As we move into more of the parallel histories of black people in America and the Irish, I have found the most interesting theme of each group’s struggles to escape the oppression and prejudices of the majority of their respective times, with the whites in America and the English colonizers in Ireland. Each dominating majority used the notion of “not yet ready” to describe its downcast group in order to maintain their own positions of power and status. Not only does this phrase create and rapidly proliferate explicitly racist sentiment among the mostly white majority, but its sense of superiority also allows for economic and political exploitation of each group of “others.” In America, whites used these attitudes to pass sweeping legislation, especially in the South, to prevent any sort of racial uplift for blacks. Jim Crow laws prohibited voting for blacks in the South and excluded them from virtually every area of society, essentially limiting them to sharecropping and still fulfilling similar roles to their slavehood for decades. The concept of “not yet ready” pushed writers such as Washington and DuBois to push in a variety of ways for social uplift, especially through education, but this practice only yielded middling success. As DuBois illustrates in “The Souls of Black Folk,” this cultural divide within the same ethnic community created great tensions between the educated and uneducated blacks, which neutralized the effectiveness of Washington and DuBois’s hopes. By facing more obstacles and true social progress, blacks in America were trapped in a harsh social space, unable to reach their reasonable goals while still being grossly mistreated by the white majorities.
Likewise, the Irish experienced similar slander to their culture and representation at the hands of the English majority, who took advantage of their crops to the point of near extinction when the potato famine hit. The introduction of the plantation system echoed its use in the Americas, in which the apparently ethnically inferior group is forced into work and after the abolition of each system, is still held in a form of indentured servitude. This continued colonial practice allowed for Britain to keep its hold over the Irish and profit off of their labor, while the Irish struggled without money for their work and extremely limited food supplies. Also, in the public eye, the Irish, as well as black people in America, were ridiculed constantly, mostly through caricatures which displayed each group as sub-human and apelike. However, one of the key differences between the blacks in America and the whites in Ireland was the Irish’s eventual acceptance into “whiteness” after generations of immigration into America, although this prohibition from full acceptance into modernity remains intact even to this day in several respects for African Americans. Whereas the Irish have been eventually welcomed into the sense of modernity brought about in the 19th century, black people must deal with the oppression of being deemed “never ready,” constantly trying to prove their similarity to the cultural majority to receive a fair chance.