By his command, roughly 12,000 Irish people were sold into slavery under the Commonwealth. Thousands more were killed on the spot. One was Col. John Durkee’s Father who was sent from Barbados to work on a farm in Mass. In 1630.
Col. John Durkee was the famous revolutionary war hero. He 12 Gen. Back. MY great grandfather. Were you surprised to learn that there were Irish Slaves? NO ONE TALKS ABOUT IT!.
Col. John Durkee was the famous revolutionary war hero."
I'm not disputing the lineage or your proud heritage, but, there is a 146 year difference between 1630 and 1776. Could it have been his great, great grandfather?
Not only that, the Arab Muslim North Africans were in the habit of capturing Christian Europeans and using them as slaves or holding them for ransom. For centuries. No one talks about that either. The phrase “worked like a galley slave” is not a random choice of words. There’s also a reason “to the shores of Tripoli” appears in a certain song.
What our nation suffers from is not just the legacy of Slavery but the failure of Reconstruction.
There were Irish slaves and White slaves, true. But eventually, over time the Irish were integrated into Society. So much so that by 1960, one of them could become President. Jim Crow Laws were not created to keep the Irish out of mainstream America.
There are living Black Americans that experienced legalized discrimination (Condi Rice is one of them and she is only 51 years old). There are no Irish-Americans who can make that claim.
There is a difference.
There is a reason why half-black people choose to classify themselves as ‘Black’. It’s the ‘one-drop rule’. Blacks did not create the ‘one-drop’ rule, it was a legacy of a society obsessed with race. (Brazil never created such a silly rule). Thankfully, we are slowly but surely moving out of that legacy. But it will take time.
We tend to believe that things can be done presto - afterall, we are Americans. But grievances last generations (witness Yugoslavia, Ireland, Korea(and Japan) and Iraq). That is human nature. It has been barely forty years since the wrongs this Nation committed against the Black Community have been righted. (Conservatives are supposed to understand human nature).
We have made remarkable progress, though.
Let’s stop pretending that the history of Irish in America is analogous to the history of Blacks in America. However, we need to be tough enough to tell the Black Community to get its act together. We need to end the silly ‘War on Drugs’. We need to continue working to bring up the next generation of conservative blacks.
The coming implosion of the Democratic Party (due to Hillary’s insistence on fighting on in a race she can’t win) will offer us our best opportunity.