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The Unwanted People: My “Third World” Ancestors (and Yours), Part 3

(You may want to read Part 1 here. Or not. Your call.)

  • And still they teach you in your school
  • About those glorious days of rule
  • And how it’s your destiny to be
  • Superior to me
  • But if you’ve any kind of mind
  • You’ll see that all humankind
  • Are the children of this earth
  • And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out

Part 2 examined the resurgence of the phrase “Third World” and it being used to single out unwanted immigrant groups, almost exclusively non-white. I noted the parallels to the way this phrase has been used in past portrayals of Irish immigrants, promising to go into more detail. Importantly, negative perceptions were used to justify ill treatment and discriminatory policies, as they are today toward other groups.

Why were Irish immigrants so frequently targets of discrimination? Much of this animus was transferred from Britain in the form of stereotypes that extend at least as far back as the 16th century.[1] These depicted the Irish as ‘wilde,’ wicked, ‘bloud-thirsty’ cannibals and animals, ‘Devills in humane shape,’ and full of ‘naturall fury’ (Holland 2017). By the 1700s Irish people were also painted as fools, drunks, and idiots such “that the Irish were no longer singularly an object of fear, but now one of ridicule and mockery” (Holland 2017).

Eventually, Irish people on both sides of the anglophone Atlantic were racialized as qualitatively different and inferior, ascribed either due to their “hardware” (biology, lineage, evolution) or “software” (culture, religion, language, upbringing, etc.).

St. Patrick’s Vermin: A Violent Case of Social Indigestion

As early as 1718, Bostonians blamed Irish immigrants for creating a food shortage, with Thomas Lechmere writing that “these confounded Irish will eat us all up” (Shipton, 1936: 238).[2] Harvard historian Clifford K. Shipton (1936) referred to the 1730s as “the first Celtic invasion” of New England, with Irish of different religions making up the bulk of the imported servant class, indentured for terms of roughly four to seven years (p. 233). According to Shipton, “It was the Celtic temperament and manners of this group of immigrants which produced the violent case of social indigestion from which New England suffered” (emphasis added). Old newspapers, such as The New England Courant (Sept 21, 1724) mocked the Ulster Irish in their midst as “greasy Teaguelandish Slubberdegullians[3],” while the Jan 11, 1725 edition referred to Irish Catholics as “St. Patrick’s Vermin,” adding that:

“They serve us for no other Purposes than to plague their Masters and Mistresses and debauch their Children. This gives us an ill Opinion of Foreigners, expecially (sic) those coming from Ireland.” (cited in Shipton 1936, p. 235).

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The Unwanted People: My “Third World” Ancestors (and Yours), Part 2

(You may want to read Part 1 here. Or not. Your call.)

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“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

– Abraham Lincoln, 1855

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In 1992, Thérèse Caherty and colleagues in Ireland published a series of short essays with the provocative title “Is Ireland a Third World Country?” In response to that question, one of the editors, Caitríona Ruane, wrote that “the answers were as various and diverse as those participating” (p. ix), highlighting the ambiguity of the concept and Ireland’s unique status. One chapter by Queens University sociologist Liam O’Dowd noted that at the time (early 1990s, remember) Ireland was among the 30 richest industrialized economies in the world. Therefore, he said directly, by that criterion most people would not categorize it as “Third World.” For comparison, Ireland today ranks in the top 10 for GNI per capita according to the World Bank and 11th for the Human Development Index.

However, O’Dowd pointed out that Ireland still faced high levels of poverty. Other authors noted Ireland’s parallels with other countries typically thought of as “Third World”, including its former colonial status, its semi-peripheral position in the global economy, political patronage and clientelism, the largescale displacement of its population abroad, human rights abuses in Northern Ireland, a reliance on foreign corporations for employment, and inequality. The chapter by economist Andy Storey and sociologist Ronaldo Munck reminded the reader that colonialism can leave “a legacy of distorted economic structures” and that upon independence Ireland emerged as an agricultural economy with relatively little industrialization, and therefore “Ireland’s developmental reference points are in the Third World rather than the First” (p. 61-2).  Journalist Carol Coulter suggested Ireland was “somewhere between the First and the Third worlds,” and obviously not quite Second World either, for that matter (p. 13). Keep this in mind for later.

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I have come to know

Thorin: “Farewell, good thief. I wish to part in friendship, and would take back my words at the Gate.”

Bilbo: “There are many words I would take back also.”

Thorin: “And does it take this to make us see each other?…. I was wrong. You did understand war. It was I who did not, until now.”

Bilbo: “Farewell, King under the Mountain!”

Thorin: “Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways: food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”

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The Unwanted People: My “Third World” Ancestors (and Yours), Part 1

“(This is) a lecture on the mingling and merging and therefore on the oneness and unity of all the races of mankind...Let no Irishman throw a stone at the foreigner; he may hit his own clansman. Let no foreigner revile the Irish; he may be vilifying his own stock.” 

– James Connolly, 1908

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Years ago, on a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in idyllic Cooperstown New York, my father called me over to see something he found in the next exhibit. He pointed me to an 1860s job advertisement for a baseball club in Washington D.C. searching for top players, while also promising them a government job, a “first-rate position” in the Treasury Department (so much for meritocracy). The ad concluded with the disclaimer: “No Irish need apply.”

It wasn’t for lack of ability. The historian Jerrold Casway (2006: page X) referred to the late 19th century as “the Emerald Age of Baseball,” with Irish Americans becoming “baseball’s dominant ethnic group” and eventually making up as much as 40% of major league rosters. Casway noted that the game provided “a shortcut to the American Dream” for the sons of Irish immigrants, mere decades after the Great Famine. These would include early stars and Hall of Famers (often with colorful nicknames) such as Ed Delahanty, “Pud” Galvin, “Orator Jim” O’Rourke, and Mike “King” Kelly.[1]

But this isn’t an essay about 19th century baseball, as tempting as that topic might be to me (only me?), as an aficionado of the beautiful game that has marked the time.[2] Nor is it about discrimination against Irish immigrants being unique (it categorically was not). Rather, it’s about striking nativist parallels seen in the United States today, particularly against so-called “Third World” immigrants. And I suppose for that reason it’s also about empathy, and decency. In many ways the species of nativism seen today is even more pernicious than yesteryear in ideology and its effect on actual human lives and deaths in the streets and in custody. And, I think lamentably, such nativistic thought is often exhibited by people whose ancestors faced similar discrimination, of which many seem to have forgotten.[3]

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What Will Be the Public Health Costs of I.C.E.?

Summary: (1) Previous research shows that an immigration raid in Iowa in 2008 was associated with lower birth weight. (2) This was true of infants born to both foreign-born and US-born Latina women, suggesting this association centered around fear of being racially profiled, not merely immigration status. (3) Low birth weight is correlated with a range of health issues, including chronic diseases in middle age. (4) The scale of immigration raids today is much larger than 2008, affecting a wider segment of the population, increasing collateral damage among citizens. (5) One survey found that roughly 1 in 4 U.S. adults worry about deportation, with higher rates among immigrants and US born, second-generation citizens. This constitutes tens of millions of Americans, including an unspecified number of women of reproductive age. (6) In addition to human rights abuses, harsh deportation policies will likely lead to prenatal stress, impaired early development, and extensive long-term costs to public health.

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From fairimmigration.org

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“And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”

– Los Angeles resident Elizabeth Castillo, referring to local ICE raids (source)

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In 2017, Nicole Novak and colleagues looked at the effects of a major government raid against suspected undocumented, primarily Hispanic, migrant workers in Postville Iowa (Novak et al 2017). In May of 2008, nine hundred ICE agents, along with a Black Hawk helicopter, raided a meat-processing plant in Postville, resulting in the arrests of nearly 400 workers. After a five-month prison sentence, 297 people were eventually deported. However, even those who were not deported (or even arrested) were affected.

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Class Exercise: How Justifiable Is Violence?

If you ever get close to a human
And human behavior
Be ready, be ready to get confused
…
They’re terribly, terribly, terribly moody
…
And there is no map
And a compass wouldn’t help at all
(Bjork, Human Behaviour , 1993)

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This semester I tried something new in my undergraduate class on anthropology and war. Briefly, the class has two parts: in the first half of the semester we explore cooperation, conflict, and war from an anthropological perspective. In the second half, we look at various ways that wars affect health and become embodied, or get “under the skin.”

When writing the syllabus back in early January, I thought about delving deeper into what’s going on in people’s minds when they feel violence is warranted, a topic I’ve written about before:

determining when violence (lethal and non-lethal) is morally justifiable can be a gray zone, with people positioning themselves on a continuum between completely nonviolent “doves” to hyper-aggressive “hawks.” While many people hold nonviolence as an ideal; living up to that ideal perfectly has proven difficult to almost impossible. The question is where people draw their line.  

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For the class exercise, I gave students a survey. On a scale of 0 to 100, I asked them to rate how justifiable it would be to use violence under 28 different scenarios. For a bit more background, I picked some scenarios that were hypothetical (ex. Gandhi’s famous example of using violence to “dispatch” a man in the act of committing mass murder with a sword), while others were based on real-world events. I did not tell students which scenarios were hypothetical or not ahead of time, but did so after compiling results, which they then discussed in groups. A few scenarios involved variations on a theme to find where people drew their lines. Some scenarios were about the behavior of other people, while others were about how students themselves might respond. And some involved lethal violence, others sub-lethal, and still others pertained to threats of violence (therefore, the numeric results aren’t all directly comparable).

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USAID, Civil Wars in Laos (& Elon Musk)

Last week, Elon Musk wrote that “USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op,” as a partial explanation for his desire to close the organization. I am not an expert on the entire history of USAID (United States Agency for International Development), but I do know a little something about one particular episode in its past that contradicts Musk’s claim.

Long ago, I wrote my dissertation about some of the long-term health impacts of the civil wars in Laos from the 1950s-70s. That required interviewing and assessing Laotian refugees. It also meant delving into different subjects, including the biology of what was then called the “fetal origins hypothesis,” today commonly known as the DOHaD idea. It also meant plunging into the history of the wars and how the civilian population fared. I found the history fascinating, involving a revolving door of royalists, communists, and “neutralists,” featuring Laotians themselves, but against a backdrop of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and later intervention by Vietnam, Thailand, and of course the United States.

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Resilience

“When there is a storm, and you stand in front of a tree, if you look at its branches, you swear it will fall. But if you watch the trunk, you will see its stability.”

—Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant

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Trump: 21st Century Demagogue

Demagogue /n./ ˈdem’ə gäg’ : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

“Blessed are the ‘shithole countries,’ for they gave us the American Dream.” – Paul Hewson

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In the past month, much of the political discourse in the U.S. revolved around fearmongering by Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance against immigrants, specifically Haitian immigrants in Ohio. After Trump repeated baseless rumors about Haitians stealing (and eating) people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, that town was subjected to at least 33 bomb threats, including schools, government buildings, and local colleges, according to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (a Republican, if that matters to you).

While the bomb threats turned out to be empty, they were nonetheless highly disruptive, with hospitals put on lockdown, City Hall and schools evacuated, and universities forced to hold classes remotely. DeWine revealed that there was evidence that some of the threats originated overseas, likely in an attempt to create a bit of chaos in the U.S. Yet, other threats were local and not so empty. Haitians in Springfield have had property  vandalized and reported feeling anxious and afraid for their lives. Haitian-American media outlets have also been threatened. And even a white business owner in Springfield (a Republican who voted twice for Trump) has had his life and those of his family threatened after he defended his Haitian employees. The fallout for ordinary people has been very real, stemming largely from Trump’s and Vance’s incitement.

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(New Publication) Coming of Age in War: Conflict & Menarche

Together with my brilliant colleagues Delaney Glass (UToronto) and Meredith Reiches (UMass Boston), we recently published our article “Coming of age in war: Early life adversity, age at menarche, and mental health” in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

This was a special issue on forced migration and physiology, guest edited by Lee Gettler (Notre Dame) and Jelena Jankovic-Rankovic (University of South Carolina), and I think we probably compiled one of the most comprehensive reviews to date about armed conflict and menarche (first menstruation).

There are a couple of hypotheses about how child and adolescent bodies respond to early stressors: one is that bodies should mature quicker in times of uncertainty to increase one’s chances of reaching reproductive maturity. (The literature suggests that this does seem to happen under certain circumstances and types of stressors). The other is that maturation would be delayed, possibly due to energetic constraints.

We identified 36 samples from 29 studies in the literature that looked at armed conflict and menarche, with a range of methods and populations from around the globe. Here’s some of what we found…

Locations of samples on conflict and menarche we identified from the literature.

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