Alluring myth of `Black Irish' may be a sign of hope

I was writing last week about the strange historical relationship between Ireland and ideas of racial identity and suggesting that it may contain some kinds of ambiguity that might be useful in the search for a more generous and open-ended ended sense of Irishness in the years to come. I promised, or, as some readers may feel, threatened, to return to the subject this week.

The first thing to be said is that the presence of ambiguity doesn't minimise the Irish history of racism, but it does allow us to suggest that there was more going on than simple bigotry. One of the things that was going on was the Irish using racial discourse as a way to explore their own contradictions.

Particularly in the field of culture, it is possible to discern a more contrary set of desires than the straightforward view of the Irish creating and perpetuating racist stereotypes might suggest. Nobody could claim that, say, Irish performers in the 19th century who put on black faces in the minstrel shows that were the most lucrative forms of entertainment, were not involved in a deeply racist and oppressive cultural act. But it is possible to acknowledge that fact while also recognising that as well as the racism, there was also an incoherent and inarticulate identification with blacks.

One thing that has to be remembered about blackface minstrels, for instance, is that it could function as a kind of alter ego, a mask behind which the performers could express thoughts that might otherwise be inexpressible. For one thing, Irish performers may well have identified rather closely with the typical minstrel nostalgia for a lost homeland and a romantic, rural paradise. Singing about My Old Kentucky Home and The Old Folks Back Home must have been, for immigrants and their children, more than just a blackface ritual.

David Roediger suggests that "Irish immigrants addressed their own divorce from connections with land and nature's rhythms in part by attempting to define pre-industrial behaviour, and even longing for the past itself, as `Black' behaviour. When Irish immigrant minstrel entertainers sang Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, they both expressed feelings of loss and exile and at the same time distanced themselves from those feelings through blackface."

Blacking up may also have been a way of expressing forms of sexuality that could not be expressed otherwise. It is notable that the two most successful minstrel female impersonators of the late 19th century were Irish - Patrick Francis Glassey, who performed as the Only Leon, and Anthony Cannon, who performed as Tony Hart. Both played near-white women opposite blacked-up men, in Hart's case, the famous Ned Harrigan. I don't think you need to be a paid-up Freudian to suggest that something was going on here, and that at its most obvious it was a black-and-white sexual fantasy.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, it was an Irishman, D.G Croly, who, with his co-author George Wakeman, jointly brought the word "miscegenation" into American usage in their pamphlet, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, published in 1863.

The pamphlet was written as an elaborate hoax, under the pretence that it was the work of abolitionists. It was designed to lure anti-slavery Republican Party leaders into endorsing sentiments which could then be used against them with the Irish electorate.

Chief among them was a fantasy of Irish-Black sex. They stressed that "connubial relations between black men and white Irish women" would be "pleasant to both parties", and they purported to argue that the mixing of Irish and black blood would be "of infinite service to the Irish . . . a more brutal race and lower in civilisation than the negro".

Again, though the political intention is racist, what is striking is that the fantasy of Irish-Black sexual relations could be so vividly imagined by an Irish-American like Croly. This ability to imagine racial mixing, and the broader level of underground identification with blacks to which it points, has remained present in contemporary Irish culture.

One sign of it might be the persistence, largely in oral tradition, of the myth of the "Black Irish", the supposed offspring of Spanish sailors thrown by the wreck of the Armada onto the Irish coast. The idea, for which there is little historical evidence, is still used in Ireland and in Irish America, to explain the fact that some Irish people have a dark, swarthy appearance. It was celebrated a few years by the poet Paul Durcan in his long dramatic poem Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

The fact that the notion of the Black Irish survived as a benign image, a heritage that Irish people cheerfully claim, suggests that it has a real allure. In fact, popular culture in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s has, considering how small the black population of Ireland has been, thrown up a surprising number of black heroes.

When I was growing up in the Dublin suburb of Crumlin, our local hero was the rock singer Phil Lynott, who was both Irish and black. It is striking, too, that the Irish had no difficulty identifying with black players on the Irish soccer team of the late 1980s and early 1990s which was the most potent popular emblem of nationhood. One of them, Paul McGrath, was the first grand marshal of the revamped St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin a few years ago.

It is, of course, easy for people to make heroes of sportsmen or musicians while still remaining hostile to the ordinary, poor immigrant, but the popularity of Roddy Doyle's novel, The Commitments, with s its image of poor Dubliners aspiring to be a black soul band suggests that there is some deeper allure to the idea of the Black Irish.

In it, of course, young Jimmy Rabbitte galvanises the potential members of the band he is trying to form by telling them: "Your music should be abou' where you're from and the sort of people yeh come from - Say it once, say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." They looked at him - James Brown. They were stunned by what came next. "The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads." They nearly gasped it was so true. "An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland . . . An' the northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin - Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."

In the imagination at least, the taunts once hurled at the Irish in America, that they were "white niggers", can be embraced as a source of pride. That pride suggests that at a critical moment in our history, the Irish may not be content with having become white and may be able to muster the courage to becoming fully human.