Irish slaves myth

The Irish slaves myth is a conflation of the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries on one hand, and the chattel slavery of Africans sold into the Atlantic slave trade and their descendants on the other, usually used to undermine contemporary African American demands for equality and reparations. It is also employed by some Irish nationalists, both to highlight historical British oppression of Irish people and to obscure the fact that some Irish people benefited from the African slave trade.

The myth has become increasingly prominent since the 1990s and has been prominent in online memes and social media debates. This has led a large number of historians to publicly condemn it.

From the 17th to the 19th centuries, tens of thousands of British and Irish indentured servants emigrated to British America. The majority of these entered into indentured servitude in the Americas for a set number of years willingly in order to pay their way across the Atlantic, but at least 10,000 were transported as punishment for rebellion or other crimes, then subjected to forced labour for a given period.

During this same period, the Atlantic slave trade was enslaving millions of Africans and bringing them to the Americas, including the British colonies, where they were put to work. In Ireland, Africa, and in the Caribbean, Irish people benefitted from the African trade, as slave merchants, factors, investors, and owners. According to historian Nini Rodgers, "every group in Ireland produced merchants who benefited from the slave trade and the expanding slave colonies." Unlike Irish indentured servants, enslaved Africans generally were made slaves for life and slave status was imposed on their children at birth.

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Wikipedia