Here is more of what I would like to see:
-a movie which juxtaposes the slavery of Black people in the U.S. with the slavery/“indentured servant” of the Irish in the U.S. I would not wish this to be intentionally cruel, although life’s contradictions contain cruelties; I would like to see how the oppression of one group may have affected the other. Were some Blacks and Irish oblivious to the mistreatment of the other and how did that manifest in behavior? Mutual respect? disrespect? an inability to recognize another’s victimization?
The first time I ever heard of such history was from my Black Ethnic Studies professor who taught me about the similarities between the African-Americans and the Irish-Americans and yet how unspoken and insidious that similarity was and is.
Obviously, we can never truly answer these questions because we do not have much historical documentation. I can tell you that the manner how each group was treated have some differences, but many similarities. For example, the English on the island of Barbados sold Irish slave and African slaves at different prices. And the fact is that the African slave sold for much more than the Irish slave. I believe I read that the African slave, during the 1660-1680 era, was sold for 10 - 12 pounds sterling, while the Irish slave was sold for maybe 2-3 pounds sterling. There was such a hatred for the Irish (sorry to offend) “papist” by the English that they would gladly sell an Irish Catholic into slavery and not even make much of a profit over the voyage from Ireland.
I contend that the African slaves and the Irish slaves not only knew about each others enslavement, but shared in the barbarity. A sugar plantation owner would have had a multitude of each working the cane. It was not uncommon to see pale skinned, freckled, sun-burnt young men working alongside those of darker skin. Skilled Irish, like those who did accounting and other useful tasks, were saved from the most heinous of treatment, very much serving like a house slave. The slave-owners also did some extremely egregious things to the slaves on Barbados. Some plantation owners even took strong African men and young Irish girls, pre-teen to teen, of child-bearing years and attempt to breed out the “blackness” of the African slave community. There are even accounts written of Mulattoes serving as supervisors over the Irish slaves, who were considered seditious scum. Pregnant women, African or Irish, were forced to work the sugar cane fields up until labor began. Many children would have been born right there in the fields. Once the child was born, the mother was expected to get right back to work. If a pregnant women offended in some way, the Mulatto slave-master would force her to dig a hole in the ground, then lay down on the ground, over the hole, so that she could be beaten without damaging the child in her womb. There were a great number of other atrocities; too many to name.
I apologize if these accounts causes you any grief. But this topic has been swept under the rug far too long. Without glossing over the plight and torment of the African slave during their several hundred years of slavery, I think that it is important that people know that the Irish have also suffered hundreds of years of torture and mistreatment as well, though it has been kept from the annals of history. From war and slavery, to penal laws and famine, the Irish have suffered much and have not been given any real justice in history.
