For a little context, this guy on facebook did the thing where he said that the "White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the US" and then went on to use that to justify his racial prejudices.
See now like I know it's bullshit, and I'm trying to bring out my arguments as much as I can, but I don't feel as if I know enough about the topic as I should, and I would like to be prepared when it comes up again (and it comes up quite a lot).
So, how does the oppression of the Irish in the United States compare to the oppression of other racial or ethnic groups? Which groups would have objectively "had it worse" than the Irish? And for completion's sake, which oppressed groups have the Irish objectively had it worse than?
hi, there's actually a section in the FAQ on this; check out links from /u/Dubstripsquads in this post here
and here are a few very recent comments by /u/sowser
I hope someone who is much better versed in this particular history can give you a better answer, but I will say that a large part of this comparison fails because while, yes, Irish immigrants (and Jews, and Italians, and Polish, and Chinese, and basically any immigrant community at one point or another) had a difficult time getting settled in America, it got better for them and their descendants. Contrast that with Black Americans who still have an objectively harder time in society, even after 200-some years.
Casually digging around on the web lead me to this journal article: "No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization" by Richard J. Jensen, Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429. I remember my grandmother, whose grandparents were Northern Irish immigrants via Canada, insisting that there were "NINA" signs during the depression, but it appears that she fell victim to a collective misremembering, because no one has thus far been able to document these signs, even during a time when photographers were everywhere documenting the plight of the unemployed.
In other words, you friend is not going to win the Oppression Olympics by claiming Irish discrimination.
EDIT: This paragraph from Jensen's article is particularly worth noting:
We know from the experience of African Americans and Chinese that the most powerful form of job discrimination came from workers who vowed to boycott or shut down any employer who hired the excluded class. Employers who were personally willing to hire Chinese or blacks were forced to submit to the threats. There were no reports of mobs attacking Irish employment, even during sporadic episodes of attacks on Catholic church facilities in 1830s and 1840s. No one has reported claims that co-workers refused to work alongside Irish; this powerful form of discrimination probably did not affect the Irish in significant ways. On the other hand the Irish repeatedly attacked employers who hired African Americans or Chinese.
EDIT 2: As mentioned below, there was an article published in a 2015 volume of the Journal of Social History that refutes Jensen's claim that NINA signs did not exist. However, Jensen responded with a critique of Fried and Miller's methodology, which is worth a read.