A Myth of Victimization

"No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization

Abstract

Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.
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Of course, the folk who *need* to know this will choose to disregard it.

I'd actually read this before, some time ago, possibly even via this blog-post from Kathy Shaidle: 'If United 93 had been an Air Canada flight...' Some exceprts:

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But then again, the Left draws most of its motivating energy from imaginary problems, like global warming, DDT, back alley coat hanger abortions, and the chronic boredom of American housewives in 1950s suburbia.

The Left is very concerned about something they like to call “social justice”, which I define as the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems.

Like Spinal Tap’s second drummer, who famously “choked to death on someone ELSE’s vomit,” Canadian leftists have always resented their neighbors in the United States for having a romantic, large scale Civil Rights Movement during the 60s and 70s.

So the HRCs became the Canadian Left’s state-sponsored version of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit ins but, without the stirring LIFE magazine photos and crappy folk music soundtrack.

Going against that tide, in the US, Barry Goldwater bravely voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on principle.

As one author explained:

Most of the twenty-seven senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act were Southern segregationists. Goldwater was not a segregationist, nor was he any kind of racist. He was, in fact, a lifelong opponent of racial discrimination. He desegegrated his family’s department store back in the 1940s; he was a member of the N.A.A.C.P.

But Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because he believed, as a conservative, that the federal government did not have the power to compel states to conform to its idea of racial equality, or to dictate to individuals whom they must associate with.

Such “Love One Another Or Else” laws, from the Civil Rights Act to our own Section 13, inevitably bend under pressure from that other, higher, law: the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The fallout ranges from forced busing and white flight to those everyday resentments that simmer just below the surface as people cluster themselves into victim identity groups and complain about each other in whispers.

Human Rights Commissions were supposed to HELP the multicultural causes of tolerance and diversity. Instead, they pit groups against each other as they vie for favored victim status and the pitiful spoils that such status imparts.
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The problem with the HRCs is most commonly presented as an issue of freedom of speech. However, I’d like to raise two additional aspects that don’t get as much play.

First, the HRCs are engaged in class warfare. The majority of “hate speech” cases are brought by highly educated, highly privileged white liberals -- against less educated, working class, blue collar “reactionary” whites, who insist on speaking to each other about topics like immigration, using old fashioned, politically incorrect language.

Therefore, the enforcement of Section 13 is an expensive exercise in state sponsored snobbery, in which citizen’s own hard earned tax dollars are used by their “betters” to scold and shame them. ...
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The other problem rarely discussed in terms of the HRCs is that besides being an affront to freedom of speech, many cases violate the right to private property.

But conveniently enough, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does NOT recognize the right to private property anyhow. Thank you, Ed Broadbent.

Canadians therefore had to endure the spectacle of, for example, a man claiming the “human right” to smoke marijuana on the premises of someone else’s restaurant. The difference between that and insisting on being served at a Woolworth’s lunch counter is only a matter of degree.

Again, Barry Goldwater warned about this sort of thing but of course he was just an “insane” fascist right winger...

Of course, there is one vital and distinct difference of kind in regard to the Woolworth's lunch counters. And that is that, irrespective of whether the owners of Woolworth's wished to exercise their moral right to behave immorally by treating black Americans with contempt merely because they were black, the lunch counters were segregated under color and force of law.

Was it *really* necessary to permanently pit all Americans against one another, on a group basis of race or ethnicity, to correct that legalized injustice? How did "more of the same" solve the problem? How does that work, in actual reality?

"Justice, justice shalt thou seek," commands haTorah (Deut 16:20) -- one of the meanings of which is that we cannot seek/pursue justice by unjust means; we just can't make that work.