When writing out my final thoughts on our class, I cannot stop thinking about the scene between Jacobs-Jenkins and Boucicault in “An Octoroon” where the two playwrights engage in a back and forth game of telling the other, “fuck you.” At first glance, this argument seems to be a simple attempt at humor, depicting two playwrights arguing against each other for little reason other than the fact that they’re both drinking. But I believe that this half-page of expletives is a perfect way to describe the engagement between the blacks and Irish of the Atlantic throughout the course of history.
Throughout the course of this semester we have seen African Americans and the Irish attempt to describe their systems of oppression through analogies toward the other group. I am arguing in my final paper that these analogies are mainly one-sided on the part of the Irish and that African Americans typically reject the comparison. The black vocalization of “fuck me? fuck you!” can be interpreted as “fuck me for not understanding your struggle? fuck you for making the comparison!” whereas the Irish vocalization of this phrase can be interpreted as “fuck me for making the comparison? fuck you for not understanding our struggle!” This ends up being a constant loop, just as we see in “An Octoroon,” a back and forth game of trying to figure out whether the two groups’ struggles are equivalent to one another. But I don’t believe that equivalence decides whether the Black and Green comparison is valid.
There are similarities between the two struggles, albeit I believe African Americans had it much harder than the Irish, but arguing against one another over who’s struggle was more severe does not really do much to improve one’s situation. At first I believed Douglass’s claim that “there is no comparison” between the two struggles, but now I am starting to doubt my initial thought. Human suffering should be something anyone can empathize with, yet we divide our sufferings based on race. If we believe Gilroy that race is nothing but a social construct, then why do we restrict our empathy based on differences in race? The “fuck me? fuck you!” mentality is predicated upon differences in race; Jacob-Jenkins and Boucicault offer two interpretations of the same story and argue with each other over who is a true playwright, the black playwright of the modern era who struggles to produce the play or the Irish playwright who wrote the original story who put on the production with ease. The two men are too focused on their differences to accept that, maybe, both of their interpretations of the same story are valid. There is a struggle between African Americans and the Irish to empathize with each other throughout every work we’ve read due to the differences in their struggles, and the constant focus on which situation was more severe. But if the two groups could hone in on the similarities of the struggles, I believe that we live closer to Gilroy’s image of a world without race than a world where groups constantly question the validity of pleas for empathy.
Reading the title of your blog post, I actually laughed out loud. Not just because expletives, haha, but because of how ironically and unironically apt your application of that exchange is. I would never have thought of it that way, but it really put into words the extraordinary emotion that is behind the struggles we have looked at in class and the frustrations of misunderstood identities and histories. And it recalls the unproductive arguments I’m sure we’ve all had, where any attempts at real communication are lost in the passion of making your own points. We shouldn’t restrict our empathy on the basis of race, but should still be wary of the way the socially constructed realities of race inform different life experiences as we attempt to make comparisons like those across the ocean. I’m going to keep thinking about this, but what an interesting take away for the dynamics and relationships we have discovered in our class!