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 Wanted—No 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” signs—ones 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 ...
Well, yeah. Remember what they did at Pearl Harbor?
Political correctness decreed that there be no examples of any white ethnic group suffering discrimination. Only blacks and other racial/sexual minorities could suffer discrimination.
The young lady proved a highly-cited professor wrong -- I hope she is not retaliated against by the Leftist academic establishment. She not only proved him wrong, but embarrassingly wrong -- spouting a position which a brief search by an 8th grader showed to be completely bogus.
One image would be a curiosity. Multiple images, surviving to the present, are evidence that the signs were fairly common (unless somebody can show that, 150 years ago, there were people making a point of searching diligently across the country looking for every single anti-Irish sign, and ensuring that their evidence survived for 150 years).
One mark of a successful immigrant group is the embrace of the slur, the stereotype, the caricature. Laughing at it denies it its power. That judge gets it.
I know that. My comment was a an attempt at humor. With that said, significant minority of people from the west coast of Ireland have distinctive features that look more Iberian/Mediterranean (i.e., Portugal, Spain, and North Africa), than Northern Europeon (i.e., Gael, Celt, Nordic, and Norman), with their slightly darker skin, dark coarse hair, and "hooked" nose. I see these features in my own family from Galway and other areas of West Ireland.
First thing I thought of, as soon as I read the headline:
“We’ll take the n——rs and the ch—ks, but we DON’T WANT THE IRISH!”
I’ve seen that movie too many times. Better watch it again soon.
The Irish bombed Pearl Harbor? This is what I get for sleeping through my history class.
Has anyone here actually read her article? Because I cannot. You have to pay.
Just what is the evidence?
You cannot possibly believe that a few signs in some attics are REAL? That people collected real authenticated signs.
They need to be authenticated.
The newspapers are a better gauge.
Even then, they need to be put in context. How many forbde other ethnicities? Or specified they wanted something else for the job? Even that one ad started by saying they want Protestants.
Once again, who really knows what is in the girl’s article? Has anyone paid up to see it?
Came for Blazing Saddles reference. Leaving satisfied.
Not the Irish - the Germans. You said everyone hates the Germans... never mind.
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