Posted on 08/04/2015 6:21:28 PM PDT by Jan_Sobieski
The Internet has been buzzing about how discrimination against the Irish was a myth. All it took was a high schooler to prove them wrong. Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined, or even invented.
That's because Rebecca was too busy trying to get through the 8th grade. In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard J. Jensen printed No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization. His abstract begins: Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming Help WantedNo Irish Need Apply! No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent.
In short, those famous No Irish Need Apply signsones that proved Irish Americans faced explicit job discrimination in the 19th and 20th centuries? Professor Jensen came to the blockbuster conclusion that they never existed...
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
There were also signs that said, “No Micks on the grass.” Irish were called Micks, because so many of their last names started with Mc.
Personally when I saw something excerpted from that book (I’m sure it was), I thought there has to be something to it.
Indeed, people DO tend to keep telling stories until they are turned into truth. It has happened many times, until the truth was forgotten.
Summary: 14-year old (eight grader) found enough information to create a scholarly article disproving entirely a “typical” biased PhD’s claim that Irish segregation and prejudice did not exist in America.
With the guidance of a different professor, her article and research were published.
I had ancestors who were put on a train with a label saying “Lake County Oregon” to deliver them to a prearranged job. They were not to be let off anywhere in route. They and the railroad laborers were not given much White Privilege.
Welcome to the club. The same crew of liberals opine that the Holocaust was not discrimination and Jews always had it easy.
I’m not sure I by this because the use of “No Irish Need Apply” was so commonplace and prevalent in that era that Mark Twain used it twice in “Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman” as a slang way of agreeing, or saying “amen”.
Obviously then, it was not quite that rare.
Leftists have been rewriting history for decades. They also enjoy slamming our history, judging our ancestors by the social mores of today. STOP IT!!
As opposed to “Mack” for the Scots.
I saw a sign in a cafe window in London in 1995 saying “No Micks”. 1995!!!!
The “blankets infected with smallpox” used to exterminate Indians was based on a single incident - and blown into a widespread campaign of germ warfare by a fake Indian (Ward Churchill?)
Repeat the lie often enough and it becomes the truth...
Same folks who say anti-war protestors never so much as spat on a soldier.
Of course they did crappy research.
“After only couple of hours Googling it, Rebecca, a 14-year-old, had found out these signs had, in fact, existed all along. Not only in newspaper listingsin which they appeared in drovesbut, after further research, in shop windows, too.”
Where is this article? Where is the actual physical evidence?
I’d really like to see how actual SIGNS are verified. Did she find some in someone’s attic?
Where is this article so I can see just how she proves him all wrong?
‘It was out of the blue on May 1st, May Daywhich is sort of fortuitous, now that I think about it, says Miller. May Day is International Workers’ Day, which celebrates laborers worldwide.’
oooohhhhkaaay.....
Gives me great boost of confidence in the motives.
“She then makes a salient point: Even if it were 15 recorded instances per year or 1,500the signs existed, the persecution was real, and discrimination of the Irish was not an imagined feeling, but a reality difficult to both express and quantify.”
Not salient. It INDEED matters how many/% exist; typical liberal thoughts “if just one....”. Any given thing always has 1 example, but that does not prove its prevalence; in this case, not ipso-facto “discrimination”.
Hmmm. I thought it would be O’s.
That’s what I mean.
Never mind the truth (?) about the Constellation, about the Titanic, or myriad other things either broadly “known” or “known” within a community.
Have you read the article?
Quite a few references to Laborers in there....who is the leftist?
Irish lives matter the most. IMHO
Aye; God’s people...
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