Just as with Catholic schools at the time, the Irish in Britain were also segregated from the general British population through the establishment of Irish working-class ghettos. “John Foster has described the existence of ghettoized Irish communities and anti-Irish hostility as a significant factor in the assertion of political and industrial authority over the indigenous working-class in the mid-nineteenth century.” (Hickman, 17). Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish in Britain were attacked, segregated, disenfranchised, and denationalized by both the British people and the British government. As mentioned earlier, scientific studies which concluded that all races other than the Anglo-Saxons were lower on the evolutionary chain were
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“Drawing on a study of popular images of the Irish in Victorian England, Curtis (1968: 121) argues that not only were such images [of the Irish as ape-like sub humans] commonly held among the working class, but that ‘many educated Victorians actually believed in the existence of a wide racial and cultural gap between themselves and the Irish Celts’. Some of these images were to persist well into the twentieth century.” (Solomos, 39). The racial theory and stereotypes of the Irish as racially inferior and “closer to the apes than their ‘superiors’, the Anglo-Saxons” (Wohl), was widely believed and deeply engrained into British racial thought, even into the late twentieth century. Because of the popularity of this racial thought, prejudice easily spreads throughout …show more content…
The myth states that there were no other races besides Anglo-Saxons in Britain until the fairly influx of immigrants from the Caribbean post-World War II. It is because of this myth that during the drafting and enforcement of the 1976 Race Relations Act, the Irish were left out of protection under the act, despite their status as a discrimination prone ethnicity in Britain. Ghaill writes about the Race Relations Act as it pertains to the Irish in his paper. “For example, they have pointed out that the 1976 Race Relations Act identifies seven characteristics of an ethnic group, which are as follows: a large shared history; distinct traditions and customs; distinct geographical origins; own language; a distinct literature and common religion(s). The Irish meet all these criteria as outlined in the Act.” (Ghaill, 142). Since the Irish meet all of the qualifications for protection under the 1976 Race Relations Act, they should receive that protection from discrimination. However, they were not because of the idea that if a minority group is white, they do not have an ethnicity, and acts against them are therefore not racist. To simplify race down to color is to ignore many different ethnicities and to group many of them together. To do this is to take away people’s culture. “I selecting colour as the exclusive marker of difference contemporary theorists have underplayed broader cultural and religious
“Drawing on a study of popular images of the Irish in Victorian England, Curtis (1968: 121) argues that not only were such images [of the Irish as ape-like sub humans] commonly held among the working class, but that ‘many educated Victorians actually believed in the existence of a wide racial and cultural gap between themselves and the Irish Celts’. Some of these images were to persist well into the twentieth century.” (Solomos, 39). The racial theory and stereotypes of the Irish as racially inferior and “closer to the apes than their ‘superiors’, the Anglo-Saxons” (Wohl), was widely believed and deeply engrained into British racial thought, even into the late twentieth century. Because of the popularity of this racial thought, prejudice easily spreads throughout …show more content…
The myth states that there were no other races besides Anglo-Saxons in Britain until the fairly influx of immigrants from the Caribbean post-World War II. It is because of this myth that during the drafting and enforcement of the 1976 Race Relations Act, the Irish were left out of protection under the act, despite their status as a discrimination prone ethnicity in Britain. Ghaill writes about the Race Relations Act as it pertains to the Irish in his paper. “For example, they have pointed out that the 1976 Race Relations Act identifies seven characteristics of an ethnic group, which are as follows: a large shared history; distinct traditions and customs; distinct geographical origins; own language; a distinct literature and common religion(s). The Irish meet all these criteria as outlined in the Act.” (Ghaill, 142). Since the Irish meet all of the qualifications for protection under the 1976 Race Relations Act, they should receive that protection from discrimination. However, they were not because of the idea that if a minority group is white, they do not have an ethnicity, and acts against them are therefore not racist. To simplify race down to color is to ignore many different ethnicities and to group many of them together. To do this is to take away people’s culture. “I selecting colour as the exclusive marker of difference contemporary theorists have underplayed broader cultural and religious