The term "Black Irish" was initially used in the 19th and 20th centuries by Irish Americans to describe people of Irish descent who have black or dark-colored hair, blue or dark eyes, or otherwise dark coloring.[1][2] This meaning is not frequently used in anglophone Ireland,[3] where "Black Irish" more often refers to Irish people of African descent.[4] Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole nonetheless points to the terms use within both Irish and Irish American spaces, where it was employed by Irish poet Paul Durcan as a literary device.[5]
The most common use of the term "Black Irish" is tied to the myth that they were descended from Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588.[6][7][8][9][10][11] However, no anthropological, historical, or genetic research supports this story. Some theorists assert that the term was adopted in some cases by Irish Americans who wanted to conceal interracial unions with African Americans, paralleling the phrase "Black Dutch" which was also used in the United States to hide racial identity.[12][13][14] Likewise, the concept of "Black Irish" was also used by some Aboriginal Australians to racially pass themselves into Australian society.[15] In the earlier parts of the 19th century, "Black Irish" was sometimes used in the United States to describe biracial people of African and Irish descent.[10][11]
By the 20th century, "Black Irish" had become an identity played out by Irish-American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert E. Howard. In anglophone Ireland, in the 21st century, Black Irish is used primarily to refer to Irish nationals of African descent, and the alternative meaning is not commonly used.[4] Within the Irish language, the color dubh meaning "black" remains a monicker used to denote those with dark hair, and is often associated with An Fear Dubh, a folk name for the devil.[16]
Spanish origin myth
The primary version of the myth proposes that a strain of Irish people with black hair and dark complexions were the descendants of Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588.[7][11][15] In reality, of the roughly 5,000 Spanish sailors who were recorded as being wrecked off the coast of Ireland and Scotland, the few that survived the wrecks were either hunted down and killed by English troops or immediately returned to Spain,[17][18] and thus could not have impacted the Irish gene pool in any significant manner.[19]
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.[20]
Genetic studies
Two genetic studies conducted in the 2010s found little if any Spanish traces in Irish DNA, with population geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin rejecting the Spanish origin myth.[21]
Potential purposes of the myth
Some researchers have suggested the concept of "Black Irish" as the descendants of Spanish sailors was created and popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries by Irish Americans in the United States who wanted to conceal interracial children produced with African Americans. Academics researching 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 or other "dark" European ancestors used to disguise the African heritage of interracial children.[12][13][22] 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."[14]
In the early to mid-20th century, the myth of the 'Black Irish' was used occasionally by Aboriginal Australians to racially pass themselves into white Australian society.[15]
Recent assertions that the term "black" has never been used in Ireland have been brought into question for effacing Irish language culture, which does indeed use the term dubh[23] to describe white people with swarthy features, different from the use of gorm to describe those with melanated skin.[24] The more modern insertion of duine de dhath or person of color into the Irish language vocabulary was created due to associations between dubh and the devil and confusion about describing modern Irish citizens of color as "blue" in a bilingual society, often resulting in micro-aggressive jokes against children of color at Irish schools.[25]
Modern use of the term
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.[26]
The term remains an ethnonym within Irish America, where it is frequently invoked within Irish American crime fiction[27] and neo-noir television such as The Black Donnellys to develop a thematic foreboding overtone, often in discussion with Irish American anxieties of ethnic obsolescence.[28] The Black Donnellys jests at the terms mythic origins by claiming that the Spanish Armada myth covers a deeper myth about a pre-Celtic race of dark skinned people that the Celts intermarried with. Neither myth is anchored in historical evidence.
Confusion about the identity "Black Irish" as an ethnonym and Black Irish in referenced to mixed race Irish Americans or Irish nationals of color is a frequent occurrence within an Irish American, American, and Irish media that each maintain distinct cultural imaginations. Nonetheless, the multiplicity of the term's meanings remains, and academic claims that the ethnonym is a form of racial "hijacking" by white Irish Americans ignore the use of the term outside of imagined racial binaries of black and white.
References
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