A group carries confederate flags past a Black Lives Matter rally in Oklahoma City on 10 July 2016. Sue Ogrocki/Press Association. All rights reserved.
In January 2015 I published an article on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery addressing the use of an ‘Irish slaves’ mythos and online memes to attack the Black Lives Matter movement and to mock calls for reparatory justice for American and Caribbean slavery. What is the ‘Irish slaves’ mythos? In short, the false equivalence of indentured or involuntary servitude with: (a) the transatlantic slave trade; (b) racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery; and (c) its legacies that continue to affect millions of people today. My motivation was the pressing need to publicly counter the campaign that decontextualises and equates these different but related histories in the service of white supremacist projects.
I hoped that the trend would fade as quickly as it had come to prominence. Instead, the memes went viral. For nearly two years now I have tracked the trajectory of the ‘Irish slaves’ mythos online and in that time the memefication of this myth has reached unprecedented levels of visibility and popularity across the social web, primarily in the United States. Google searches for the term ‘Irish slaves’ have exploded since October 2014, with September 2016 as the highest month on record so far.
