerry Adams became involved in a controversy over his use of the word "nigger".
Irish Times columnist Donald Clarke describes the meme as racist, saying "More commonly we see racists using the myth to belittle the suffering visited on black slaves and to siphon some sympathy towards their own clan."
Academic criticism
The Irish Examiner newspaper had published an article citing John Martin's Globalresearch.ca piece in 2013 but removed it from its website in early 2016 after over 80 writers, historians and academics wrote an open letter condemning the myth. Scientific American followed suit with an article making similar arguments in 2015, but later heavily revised the article to remove the ahistorical material. Sean O'Callaghan's book To Hell or Barbados in particular has been criticised by, among others, Dr Nini Rodgers, who stated that his narrative appeared to arise from his horror at seeing white people being on a level with blacks.
Historian Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University, states that the current racial climate is leaning toward denial of certain events in history, saying "There is a strange war on memory that’s going on right now, denying the facts of chattel slavery, or claiming to have learned on Facebook or social media that, say, Irish slavery was worse, that white people were enslaved as well. Not true."
Others, such as Matthew Reilly, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University with an academic background in Barbadian slavery, contend that "The Irish slave myth is not supported by the historical evidence." Reilly and others emphasise the social and legal status that European transported prisoners and indentured servants retained despite their servitude, compared with the almost total lack of human rights for African slaves. Historian Donald Akenson, writing in If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730, states that on the island of Montserrat, "White indentured servitude was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience." According to Liam Hogan, the debate over the exact definition of slavery, as well as a tendency of some Irish nationalists to gloss over the ways in which Irish people benefitted from the African slave trade, allowed for a grey area in historical discourse that was then seized upon as a political weapon by white supremacists.