IE: Are the Irish racist?
EUG...@zodiac.rutgers.edu
by Kate O'Callaghan
from The Irish Echo
March 15, 1995
John Maguire (a pseudonym) moved from Bainbridge Avenue in
the Bronx to Woodlawn three years ago. Over the last six months
his African-American girlfriend, Francine, has periodically
visited his apartment which he shares with two other Irishmen.
About two months ago john's landlord took him aside and told him
blunt that no blacks were allowed in the building. "He doesn't
speak good English", John says, "but I had no difficulty in
understanding what he was saying. People in the building had been
complaining, he said."
John did not take issue with this blatant racism because he
did not want his girlfriend to know about it and be hurt.
Nothing further was said, "It didn't surprise me," John said.
"People can be paranoid about the old thing of 'there goes the
neighborhood' and here in Woodlawn they're very protective about
that." Woodlawn, on the boundary line of New York City and
Yonkers, is not on a subway line and is an almost totally Irish
and Italian neighborhood.
In the last five years it has been settled in large numbers
by young Irish immigrants fleeing Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx.
It is a pattern which has repeated itself with depressing
regularity throughout this century as white people fled city
neighborhoods when blacks and Hispanics moved in. "In the 15
years since I've been here," Rita Higgins notes, "the Irish have
moved from Fordham Road, where I first stayed, up to Bainbridge,
and now Woodlawn is the last bastion because anywhere else is
outside the city."
But it is the same old pattern of racism which has driven
the Irish out of neighborhoods like Bainbridge Avenue in the late
1980's, whose demographics are rapidly changing? After all, these
young Irish are meant to be more liberal and open-minded than
their predecessors. "I feel its unfair to say they moved out
because blacks started moving in. It's more a combination of
things,: John Maguire says. "People want to feel safe coming
home at 2pm in the morning and Bainbridge/204th Street had become
more dangerous. It wasn't as clean and it was very noisy. It was
different to what it had been four years before that."
When thousands of illegal young Irish flocked into
Bainbridge inn the late 1980's, the existing older white Irish,
Jewish and Italian population were already hemorrhaging out of
the area. "When we first moved there in 1981," Rita Higgins
remembers, "it was not safe to walk about. That had a lot to do
with drugs."
But residents were trying to maintain the neighborhood and
there were big signs everywhere proclaiming: "Don't move.
Improve." People held neighborhood marches to make the area safe,
which, added to the massive Irish influx, changed the outlook of
Bainbridge in the late 1980s. Despite being illegal, the Irish of
the neighborhood had no difficulty getting work and the economy
of the neighborhood blossomed. Accents from every county in
Ireland rang out along the "Golden Mile," as it was called. and
for a short period people of different ethnic groups seemed to
mingle freely in the area, even though they might not have
socialized together.
Then crime started to rise again in the area and many were
victims of robbery or muggings. And there was a spate of "donkey
bashing"-- Irish-born people being set upon by Irish Americans.
Added to that, there were a number of murder in the neighborhood
which scared people: a young Irish American Hughie Harley was
stabbed to death for a dollar by a young man who had been in the
country a week from Puerto Rico. A woman living off Webster
Avenue reported that she was raped by two black men and the
report sent the area's Irish residents into a panic. (The
veracity of this report was later strongly challenged but the
effect on the neighborhood was not diminished.)
"People got scared," say Sister Edna McNicholas, who runs
the Tir na Og Center on Bainbridge Ave. "They saw the area had
changed. Unconsciously they may have felt that they were moving
to a safer area, moving to Woodlawn where that are a large number
of Irish. When you're away from home there's security in being
with people you know."
When you look at it first, it looks like classic white-
flight, Rita Higgins believes, but "so much of it, too, had to do
with the school. The Irish had begun to settle down and have
children." "If we had the option of putting them in good public
schools it would have been a different story", she says, "But it
costs so much money to put them in private parochial schools, and
then there can be up to 40 kids in a class in some of those
schools." So parents felt their only option was to move to the
suburbs where the schools were less crowded. "You get where they
identify schools being good or bad because the black kids go
there," Rita says, "and that's not right. You have to look at the
academic record of the schools."
The process of the Irish flight from Bainbridge was classic:
at times of insecurity, neuroses like racism play much more on
people's minds. As the Irish drifted out of Bainbridge and
immigration stopped, their placed were being taken by black and
Hispanic tenants. Then Kevin Ahern, the owner of the Green Derby
Bar was killed down off the Fordham Road. Irish neighborhood
residents marched down to Fordham in protest. Incidents like that
served to increase a sense of paranoia; a feeling that the
neighborhood was in decline, a term that is synonymous with
rising proportions of black people. Many white people see the
numbers of blacks around them increasing around them as a sign
that the area is in decline. If it is in decline and they are
still living there, then they too are downwardly mobile. That
increases people's sense of insecurity. They associate blacks
with a rise in crime and a decline in pubic services like
schools, playgrounds, police responsiveness, and they think
landlords will no longer maintain buildings.
There is an amount of truth in all of the above. Society
discriminates against eh poor because they are powerless. And
because society is racist, it discriminates even more against
poor black people. Therefore when the amount of poor black people
increases in a neighborhood certain things happen: for example,
quite often banks and supermarkets won't locate there. Violence
and murder don't get much play in the newspapers when they happen
in predominantly poor black neighborhoods. These tare all things
which society takes for granted and which are not lost on new
arrivals to this country.
"It's easy to get caught up in this race thing in New York
City," John Maguire believes. "You experience certain things when
you are living here. Then you know somebody who;s had a bad
experience travelling on the subway or been a victim of some sort
of crime and it grows out of that. Crimes like mugging, etc. are
probably committed by poor people, and in New York City, it just
happens that poor people tend to be black or Hispanic. So one
gets linked with the other."
The new irish immigrants usually live in neighborhoods where
these issues are posed more sharply than anywhere else. The
white-flight from the cities has stripped most city neighborhoods
of the Irish middle class--places where immigrants naturally
gravitate because of the support network. Those city
neighborhoods that remain feel themselves constantly under threat
and young immigrants are quick to pick up on the fear and
paranoia about black people that these situations generate.
Eileen O'Hanlon (pseudonym) is a college educated Tipperary
girl living in the Woodlawn/Yonkers area who finds the young
Irish community there "extremely racist and narrow-minded." These
young Irish people never saw anything except Irish people growing
up but they picked up the attitudes from television and movies
reflecting the broader society, she believes. "There's an
attitude that black people are lesser in society. In all the
movies the black person in the underdog. So people pick up on
that."
She herself works and socializes with people of many
different ethnic backgrounds. Irish people in the neighborhood
find this very strange, she thinks. "Irish people are very
clannish," she says. One of her roommates is constantly making
racist remarks about her friends. "He calls them niggers and says
I shouldn't be going around with them." Eileen believes there is
a lot of peer pressure in places like Woodlawn to appear racist
because "if you don't friends will think there is something wrong
with you."
You're always going to get some people who are racists in
every group, John Maguire maintains, and goes on: "I'm surprised
myself when I hear racist comments because I feel we Irish
suffered enough under racism and prejudice in our own history.
You'd think we'd actually identify with the underdog more."
In the last century and later, many American-born people
were saying about the Irish what the Irish today are saying about
African-Americans. Writing about an Irish neighborhood called the
Five Points, which he visited in 1842, Charles Dickens described
the unrelieved poverty and misery of the area in 'American
Notes.' Then he went on to point out that it was only
understandable because they were Irish and it was the Irish
nature to live like that.
"You hear stories that blacks are using the system and they
don't work, etc." says Maguire, "but I've worked at a lot of
different types of jobs since I came here and I've actually seen
where black people are up against it. The Irish have been very
fortunate because when we came here most of us were illegal for a
long time, and we were still given the chance to work. Other
races in New York have been turned way at the door."
At home in Ireland we are not open to other races, but thee
are people in Ireland who are discriminated against, for
instance, the travellers (Gypsies)," Sister Edna says. "That kind
of attitudes can be nurtured without people realizing it. And it
is easy to transfer that attitude when they come here." But, in
general, Sister Edna has not found the young Irish to be terribly
racist.
"I don't think the Irish are any more prone to it than
anyone else," says Paul Finnegan of the Emerald Isle Immigration
Center. The original Irish immigrants, he believed, had such a
reputation for racism because they were in such hot competition
for the most menial jobs with other groups, especially the
blacks. "From the 50's on they saw an erosion of Irish power in
the U.S. which they felt they had to protect, and they were
coming from a society which was very intolerant and very white
and very Catholic, and now young people are coming from a much
different society. These young people have seen images of (soccer
star) Paul McGrath playing for Ireland in the World Cup and Phil
Lynott of Thin Lizzy, and they have heroes who are black and I
think they enjoy the variety."
John Maguire also feels that the young Irish are not really
racist. He has been to the Irish bars in Woodlawn with his
African-American girlfriend and says he gets little trouble,
apart from the stares. Part of the problem, he believes, is the
incestuous nature of the society. "When we young Irish came here
in the 80's we needed to live together for safety and protection
because every group does that when they first come to New York
City. They try to create what they miss about home. And I suppose
that's where the problems arise because people see it as being
their Irish neighborhood then, and they don't like to see
outsiders coming in."
Paul Finnegan thinks people make a conscious choice to be
racist or not these days. "I think it boils down to their own
personality and their own insecurities that has very little to do
with the actual reality. Because there's not the same competition
for jobs as there was in the past."
It all comes from economics, Maguire says. "People are
afraid of change. They've seen what happened in the South Bronx
and they're afraid of the same thing happening in their
neighborhood."
Rita Higgins is a firm believer in talking about these
issues more. "I think particularly Irish women adapt and change
and realize how bad racist comments their husbands pick up on the
job are for their children," she says. In April she and a group
of others are planning on putting on a ply in Woodlawn called
"Under Our Skin." It's a joint endeavour between ethnic groups
and the play is about Irish and Puerto Rican women, and deals
with white-flight from neighborhoods. "At the same time," says
Rita, "it's about what we have in common and we need to talk
about it more."
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