Image by Lukas Eggers.
White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don’t think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can’t completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn’t change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is.
It’s not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.
Donald Trump’s current war at the border is probably the best example of this in progress. The economy is shit and Americans in general are getting fucked left and right in every hole that bleeds. In a sane world, Wall Street welfare queens like Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the focus of their rage. Instead, these same vile gangsters have hoodwinked half the country into getting behind an insane conspiracy to quadruple the size of the federal police state so they can sic gestapo on itinerate border hoppers who we’re told are destroying this country with a massive crime wave that quite simply does not exist.
After surging during the economic shitstorm of the Pandemic, violent crime rates in this country have largely dropped back to where they were in 2019 and there is zero evidence that increased immigration at the time had anything to do with sparking that temporary bump. Quite the contrary, violent crime appears to have spiked across the Western Hemisphere because of the Pandemic, hitting hardest in the most impoverished nations of Central America and provoking many of their people to flee to safer sections of the map. All available statistics actually suggest that not only are undocumented immigrants less likely to commit violent crime than natives, but they are also more likely to be the victims of it too.
Sadly, none of these inconvenient facts stopped Donald Trump from using the potent imagery of increasingly dark vagrants spilling across the Rio Grande to get elected by wide margins of my fellow libertarians. However, I don’t take this shit so personally simply because my post-left anarchist inclinations have driven me to adopt increasingly libertarian tactics to combat the white power state.
I tend to take this shit a little more personally than your average libertarian honkey, especially around Saint Patrick’s Day, because I am a historically literate nerd of Irish Catholic ancestry, and I am well aware of the fact that my people were the original wetbacks in this country before we assimilated beneath a banner of white supremacy.
You wouldn’t think it by looking at a South Philly Trump rally, but Irish people weren’t even considered white when we first stepped foot on American soil. After centuries of violent colonial rule under the British Empire, my ancestors left their homeland in the mid-19th century to escape a blight that English authorities deliberately manipulated into a genocidal famine. About a million of us died and millions more flooded America’s shores aboard floating coffins, starving and riddled with disease, and when we got here, we faced a lot of the same perils faced by Hondurans and Guatemalans today.
We were subjected to alarmist tabloid headlines and baseless conspiracy theories. We were herded into squalid tenements and targeted by violent mobs. And we were singled out for the simple fact that there was just too damn many of us to assimilate into America’s cultural purgatory of Anglo-Saxon conformity all at once. In fact, an entire political party was built on this hysteria; the so-called American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, who waged a holy war on Irish Catholics both literally and electorally beneath the banner of “Americans must rule America!”
This proto-MAGA sect swept the country in the mid-1850s, electing over 100 congressmen as well as mayors in major cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They eventually even took the White House with our 19th president, Millard Filmore, being a former Know Nothing. During this time, these pseudo-populist despots passed egregiously anti-democratic laws that mandated teaching the King James Bible in public schools and barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent at least 21 years in the country.
They also literally murdered people, especially at the ballot box, like they did at the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Catholic homes were burnt to the ground and as many as 100 Irish people were killed in cold blood while thousands more were left with little choice but to flee the city for their lives.
So, what the fuck happened then? How did my people go from being called “white niggers” and digging ditches in the ghettoes alongside our darker counterparts to being a major part of the same system that was once devoted to expelling us from its shores by any means necessary? Well, we did the same thing that the Italians and the Jews did; we got busy being white. We achieved this dubious goal in a number of ways but most of them essentially amounted to us convincing our masters that we could be trusted to do their bidding for them.
We murdered our fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War when 40% of the United States Army was made up of immigrants. We rose up the ranks of the New England chapters of the Democratic Party by becoming the loudest advocates for chattel slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And we dutifully savaged the next influx of American refugees, leading violent race riots against Chinese railway workers accused of stealing our jobs.
So, now Irish Catholics can stand proud as white people but was it really worth it? What did we as a people really gain from this Faustian bargain beyond a slightly lower rank on the police state’s shitlist? The right to identify with the same globalist Anglo-Saxon monoculture that kept our people in chains for centuries and continues to divide our ancestral homeland?
For this we forfeited a proud culture of Celtic pride built around agrarian peasant resistance to colonial rule. We sacrificed everything that made us Irish just to conform to a crass commercial culture that still fundamentally hates us, that paints us as drunkards and mooks and turns our sacred holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day into an excuse for Protestant frat boys to binge themselves sick on green beer and vomit into plastic leprechaun hats.
This is the other side of whiteness that the left often forgets to acknowledge. The first ethnicities that the master race erased were actually the European peasant cultures that they reduced to a single color. There is no such thing as white culture. This is nothing but a purposely vague conglomeration of secular universalist Protestant hogwash that essentially amounts to little more than kneejerk conformity and an evangelical devotion to institutional power.
That and the constantly evolving demonization of the “other” which is basically just any outgroup that fails to comply with its own erasure and generally makes the world too diverse to govern. That used to be us, and as far as I’m concerned it still should be.
We were all minorities once, a million little tribes scattered to four corners of the wind. This only became a problem when a few powerful people decided that just one city state full of servants wasn’t enough to satiate their power lust and decided to build empires spanning many tribes so they could play God with the poor people in the next village too. From this rapidly expanding cesspool came America and from America came the concept of the white race, invented by the same imperialists who sacked Ireland so they could sack Virginia too.
During the early days of American colonialism there was no black or white. Slaves and servants came in a wide variety of colors and their status could evolve through subordination to the current puritanical traditions favored at the time by the royals back home in London. It wasn’t even totally unheard of to find slaveowners of African descent provided that they said their prayers and paid their taxes.
Then a wealthy landowner by the name of Nathaniel Bacon decided that he was tired of kicking up his fortune to the Virginia colonial elites and formed a militia made up predominantly of European indentured servants and African slaves to overthrow the government. Bacon’s Rebellion quickly got out of hand however and became something of a multicultural populist referendum on life under empire. The uprising was suppressed relatively quickly but not before Bacon’s unruly slave army had succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground.
The planter class got scared and sought to divide the peasantry against each other. They did this by inventing whiteness as an ethnic concept. And just like that, all Europeans were spared the whip while those Africans deemed Black were reduced to a permanent slave caste.
But not every European embraced assimilation. Some of us wanted to remain ungovernable. And some of us were even insulted at the very notion of becoming complicit in reducing other human beings to property. This included a handful of Irish Catholic conscripts during the Mexican American War who deserted their posts to join the Mexican Army in resisting the Protestant expansion of chattel slavery in Texas. These unruly Micks ended up forming a ferocious artillery unit known appropriately as Saint Patrick’s Battalion and while many were captured and executed as traitors, they didn’t die white servants of American imperialism, they died free, and they died Irish.
I may be but a genderfuck heretic, but this is what I celebrate on Saint Patrick’s Day, a culture of proud peasant renegades who stood with the oppressed not just because it’s the honorable thing to do but because it’s the only way to break free from the shallow culture of our ancestral oppressors. So, if you’re truly as proud of being Irish as I am then you’ll join me in standing with the latest class of wetbacks and spit your ill-gotten whiteness back in the face of the Know Nothings of the GOP.
The only thing great about America is all the weird little tribes who resist it. So, you motherfuckers can keep your white power and kiss my ass, because I’m not white, I’m Irish.
