The historic term Black Irish described "an Irish person, or one of Irish ancestry, having dark hair and a dark complexion or eyes",[1] and was used primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries by Irish-Americans as part of a broader "performative ethnic identity" of Irishness.[2] The term was associated with various myths proposing a Spanish origin. The most popular myth proposed that the Black Irish were the descendants of Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588;[3][4][5][6] however, genetic, historical, and anthropological research does not support this.

Some theorists assert that the term was adopted in some cases by Irish-Americans to conceal interracial unions with African-Americans, paralleling the phrase "Black Dutch" which was also used in the United States to hide racial identity.[7][8][9] Likewise, the concept of "Black Irish" was also used by some Aboriginal Australians to racially pass themselves into white Australian society.[10] In the earlier parts of the 19th century, "Black Irish" was sometimes used in America to describe biracial people of African and Irish descent.[5]

The folkloric sense of the term "Black Irish" is not used in Ireland,[11][12] where the term "Black Irish" usually refers to Irish people of African descent, or Irish people of another black background.[12][13]

Description

portrait of a man with dark hair
US President Richard Nixon was called Black Irish because of his hair and skin color.[14]

The academic Christopher Dowd describes the Black Irish identity as being "performed" by early 20th-century Irish-American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, Margaret Mitchell, and Robert E. Howard.[15] These authors "became Irish in the same way that all Irish Americans do—by ascribing certain traits to an imagined Irish community",[16] popularising, exploring, and expanding upon the myth of the Black Irish in their writings.

Spanish origin myth

A popular myth proposes that a strain of Irish people with black hair and dark complexions, sometimes identified with the "Black Irish", were the descendants of Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588.[3][6] 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,[17][18] 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.[19]

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.[20]

Potential purposes of the myth

Some researchers have 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. 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 and other European women used to disguise the African heritage of interracial children.[7][8][21] 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."[9]

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.[10]

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.[22]

In Ireland, in the 21st century, Black Irish is now more commonly used to refer to Irish nationals of African descent. According to the 2022 census, 67,546 people identify as Black or Black Irish with an African background, while 8,699 people identify as Black or Black Irish with any other Black background.[13]

References

  1. ↑ "Black Irish". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 8 December 2023.
  2. ↑ Dowd, Christopher (Summer 2016). "The Irish-American Identities of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian". New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua. 20 (2): 15–34. JSTOR 44807183. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
  3. 1 2 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 ago by the poet Paul Durcan in his long dramatic poem Nights in the Gardens of Spain.
  4. ↑ Van Vossole, Jonas (2016). "Framing PIGS: patterns of racism and neocolonialism in the Euro crisis". Patterns of Prejudice. 50 (1): 7. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2015.1128056. hdl:10316/41783. Retrieved 6 December 2023. While not having the same history of Mediterraneanization, the Irish people have undergone a long period of racialization, and religious and racial discrimination, mainly by the British. Its history is marked by emigration waves associated with famines and economic hardship, often making them second-class citizens in the British Empire. Even the Irish have a 'black' identity: according to a widespread popular myth, the 'Black Irish' are descendants of Spanish sailors.
  5. 1 2 Tate, Claudia (1998). Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Oxford University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-19-509683-5.
  6. 1 2 Pramaggiore, Maria (2015). "Review: The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed Race Identities on Irish Film and Television By Zélie Asava". Estudios Irlandeses. 10: 176–178. Retrieved 8 November 2023. Fairly late in the book's introduction the author mentions the traditional understanding of the term 'black Irish' as the descendants of the survivors of the wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588. In an attempt to privilege 'the new Irish' the author misses an opportunity to historicize contemporary ideologies and practices. A concept of black Irishness existed before the twentieth century, prior to the inaugural event that the author points to as a frame for the historical situation of the black Irish̶ the first deportation of a black man in an independent Ireland in 1925.
  7. 1 2 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
  8. 1 2 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.
  9. 1 2 Podber, Jacob J. (September 2008). "Creating Real and Virtual Communities Among the Melungeons of Appalachia" (PDF). Journal of Kentucky Studies.
  10. 1 2 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. Black Irish' is a popularly used term to account for people in Ireland with dark hair or complexions, thought to be descended from the Spanish Armada. Occasionally in Australia, Aboriginal people seeking to escape widespread discrimination borrowed the moniker 'black Irish' to conceal their identity, particularly in the early to mid-twentieth century when state-sanctioned child removal was especially rampant.
  11. ↑ Burke, Mary M. (1 March 2023). Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Oxford University Press. pp. 91–93.
  12. 1 2 Clarke, Donald (21 August 2021). "Donald Clarke: Expect all celebrities to have their own tequila by 2050". The Irish Times. Retrieved 8 December 2023. The phrase 'black Irish' has two meanings. In the United States the Spanish Armada is sometimes fancifully invoked to explain – though no explanation is required – why some Irish people have black hair and dark eyes. That stereotype of the freckled redhead is hard to shake. 'Black Irish' is elsewhere more usefully employed to describe Irish people of colour.
  13. 1 2 "Population Usually Resident and Present in the State FY023". Central Statistics Office. Retrieved 7 December 2023. Black or Black Irish - African Number 67,546. Black or Black Irish - any other Black background Number 8,699
  14. ↑ Alsop, Stewart (2016-06-07). Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait. Open Road Media. p. 65. ISBN 978-1-4804-4600-7.
  15. ↑ Dowd, Christopher, "The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature" (New York: Routledge, 2011).
  16. ↑ Dowd, Christopher. “The Irish-American Identities of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 15–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44807183. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
  17. ↑ Mattingly, Garrett (2005). The Armada. Houghton Mifflin. p. 369. ISBN 9780618565917.
  18. ↑ 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.
  19. ↑ Ruiz-Mas, José (2023). "Joyce, Galway and the Spanish Armada" (PDF). Estudios Irlandeses (18): 94–102. doi:10.24162/EI2023-11386. S2CID 257588035.
  20. ↑ 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.
  21. ↑ Hirschman, Elizabeth C.; Panther-Yate, Donald (2007). "Suddenly Melungeon! Reconstructing Consumer Identity Across the Color Line". Consumer Culture Theory. Research in Consumer Behavior. 11: 252. doi:10.1016/s0885-2111(06)11011-x. ISBN 978-0-7623-1446-1. Retrieved 8 December 2023. While some contemporary Melungeons are quite light complexioned, even having blonde or red hair and fair skin, the majority are darker, with what is commonly described as olive or copper toned skin, brunette or black hair, and dark brown eyes. Ironically, despite having Mediterranean or Middle Eastern physiognomies, many Melungeons grew up confident of their ostensibly Northern or Western European ancestry. This self-deception often originated with parents or grandparents who told the individual that s/he was Scotch–Irish, English, French, and/or German. If challenged by the skeptical child that s/he seemed to be darker than most Scottish or German persons, the parent/grandparent might reply that this was due to some Black Dutch or Black Irish ancestry
  22. ↑ "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.
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