Wow,
Apparently, Bill O’Reilly thinks that the migration of Irish immigrants to the United States in the 19th century is actually equivalent to the slave trade!
He was TRYING to argue that the fact that blacks were once slaves and had nothing does not mean that they cannot make it and succeed in this country. This is a legitimate point of argument, but he decided to do this by comparing the slave-trade to Irish immigration. Say wha?
According to Media Matters, O’Reilly was responding to a caller who was arguing that the reason the prison population is disproportionately black is because of slavery. “If you take someone's language, someone's history, and someone's culture,” the caller said, “and then you just release them out into the world, you think they're going to be successful as a people?”
O’Reilly responded with the following:
“My people came from County Cavan in Ireland. All right? And the British Crown marched in there with their henchman, Oliver Cromwell, and they seized all of my ancestors' lands, everything. And they threw them into slavery, pretty much indentured servitude on the land. And then the land collapsed, all right? And everybody was starving in Ireland. They had to leave the country, just as Africans had to leave -- African-Americans had to leave Africa and come over on a boat and try to make in the New World with nothing. Nothing. And succeeded, succeeded. As did Italians, as did -- and I'll submit to you, African-Americans are succeeding as well. So all of these things can be overcome I think.”
O’Reilly may be right that “all of these things can be overcome,” but his comparison is simply ignorant. Africans did not “have” to leave their country, they were kidnapped, stolen, what have you, and taken by force to the US by way of an infamous middle passage that can only be described as one of the worst conditions ever endured by the human race.
The Irish, by contrast, as with the Italians, the Jews, and every other group in American history (save Native Americans, of course) came to this country of their own free will, often escaping terrible conditions in their own country, as O’Reilly correctly alludes to. Freeing a country because of a famine and being dragged out by force are hardly analogous, especially since the condition of immigrants in America were, by and large, immeasurably superior and more hopefully than they ever could have been in their native lands. Not so with slaves, who would have remained in Africa had they been given any choice in the matter.
Furthermore, while discrimination against the Irish was pervasive and explicit in this country, it is by no means analogous to the black condition in America. Certainly, blacks were still being lynched, beaten, legally discriminated against, disenfranchised, and segregated well after the Irish had seen the worst of their prejudice. It is unbecoming and unhelpful to try and argue over who had it worse between two discriminated groups, but clearly any objective reading of history should reveal that if such an argument did exist, there could be no real question over the answer.
O’Reilly’s comparison reveals a level of ignorance towards American history in general, and towards the black experience in America in particular, that truly is unfortunate given his tremendous influence among certain circles. Knowing that this is how he views American history provides a deep insight into how he reaches some of his conclusions.
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Here is the thing that I see as problematic with most of the sloppy analogies that we see tossed around these days: they tend not to be 100% wrong, but they are just lazy shorthand -- the Irish were mistreated by the Brits (undoubtedly) canme to the US and were treated as an inferior race (undoubtedly), there were lots of them (undoubtedly) so who else came over under similar conditions? Oh, let's see, for the purpose of my point: SLAVES! And all this does is discredit what may well be a serious argument. The history of Irish immigration to America is one that deserves (and of course has gotten) attention, as there really was the concept of the "Irsh race" in England and when they came to the US. Despite the xenophobia of later eras in which immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were looked down upon and eventually restricted, the Irish were the first to confront the "No dogs, no Irish" types of signs in stores and other businesses. (And what they were fleeing was almost inarguably worse than what most of their successors faced at home.)
dcat
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