Colonialism forged modern Ireland: some introductory explorations on whiteness

Excerpt from the 'Decolonization in Ireland' online course

This 2022 essay is an excerpt from my self-paced online course Decolonization in Ireland: unravelling whiteness and remembering the land. To learn more, including a lot of historical and theoretical context for what I talked about here, and possibilities for where to go from here, consider signing up for the course which can be found at my website gaelicreexistence.com.

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Clear-felled forestry plantations are a common sight in the Irish countryside. Photo credit: Irish Times

When we speak about how any people became ‘white’, not just Irish people, we are not speaking about how, in a biological sense, there came to be differences in melanin between human peoples of different geohistorical origins but who are all of the same race or species, Homo sapiens sapiens. I am sure this is an interesting question in itself about melanin, but it’s not what we’re talking about here. The genes that determine the phenotypic differences that are now associated with the socially constructed category of race, like skin colour, are something like less than 0.01% of our DNA — I can’t remember the exact figure but it is miniscule. Biologically speaking, there are no different human races, we are anatomically the same, we just have a high variety of phenotypic characteristics.

Interestingly, the ancient world of our ancestors tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago would’ve been different to this — where there were a variety of human races like Neanderthals and Denisovans and probably even more of which there have been no remains yet found. These actually different human races even interbred with our own, with modern humans from Asia and Europe showing the most significant genetic evidence of ancestral interbreeding with Neanderthals, for example. The modern imagination of species as discreetly enclosed is also completely wrong — it has recently been found that coyotes in Turtle Island have been mixing again with wolves and dogs because both species’ ecosystem ranges have been reduced by modern human society. The two species are hybrids of each other, only being about 200,000 years removed. The same goes for us — if there were any other species within our genus alive today we would still be able to procreate with them.

When we talk now about categories like ‘white’ and ‘black’, these are fundamentally socially constructed categories that are extremely recent historically, and as such people have to be constructed socially into these categories. As social constructs they are materially manifested in the world by violent hierarchical social systems, like the state for example. While understandings of cultural difference existed between interfacing peoples going back a long time, ‘race’ as we understand it now is an entirely modern phenomenon. Racial differentiations were crudely invented almost overnight by European elites in the 17th century on plantations in the Caribbean that were exploiting Black enslaved people and White indentured labourers.

From 1492 up to this point around the 1660’s, the concern of European powers was Christianity as the method of determining a person’s humanity. If you were Christian, you had a soul and were human. If you weren’t Christian, the question was first whether or not you had a soul and therefore the potential of being Christianised and becoming human. When plantation owners realised that some progressive Christians were arguing that enslaved Blacks had the potential to be Christianised, and therefore that they wouldn’t be able to divide their hyper-exploited workforce between Christians as superior and non-Christians as inferior, there was a scramble to generate a new basis for division so that the enslaved and indentured wouldn’t unite and usurp the planters as had happened elsewhere.

Race as a system of categorisation was invented in the same breath as white supremacy. This is why there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism’ against white people, because race only makes historical sense in how it supports and has supported the white European systemic domination of the planet. White people may be able to face discrimination in certain circumstances, but it cannot be racism. Racism is not a synonym for discrimination, however Oxford Dictionary might like to try define it. Racism doesn’t have a synonym. The attempted reduction of racism to mere discrimination by white people is itself racist for its trivialisation of the particularities of historical and continuing systemic violence that the categorical logic of race inflicts on people racialised as non-white. 

Race is the categorical basis for the enforcement of white supremacy on a global level, and how from the point of the invention of race and whiteness onwards White Europeans began to define themselves and their cultural ways of knowing and being in increasingly elaborate ways as superior, civilised, and developed in a comparative framework against non-white racialised others who were seen as wild, primitive, savage, uncivilised, backward, undeveloped and so on. This linear teleological architecture underpins the very idea of ‘progress’, which is a cornerstone narrative of modernity.

These categories are still at play today but undergo ever shifting institutional manifestations in how they are expressed, where in the 19th century whole cultures may have been labelled ‘uncivilised’, today they’re called ‘underdeveloped’ or maybe even ‘emerging’. The shift in language is becoming ever more benevolent sounding, but has the same racist inner workings and can result in the same kinds of violence. Just like the Christians who argued that enslaved Blacks were capable of being Christianised were ‘progressive’ in their day, today those that proselytise things like the ‘sustainable development goals’ for other people that are determined not to be ‘developed’ are reinforcing Eurocentric colonial standards of what it means to be human, and the single story of modernity’s progress.

It’s assumed that being ‘developed’ is the best and only way to be human, which is still very much mired in a Christian saviour attitude that sees conversion as the only way to be ‘saved’, whether people choose it or not. Who others are and should be, and their direction in life, is uncritically weighed against the colonial standards of the imperial centres that ignores how monetarily wealthy, developed countries came to be so-called ‘developed’ in the first place, which is, through historical and continuing systemic violence against the majority of the planet. It is monetarily ‘wealthy’ countries that are dependent on monetarily ‘poor’ countries, not the other way around. Telling others how they can develop through knowledges and methodologies produced in Europeanised institutions is a massive exercise in gaslighting for its complete obfuscation of how actually existing modern development has happened, and in how it promotes the impossible narrative of the universal middle class dream.

If everyone on the planet were to live lifestyles the same as many do in monetarily wealthy countries, there would need to be 6 earths — what does this tell us about the scale and severity global inequalities, the extraction of life, materials, and bodies and how they subsidise such lifestyles for a global minority? Seen in this light, charity and development aid amount to an insulting kick-back of crumbs, a poor compensation for the genocides and ecocides that have taken and are taking place to extract the materials and labour that continually make wealthy countries wealthy at all, and in a resulting dominant political position to determine what the ‘one right direction’ of all humanity should be. Only, while this ‘one right direction’ is presented as ‘forward’ or as ‘progress’, the trajectory of this ever forward-moving linear progress of white Western civilisation is the annihilation of the basis for life as we know it on the planet to exist at all; including our own race - that is - the human race. 

Race and racism may be the most fundamental organising principles of modernity. The entire global system as we know it hinges on the existence and enforcement of racialised inequalities. Modernity is the broad project of Western civilisation that requires racialised and colonial violence in order to function at all. In the past 530 or so years modernity has become a system of immense planetary proportions, leaving hardly anywhere, anyone, and anything untouched by its all-encompassing violences. Modernity is continually defined by the imperial centres from which it was and is continuously articulated and enforced. Which is to say, it is defined by how Europe and its settler colonial offshoots see and manifest reality for all life on the planet. The architecture of knowledge that modernity is supported by is racist at its roots, and therefore white supremacist, because it enforces an ethnocentric cosmological enclosure on many diverse peoples and places that reinforces the superiority of the centre, and directly materially benefits it.

So where does Ireland fit into this story and why is it relevant? It is common to hear that Ireland is exempt from such considerations because the modern state, ie. ‘Ireland’ as a political entity, did not participate in direct conquest of other parts of the world. The Irish state of course did not exist at an opportune moment to participate in conquest directly but direct conquest is only part of how colonialism occurred historically and continues today. This understanding of colonialism as only direct conquest functions to exempt the current beneficiaries of historical violence from responsibility or accountability for historical debts that can never be ‘fully’ repaid. First, this understanding locates colonialism in the past as a series of events rather than something continuing, and second it assumes colonialism is defined only by direct conquest by an imperial state. Since, in this version, it’s in the past, we’re told that we should just “get over it and move on” - “no point dwelling on the past”, and since only states themselves are or were culpable, the potential for any kind of accountability is projected onto them, but again, only in a distant past. However, colonialism is an entirely more complex multitude of processes than that, it is a still continuing system inextricably tied to the every-day functioning of modernity as the dominant world system. Modernity cannot exist without colonial violence, both historical and continuing.

Dwayne Donald defines colonialism as “an extended process of relationship denial”, which calls us to consider then, what relationships have been and are being denied, and by who? What kind of relationships existed before this denial, how were they maintained, and why did denial become normalised over a continued maintenance rooted in the traditional ecological knowledges of a specific place? Achille Mbembe has said that our relationship to the non-human is what makes us human. What might the rivers, mountains, birds, and the spirits of so many kin driven to extinction say about the current state of the ‘human’ in Ireland, and how we maintain ecosystems of denial and domination?

It is also common to hear that Ireland cannot have been a coloniser, because we were colonised by the British Empire. However it is not an either/or. Both of these scenarios hold true; the horrors inflicted on the land and our ancestors over those many centuries, and the fact that many Irish people participated in the colonial projects of other imperial forces, and that by virtue of our phenotypic proximity to what became known as ‘Europeans’, we were afforded an ease of assimilation into the white supremacist structures of modernity that other non-white colonised peoples could never access. We also now have our own ethnically dominant nation state that is a card carrying member of the globally dominant political union of European colonial states. What we handed away for the short-term benefits of this assimilation is palpable in the profound levels of colonial amnesia in Irish society, the sustained ecocidal assault on the land, and the barely concealed self-hatred peculiar to people raised native to the tongue of their coloniser, abstracted from all ancestral memory of an-other way of knowing, an-other way of being. The story gets quite complicated when we start to consider how, after cultural assimilation into modern/colonial ways of being, and a total cosmological reconfiguration within the English language world, we effectively started colonising ourselves. 

Consider what Frantz Fanon said in The Wretched of the Earth: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.” These three verbs seem to aptly describe the state’s 2004 amendment to the National Monuments Act that allowed development projects to build over ancient ancestral sites so long as they are first excavated and emptied of objects: distortion, disfigurement, destruction. With the construction of the M3 motorway, a slightly shorter commute to the urban centre that has been the site of ever-increasing centralisation for centuries now was prioritised over sacred places of power that were revered and undisturbed for millennia in the Tara-Skryne valley. It’s a decision that only makes sense in a social order predicated on addiction to the accumulation of ‘stuff’, and that denies any relationship to or with place itself. What is most clear is the magnitude and peculiarity of the disruption of the modern timespace that arrogantly assumes both superiority and ownership over all things past. In the fever of scaling up the project of modernity on the island, ancestral justice or continuity has never been on the menu for the Irish state. Like an adolescent hellbent on getting approval, the Irish state seems to base a lot of decisions on trying to impress, or at least not upset, its powerful big brothers in the colonial centres of Europe. Embarrassed by their own ancestors and where they came from, “we’re just like you!” they exclaim.

As race organises how modernity functions globally, Ireland is not exempt. The question is how it functions in Ireland and within ‘Irishness’, not if. Part of Ireland’s process of being colonised was the cultural reconfiguration of Gaels into the more culturally homogenised settled white Anglophone Irish. ‘Gael’ itself came into its modern usage in the early 19th century which created a broad cultural opposition to the civilised Anglo-Saxon (and also emerging ‘Irish’ identity as Anglophone and modern) which functioned to homogenise the internal nuances and diversity within Gaeldom itself. ‘Gael’ was not a national identity, though there may have been understandings of cultural continuities between kinship groups and túatha, and maybe a common spiritual sense of relationality to the body of the island; but then, for much time there was a lot of continuity and diversity between all Gaels in modern day Ireland and Scotland. Even past the fall of the Gaelic order in the first decade of the 17th century, the filidh, a formerly powerful class in Gaelic Ireland had extended arguments, known as Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh, over clan lineages stretching back to two forefathers of the Milesians – the original Gaelic invaders of the island – with northern clans broadly seen to be descended from Érimón, and the southern from Éber Finn. They didn’t see themselves as one homogenous ‘national’ culture.

The cultural diversity that existed even in a small place like Ireland is hard to imagine for a modern person that conceives of difference principally in terms of ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’, which usually covers enormous geopolitical regions now within the jurisdiction of a corresponding nation state that once housed enormous cultural diversity. This cultural diversity does not mean that peoples were ‘discrete and enclosed’ as we (wrongly) imagine modern nations to be. In most cases modern nation states are only representative of a single dominant ethnicity and cultural expression in that place, and enact violence against non-dominant ethnicities and cultures to assimilate, marginalise, or eradicate them. In Ireland’s case, the modern nation state culturally corresponds to the settled white Anglophone Irish in how it both reproduces that cultural identity and is existentially dependent on it. The treatment of Travellers over the past century is the most glaring example of how the Irish state has attempted to violently assimilate a non-dominant cultural group, because being settled was deemed to be the only acceptable cultural way of being in the new Ireland. Nomadism, which was an everyday part of Gaelic Ireland, was then seen to be unacceptable.

A significant increase in inward migration of non-white people in the past few decades has inevitably changed, challenged, and broadened how modern Irishness is lived and reproduced in and by the social body, but the recent migrations of Ukrainians fleeing war has so far demonstrated a strong preference for white migrants over non-white by both the Irish state and white Irish society more broadly. Asylum seekers racialised as non-white and non-European have been left to rot in the carceral Direct Provision system under constant threat of deportation for more than 10 years in some cases. It is not that Ukrainians do not deserve a safe haven from an imperial invasion – people should be able to migrate freely – but there are quite serious questions to be asked about the visceral fervour with which white people here have responded to the plight of refugees read as being white and European, when nothing remotely similar has ever been mobilised for non-white and non-European refugees.

The making of the modern sense of ‘nation’ is too broad a topic for me to adequately cover here, but there are a few things of brief importance to consider. The production of a singular monocultural identity whether that be ‘Irish’, or ‘English’, or ‘French’, or ‘Italian’, is a phenomenon of the last 200 or so years and is the result of many more centuries of cultural genocide and separation of people from the land, which, at least in Europe’s case began with Roman imperialism. Subsequently, the burgeoning modern states seeking to create a social and cultural base for the functioning of industrial capitalist economies, invested heavily in national education systems and made them a legal obligation. Since then, national education systems have functioned primarily to reproduce the dominant cultural expression in a particular place, which is also why people from different cultures may have a hard time operating within or with being legally obliged to participate in such systems.

Dominant narratives usually then place blame on the marginalised group for some inherent flaw or failure of character for not being able to meet culturally specific educational standards set by the dominant group. The same historical forces that violently removed people from their context as Gaels were simultaneously transforming them into white people through Anglicisation and Europeanisation. By the time Ireland was on the cusp of political independence from the British Empire, Eamon de Valera could turn around in 1920 on a speaking tour in the US and tell audiences that Ireland “was the only white nation on earth still in the bonds of political slavery”, while Erskine Childers posed a question wondering if Ireland was “the last unliberated white community on the face of the globe.” Discourses of race and appeals to white supremacist power structures were clearly considered by those instrumental in the initial construction of the modern Irish state.

This is important to consider because Gaels were not ‘white’; as I said, the category of ‘white’ was invented in the 17th century and only started to make sense within that emerging social and cultural context. Because there were no readily obvious phenotypic markers like skin colour with which to divide coloniser and colonised in the context of Ireland as were being deployed by the British Empire elsewhere, religious differences became utilised as a means of racial and cultural delineation, which were also the same lines of political division between European imperial powers after the Reformation. This is one enormously crucial difference between Ireland and non-white colonised contexts – the same means of determining lines of superiority and inferiority could not be used in Ireland due to the fact that the Gaels were also phenotypically pale.

The destruction and dismantling of Gaelic society and the concurrent incorporation of Gaels into English systems created an environment in which, increasingly over the centuries, the only available options for being and knowing were those of the coloniser until they became the common-sense baseline for ‘just how things are’. As a result, Gaels-becoming-Irish were gradually being brought into globally contiguous colonial systems that were materially restructuring the world and the means by which it could be known and inhabited. By the end of the 19th century the English language had displaced Gaeilge as the lingua franca in most of Ireland, bringing most of the remaining pieces of the cosmological world of Gaelic Ireland with it. Part of the cultural legibility of the world within the modern Anglophone universe was racialised hierarchies, which were particularly blatant and actively justified in mainstream discourses at that time, there was no carefully crafted PR veneer to mask it as there is now.

The story of Irish people assimilating into whiteness is a globally entangled story, it is impossible to conceive of it as a domestically contained thing, because by the time people were identifying themselves as ‘Irish’, they had already assimilated into ways of being and knowing that were not home-grown by any means. By the 20th century most of the planet had been incorporated into a globalised system, with very few people and places left untouched by some kind of imperial violence, which has only expanded since. Irish whiteness cannot be separated from the stories of the Irish diaspora who have participated in settler colonial projects, and who have resultantly had sizable impacts on Irish society within Ireland through leveraging monetary and political power gained at the expense of Indigenous peoples in those places.

The conditions under which many Irish people emigrated were impossibly difficult and miserable, but once they reached the settler colonial states they were gradually assimilated into those projects which were and are still fundamentally stealing and destroying Indigenous land for short term gain. As we know, many Irish settlers found themselves in the so-called United States in particular, with now 32 million people identifying as Irish-American there, over six times the population of Ireland itself. Irish people becoming white is as much a story of Irish settler assimilation into American white supremacist structures as it is of people in Ireland constructing a nation state and social order founded on colonial inheritances. The mutual co-construction of domestic Irish nationalism and diasporic Irish nationalism is telling: in Ireland there is a mythical narrative of brilliance and exceptionalism surrounding the Irish diaspora (particularly those in America), and for many Irish Americans there is a mythical narrative of romanticised victimhood that conveniently bypasses their role in a continuing colonial project and grants them imaginary historical innocence.

In broad terms, the modern economy of Ireland has been indirectly funded by wealth generated by the existence of settler colonial projects whose very existence is dependent on genocides and ecocides against Indigenous peoples in those lands, in particular as I say the US. Variously, people in Ireland have received remittances from relatives that left; charities, churches, political parties, paramilitaries, and many other organisations in Ireland have received direct funding from diasporic groups; and of course, Ireland now acting as a tax haven for multinational corporations and as a pollution haven for pharmaceutical corporations and other heavy industry has benefited enormously, at least monetarily, from this colonial wealth, which further entangles us all in stories of global extraction and exploitation.

While the violence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland during the 20th century is now being documented and widely discussed in Irish society, there is little to no wider discourse on their role in colonialism elsewhere. The missions seem to still enjoy an assumption of benevolence in Irish society, when really the spiritual empire of the Catholic Church was the closest thing to an official empire that Ireland has had. The explicitly stated focus of Irish catholic missions in the 20th century was the conversion of pagans. Colonialism has been as much a story of spiritual and ontological domination by the Catholic Church as anything else, and Irish Catholic participation in this within English controlled places is something considerably overlooked in both Irish historiographies broadly and in public discourse.

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This 2022 essay is an excerpt from my self-paced online course Decolonization in Ireland: unravelling whiteness and remembering the land. To learn more, including a lot of historical and theoretical context for what I talked about here, and possibilities for where to go from here, consider signing up for the course which can be found at my website gaelicreexistence.com.