“It almost becomes a race to the bottom of who suffered more,” Mr. Reilly said, adding
that the memes are “an effort to claim a certain ancestry of suffering in order to claim a certain political position.”
The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right,
but it became specifically Irish after the 2000 publication of “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland,” a book by the late journalist Sean O’Callaghan, which Mr. Hogan and others have said was shoddily researched.
“Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”
The memes often have common elements: the false claim
that Irish people were enslaved in America or the Caribbean after the 1649 British invasion of Ireland led by Oliver Cromwell; the false claim that Irish slaves were cheaper and treated worse than African slaves; the false claim that Irish women were forcibly “bred” with black men.
He said that for some people, it seemed like the meme was “replacing the actual history of their Irish heritage.”
It is true that anti-Irish sentiment was present in the United States until well into the 20th century, but
that is a separate issue from 17th century indentured servitude, Ms. Harris said.
“There has been a huge backlash against talking about slavery
that continues to this day,” she said, not to mention Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination against blacks that “grew out of enslavement.”
“This continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history,” Mr. Hogan said.
The Irish slave narrative is based on the misinterpretation of the history of indentured servitude, which is how many poor Europeans migrated to North America
and the Caribbean in the early colonial period, historians said.
