Black Irish (folklore)

The historical term Black Irish was a myth[1] most likely created and popularised in the 19th and 20th centuries by Irish-Americans to conceal interracial unions with African-Americans.[2][3] It almost exactly parallels the phrase "Black Dutch" which was also used in the United States to hide racial identity, and is similar to a myth used by many families in the Southern United States who would claim descent from a "Cherokee Princess" in order to conceal descent from African-Americans.[4]

This article is about an ethnonym. For Black citizens of Ireland, see Black people in Ireland.

Description

The Black Irish myth proposed that a strain of Irish people with black hair and dark complexions, referred to as "Black Irish", were the descendants of Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588.[1]

In reality, of the roughly 5,000 Spanish sailors who were recorded as being wrecked off the coast of Ireland and Scotland, the very few that survived the wrecks were either hunted down and killed by English troops or immediately returned to Spain,[5][6] and thus could not have impacted the Irish gene pool in any significant manner. In 1912, Irish author James Joyce asserted a different version of the myth, suggesting in an article that the residents of Galway were of "the true Spanish type" owing to their interaction and trade with the Spanish in the medieval era.[7]

Genetic studies

Two separate genetic studies carried out in the 2010s found little if any Spanish traces in Irish DNA, with population geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, rejecting any notion of the "Black Irish" existing or having any genetic basis.[8]

Potential purposes of the myth

David Roediger, a professor of American studies and history with the University of Kansas, has suggested the myth of the Black Irish as the descendants of Spanish sailors was created and popularised in the 19th and 20th centuries by Irish Americans in the United States seeking to conceal interracial children produced with African Americans.[2][3] Similarly, researchers into the multi-racial Melungeon ethnic identity and other Native American groups in the southern United States found that "Black Irish" was amongst a dozen myths about Spanish sailors and other European women used to disguise the African heritage of interracial children.[9][10] A primary source told researchers "They would say they were "Black Dutch" or "Black Irish" or "Black French", or Native American. They’d say they were anything but Melungeon because anything else would be better ... because to be Melungeon was to be discriminated against."[11]

Modern use of the term

In the early to mid-20th century, the myth of the Black Irish was used occasionally by Aboriginal Australians in order to racially pass themselves into white Australian society.[12]

In the 1950s, Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam would occasionally assert, alongside claiming Italians were descended from Carthaginian Africans and the Spanish were descended from the Moors, that the Irish were also of Black descent by invoking the Black Irish myth.[13]

In the 21st century, "Black Irish" is now more commonly used to refer to Irish nationals of African descent. As of 2016, 10,100 Irish nationals of African descent living in the Republic of Ireland referred to themselves as "Black Irish" in the national census.[14] Figures such as Phil Lynott are described by Irish national media sources as "Black Irish".[15][16]

References
  1. Fintan O'Toole (30 July 1999). "Alluring myth of 'Black Irish' may be a sign of hope". Irish Times. One sign of it might be the persistence, largely in oral tradition, of the myth of the "Black Irish", the supposed offspring of Spanish sailors thrown by the wreck of the Armada onto the Irish coast. The idea, for which there is little historical evidence, is still used in Ireland and in Irish America, to explain the fact that some Irish people have a dark, swarthy appearance. It was celebrated a few years by the poet Paul Durcan in his long dramatic poem Nights in the Gardens of Spain.
  2. Alfonso, Juan D. (13 June 2018). Racial Constructions and Activism Within Graphic Literature: An Analysis of Hank McCoy, The Beast (Thesis).
  3. David Roediger (2007). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (PDF). Verso.
  4. Smithers, Gregory D. (1 October 2015). "Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?". Slate.
  5. Mattingly, Garrett (2005). The Armada. Houghton Mifflin. p. 369. ISBN 9780618565917.
  6. Burnett, Bruce I. (July 1988). "The Great Enterprise". Naval History Magazine. 2 (3). The rest, seeking safe harbor on the wild Irish coast without pilots and charts and sometimes without anchors, were smashed more effectively by the rocks than by the English broadsides. Some Spaniards, no doubt, found refuge amongst fellow Catholics, albeit nowhere near enough to justify the myth of the "Black Irish" being descended from them. Most were simply murdered as they lay exhausted on the beaches, or were handed over to English soldiers for almost certain execution.
  7. Ruiz-Mas, José (2023). "Joyce, Galway and the Spanish Armada" (PDF). Estudios Irlandeses (18): 94–102. doi:10.24162/EI2023-11386. S2CID 257588035.
  8. Gibbons, Ann (19 May 2017). "Busting myths of origin". Science.org. Vol. 356, no. 6339. pp. 678–681. doi:10.1126/science.356.6339.678. That telling resonates with a later yarn about ships from the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the shores of Ireland and the Scottish Orkney Islands in 1588, Bradley says: "Good-looking, dark-haired Spaniards washed ashore" and had children with Gaelic and Orkney Islands women, creating a strain of Black Irish with dark hair, eyes, and skin. Although it's a great story, Bradley says, it "just didn't happen." In two studies, researchers have found only "a very small ancient Spanish contribution" to British and Irish DNA, says human geneticist Walter Bodmer of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, co-leader of a landmark 2015 study of British genetics.
  9. Vande Brake, Katherine (August 2009). Through the Back Door: Melungeon Literacies and Twenty-first-century Technologies. Mercer University Press. Calling someone "Black Dutch" or "Black Irish" was a way to acknowledge the person's dark skin without insinuating a Negro ancestor
  10. Estes, Roberta (2010). "Revealing American Indian and Minority Heritage Using Y-line, Mitochondrial, Autosomal and X Chromosomal Testing Data Combined with Pedigree Analysis" (PDF). Journal of Genetic Genealogy. 6 (1). Any classification other than white meant in terms of social and legal status that these people were lesser citizens. Therefore, Native American or African heritage that was not visually obvious was hidden and sometimes renamed to much less emotionally and socially charged monikers, such as "Black Dutch", "Black Irish" and possibly also Portuguese.
  11. Podber, Jacob J. (September 2008). "Creating Real and Virtual Communities Among the Melungeons of Appalachia" (PDF). Journal of Kentucky Studies.
  12. Karen, Hughes (2017). "Mobilising across colour lines: Intimate encounters between Aboriginal women and African American and other allied servicemen on the World War II Australian home front". Aboriginal History. 41: 47–70. doi:10.22459/AH.41.2017.03.
  13. "Malcolm X and United States Policies towards Africa: A Qualitative Analysis of His Black Nationalism and Peace through Power and Coercion Paradigms" (PDF). Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies. 9 (4). July 2016.
  14. "Census of Population 2016 – Profile 8 Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion". Retrieved 30 January 2022. There were 10,100 dual Irish nationals who identified themselves as 'Black or Black Irish – African', the largest group of which was Irish-Nigerian nationals (6,683 persons).
  15. Hann, Michael (2 November 2020). "Thin Lizzy members on the band's rise and fall: 'Heroin was the worst mistake we made'". The Irish Times. And in Lynott, the black Irish cowboy with the will of a warrior and the heart of a romantic, they had one of the great frontmen
  16. Stokes, Niall (8 June 2020). "Niall Stokes on Philip Lynott, Music and Racism in Ireland". Hot Press. and in anticipation of what would have been the 70th birthday of the great, black Irish rock star, Philip Lynott
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