Historians deny that English contempt for the Irish poor was itself racism.
Evidence
- Morgan is willing to argue that “In the eyes of unpoor Englishmen the poor bore many of the marks of an alien race.” Morgan, op. cit., pp. 325–26. In the next breath, however, he declares: “To be sure, poverty was not genetically hereditary… . The poor were not born of another color than the rest of the population, but legislation could offer a substitute for color” (ibid.). He appears to link specifically racial prejudice to differences in color; that is without color, a prejudice may emerge that is only like racism: “The contempt that lay behind these proposals [the enslavement of the poor] and behind many of the workhouse schemes is not easy to distinguish from the kind of contempt that today we call racism” (ibid., p. 325). The parallels he pursues between English domination of the Irish in the sixteenth century and native Americans from the seventeenth century on, however, would suggest otherwise, see ibid., p. 20. Here again, is an instance where the existence of European racism toward other Europeans is simply denied in both analytical and historical terms. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1725
Categorization
- XREF: Directly supports the book’s core thesis that racialized domination of the Irish preceded and modeled the enslavement of Africans and Indians.