The images below remind us that Irish immigrants were racialized in the U.S. in the 1800s. They were dehumanized and depicted as apelike, as the blog Sociological Images points out.
Harper's Weekly, below, explained the "science" behind race (which is debunked today but taken as common sense at the time) and the Irish race's place in the imagined hierarchy of the human species.
As historian David Knobel found in researching the stereoptypes surrounding the Irish in the 1800s, early in the century words about Irish character traits were common:
“quarrelsome,” “impudent,” “impertinent,” “ignorant,” “wickedness,” “vicious,” and “reckless” “ragged,” “lowbrow,” “brutish,” “wild-looking,” and “course-haired".
Later, after the midpoint of the century, Knobel found a significant turn toward physical descriptors of the Irish:
“ragged,” “lowbrow,” “brutish,” “wild-looking,” and “course-haired”
The Irish were depicted as problematic and dangerous:
..even as problematic as African Americans:
In sociology, we recognize race as a social construction.
The pseudo-scientific division of humanity into "races" was imagined, but as with so many socially accepted myths or definitions, the consequences were very real.
It is crucial to understand that racialization was about suggesting
- DIFFERENCE
and - INFERIORITY
Dehumanization accomplished both.
Good sociology also accounts for history. The stereotypes of the Irish had a unique function and trajectory in American society, but where did they originate?
The images so far have been from popular American culture throughout the 19th century. Take a look at this one from England, James Gillray's “United Irishmen in Training”, 1798:
"Dehumanizing the Irish by drawing them as beasts or primates served as a convenient technique for any conqueror, and it made perfect sense for an English empire intent on placing Ireland and its people under its jurisdiction and control. The English needed to prove the backwardness of the Irish to justify their colonization. When the Irish fought back against English oppression, their violence only perpetuated the 'violent beast' prejudice held against them... Even before English scientific circles had begun to distort Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species later in the century, the English had favored the monkey and ape as a symbol for Hibernians."
This gives us an idea of the POWER relations hiding behind the stereotype, at least in terms of its original use.
Ideas about race were used throughout the conquered world to legitimize violence, slavery, and the stealing of land and resources. This is clear enough in relation to the conquest of Ireland, but how does the racialization of the Irish in the U.S.
fit into our society's particular history of conquest and domination?
For Part Two of this post series, I will explore the power relations behind the Irish stereotype in industrial America. I will answer the question, in doing so, of how the Irish finally came to be seen as "White". That question is the title of a book by Noel Ignatiev, and the answer his research provides is interesting, disturbing, and for most people, quite surprising.
sources and further reading:
https://thomasnastcartoons.com/irish-catholic-cartoons/irish-stereotype/
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/01/28/irish-apes-tactics-of-de-humanization/