The Association of Mixed Race Irish

Article :

'Defying the exclusionary homogeneity of Irish whiteness: mixed-race children in Irish industrial schools in the twentieth century'

October 2022

by Dr Phil Mullen

Abstract:

This article uses the findings from my PhD research of an autoethnographic investigation of the construction and negotiation of racial identity(ies) for the researcher and 15 women, all of mixed Black-Irish descent, who grew up in the Irish institutional care system in the twentieth century. It describes how the combined effects of being racialized, parentless, and institutionalized resulted in a subjective (re)construction of a racial self that accommodated the social reality of how we were perceived within the predominately monoracial nation. Our racial identities were palimpsestic, being written and rewritten, according to contextual and relational factors, and alternated between biological and cultural modes of discourse on identification and ascription. I argue that the negotiation of our mixedness is not adequately encapsulated by existing explanatory frameworks that rely on the familial setting to ground mixed-race identity formation.

 Alternative Perspectives: Ireland’s Centenaries.

5 February 2022

On 16th January 1922 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland handed over power to the new Irish Provisional Government and a State commemoration took place at Dublin Castle in January 2022. This was one of many commemorations that will take place as part of the planned “Decade of Centenaries” and the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI) is keen to reflect on and share other commemoration stories that are expected to remain outside mainstream narratives reported in the media.

To this end, we are delighted to present below a lecture by Dr Phil Mullen which she gave at TCD’s Global Brain Health Institute at TCD in January 2022. As this is a year of Centenaries, this lecture is about the ninth Irish Race Congress held in Paris in January 1922 and the Publication of Ulysses also released in January 1922. It covers some interesting research on black people in Ireland.

Lecture on January 1922 Irish Race Congress, January 1922 Publication of Ulysses and some Interesting Research on black people in Ireland

By Dr Phil Mullen

Like so many young people who took the ferry to Holyhead to escape Ireland in the early 1980s, I embodied that expressed desire of James Joyce to “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Maybe outside of Ireland, and away from that cannibalistic sow (Joyce at his best in describing Ireland), I could find what it meant to be Irish and who I really was. As well as earn a few bob.

London didn’t pan out for me and I soon found myself back home in Ireland reflecting on Joyce’s words. As a black Irish woman, my own perceived racial difference was an unbidden token of not fitting in, a torn ticket stub that would never allow me, or any of the other hundreds of black children locked away in Irish institutional ‘care’, entry to the ballroom of belonging. But I also thought about the word ‘forge’ and its dual sense of positive creation – to make something, and duplicitous artifice, as in a forgery. Maybe that racial conscience - so long denied to me - was itself a forgery, a contrivance that manipulated mere excrescence of skin to suggest membership.

These two possible meanings of forging an Irish racial identity come to mind again as we celebrate the centenary of two events this week and next in Paris, that propelled on to the world stage very definite notions of what it meant to be Irish.

The first of these, the week-long Irish Race Convention opened in the Salle des Fêtes of the Continental Hotel on Monday, 23 January 1922, on the third anniversary of the establishment of Dáil Eireann and the first shots fired in the Irish War of Independence at Soloheadbeg. I have long been interested in the study of the race conventions as they reflect the understanding held of the Irish collective and its racial destiny. Widely viewed as a failure due to the tensions which erupted over the Treaty split and accompanying Balkanisation of Ireland into North and South, this was the ninth such Irish Race Convention (two more would follow in New York City in 1947 and 1994 respectively), and was very much in keeping with the spirit of the times as the first World Zionist Congress and the first Pan-African Conference had been held in 1897 and 1900 respectively.

The lofty World Congress of the Irish Race (as it was termed) intended to win international recognition for the new Irish state and establish as, Éamon de Valera put it, the “expression and the illustration of Irish individuality”. A year earlier, in January 1921, Count Plunkett, Minister for Foreign Affairs, had spoken of the Irish race “as but one body” and the first session in Paris heard papers delivered by Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill and both W. B. and Jack Yeats echoing this sentiment. A general invitation was issued to 30 million of those of Irish blood the world over, and Irish newspapers of January 1922 spoke of it as being the greatest assembly of the Irish race since Brian Boru convened a similar hosting in 1014. Though delegates came from as far as South Africa, Australia, South America, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Java and even China (in the guise of recently returned Catholic missionaries), for various reasons Irish Canadians did not attend, and while 60 delegates were expected from the large Irish community in the United States, only four attended.

Who also did not attend were members of the 19th and early 20th century black Irish community. For a tantalising hint of these ignored individuals and their documented presence we have to turn to the remarkable work of Dr Bill Hart, formerly of the University of Ulster at Coleraine, who complicates firmly held historical images of Ireland as monolithically white.

Given the racial politics of the US in the 19th century, the census records of that emigrant’s lodestar were singularly focused on recording the racial backgrounds of their citizens and consequently took considerable efforts to explicitly record not only the race of the individual according to White, Black and Mulatto (mixed) categories and their country of birth, but also that of their parents. By examining these records for the period 1850-1920, Dr. Hart has identified 1,694 black or mixed race individuals who were born in Ireland prior to 1900, many of whom had black or mixed race parents also born in Ireland. This figure only records those who, like their white compatriots, migrated to the US during this turbulent period. The number of black Irish, born in Ireland, who migrated to the US in the decades before 1900 is further compounded by the fact that the US census figures for 1890 were destroyed and therefore, it is possible that the number is even greater. Furthermore, these records obviously do not contain the black Irish, born in Ireland pre-1900, who opted to remain, or who migrated to England, Canada, Australia or elsewhere in a similar manner to so many other Irish at that time. This suggests a continuity of presence of this community, but it is a presence of absence from racial assumptions made by the Irish people, in Declan Kiberd’s phrase, “secure in their national philosophy” of racial homogeneity.

Just a few days later and a few streets away from where the Race Convention delegates jockeyed for control of the short-lived ‘Fine Ghaedheal’, an organisation to represent Irish people throughout the world (with de Valera at its head), a different expression of Ireland’s racial conviction finally saw the light of day. On Rue de l’Odéon, on February 2nd, the occasion of Joyce’s 40th birthday, Sylvia Beach, the “midwife of modernism” from her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, published the full 262,869 words of Ulysses in its unexpurgated entirety. The book is full of examples of the exclusionary impulse in the operations of Irish nation- and identity-building, whether republican (the Citizen) or unionist (Mr. Deasy), as well as the accompanying raced language. Every single Irish person of non-white colouring has heard a similar ‘where are you from?’ question such as that posed by the Citizen to Leopold Bloom, “What is your nation, if I may ask?” to which they may well echo Bloom’s reply “Ireland. I was born here. Ireland.”

In Ulysses, Joyce painted a picture of the Irish in all their various forms, and sure enough I find the language of my fellow citizens who dismantled me so much growing up, a language which reflects the superimposed roles of race, nation, gender, and religion in defining exclusion and inclusion. On seeing an advertisement of a popular minstrel show and its star Eugene Stratton “grinning with thick n***** lips” Father Conmee is unable to separate the “negro” impersonator Stratton from the “souls of black and brown and yellow men ... and the African mission”. For my part, on reading those words, I am unable to separate my thoughts from a childhood of school collections for the black babies and experiencing a range of racial calumnies that would make a Klan gathering proud. Or my horror at lynching by “a lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a Sambo strung up in a tree”. Or the reductive sexualisation of the black body as Molly fantasises about black penises but ridicules a child by likening its hair to that of blacks. I find myself as one of the transgressive ‘curiosities’ of Bloom’s fantasy, the ‘negress’ epitomised by Cissy Caffrey, who he calls “the dark one with the mop head and the n***** mouth”, and “golliwog curls”, and later as a “shilling whore”.

Perhaps Joyce’s language simply conforms to the Eurocentric bias of non-whites much as he seemed to do in relation to other racial biases (for example he muses in Ulysses that Irish Italians liked to tuck into purloined cats, still a common trope for the culinary ‘Other’ in Ireland as I grew up). Another intriguing possibility, contained in the challenge presented by research like that of Dr. Hart, is that perhaps “[m]adcap Ciss with her golliwog curls” hints at an atavistic truth outside the purview of Joycean scholars as well as those who cling to the foundational myth of Irish racial homogeneity. Blackness in Ireland did not emerge suddenly with large-scale immigration to Ireland in the 1990s but has been a presence in different periods of Irish history, and certainly as far back as pre-history (as the 2021 hit RTE show on The Burren pointed out). Perhaps Joyce is inadvertently referencing this Irish bloodline in his description of Cissy, a bloodline which forges the Irish racial conscience, and which will one day be acknowledged at some future Congress of the Irish Race attended by our now more racially diverse population.