According to the Upworthy News, 14-year-old Rebecca Fried, has put up a strong academic challenge against college professor, Richard Jensen for denying the racial discrimination suffered in the past by Irish people in the United States of America.
In 2002, Professor Jensen is said to have published a piece in the Journal of Social History, that states the available history of discrimination against the Irish population in the US is not true.
In his work, ” No Irish Need Apply (NINA): A Myth of Victimization”, Jensen concluded that the belief that employment vacancy adverts published in newspapers in the past barred an Irish person from applying to a job is a myth.
Rebecca’s father is said to have one day called his kids, including Rebecca, to share with them the work of Professor Jensen. He hoped to educate his kids about how Irish discrimination had apparently never actually happened.
However, even after listening to her father, Rebecca was not convinced and decided to consult Google to satisfy her curiosity. When she typed in her Google search, she found irrefutable photo proof that Jensen’s article was wrong.
At first, Rebecca thought the information she had found was not credible due to the unreliable nature of some information available on the internet; however, when she searched further, she found the evidence in newspaper archives and libraries.
At that point, Rebecca became convinced that Jensen’s work needed to be scrutinized further. With her father’s help, Rebecca reached out to Kerby Miller, a recently retired professor and Irish history scholar.
When they reached out to Professor Miller, he told them that Jensen’s claims were right in line with the anti-Irish propaganda that had spread in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War. Miller said he had reached out to Jensen to correct him when he published the work, but Jensen accused him of being an IRA terrorist due to the fact that he [Miller] had married a Catholic woman.
After this clarification, Miller helped Rebecca publish her own academic rebuttal to Jensen’s publication. Her article, “No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs,” was published in the Oxford Journal of Social History on July 4, 2015.
When the news of Rebecca’s publication hit IrishCentral.com, Jensen took to the comments section to defend himself and make a few patronizing jabs at his adolescent adversary.
The two went back and forth in the comments for a bit, with Rebecca showing her trademark maturity in her responses to him while also pointing out the central flaws in his thesis. Jensen continued to insist that “No Irish need apply” was the result of mass delusion. But Rebecca rightly pointed out, that the burden of proof should lie with him rather than on the collective cultural memory of an entire nation.
Rebecca’s courage against the professor shows what we can learn from history and how it’s applicable in this modern era. Did you know that Frederick Douglass wrote in 1846: “No people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion, than the Irish people?” And did you know that the Irish weren’t even considered “white” until the last hundred years?
According to activists, the fascinating history of discrimination and people like Jensen trying to deny it means “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.” While you probably won’t witness much Irish racism in 2015, it does not mean it never existed. It is said that by re-writing or denying the shameful facts of discrimination, past or present, it is made easier for it to happen again and again.
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My grandmother, who actually lived during this period, told me first hand memories about the discrimination, told me about the hatred she felt that was directed against her. You know there sometimes are these academic challenges that arise that attempt to question our notions of reality with actual very little in the way of relavent data being drawn in support of their notions. This one wanted to white wash a factual social problem that is still endemic to our society today (discrimination against minorities). Understanding that academia are in fact popullated with actual humans beholden to all the failings the rest of us have, we need to be credulous of all the research that gets peddled to us as truth, we need to actively try to understand that just because an academic says so, does not make it so. What we should do with their data is question the jelly out of it, and see if what is being premised actually comports with reality or is this another pile of academic bs, which btw happens to be a big controversial issue right now amongst academics. Another thing we should come to understand is that the universe, us, our anthropic ability to question reality, is in fact emergent phenomena that never ever ever ever ever will be explained in reductionist terms. Frankly being human they are subject to the same discriminations, biases, and delusions as the rest of us, and therefore should have the same levels of skepticism applied.
Thank You. Thank You Very Much for Sharing your comment. 🙂
The main advertisement in there, stating no Irish need apply, is clearly written by an irish person. Half of my family are O’Neils from Ireland. They are fiercely proud people.
Especially irish travellers, the home must be spotless, otherwise you’re scum, and people talk and talk about who’s decent.
Maybe the person advertising that job who definitely appears to be irish herself, being called ‘miss O’neil’ didn’t want their own people seeing their mess, if the irish community were close.
Many people wouldn’t want people who are in their community to come into their home and see their mess and clean up after them.
They’d want outsiders who wouldn’t repeat what sort of mess they’d seen and had to clean in the home and potentially tell friends and relatives of Miss O’neil.
She may have even wanted a black cleaner, with some illusion that they made better housekeepers, with it being so close to the time of slavery, but it wasn’t correct of her to ask for a ‘negro’ maid.
She just didn’t want people who know her family and friends to be coming and doing the dirty work.
Anyone who thinks anti-Irish discrimination is bogus knows nothing about US history. Just look at the history of government schooling, with Thomas Mann and his anti “Papist” BS to scare Mass. citizens into creating the government schools to “convert” the Irish immigrant kids into being good little Protestants. The national guard was called out to force the Irish kids to attend these schools.