“It almost becomes a race to the bottom of who suffered more,” Mr. Reilly said, adding<br />that the memes are “an effort to claim a certain ancestry of suffering in order to claim a certain political position.”<br />The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right,<br />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.<br />“Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”<br />The memes often have common elements: the false claim<br />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.<br />He said that for some people, it seemed like the meme was “replacing the actual history of their Irish heritage.”<br />It is true that anti-Irish sentiment was present in the United States until well into the 20th century, but<br />that is a separate issue from 17th century indentured servitude, Ms. Harris said.<br />“There has been a huge backlash against talking about slavery<br />that continues to this day,” she said, not to mention Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination against blacks that “grew out of enslavement.”<br />“This continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history,” Mr. Hogan said.<br />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<br />and the Caribbean in the early colonial period, historians said.
