Our lack of shame may breed a new racism

Shame, though often bad for individuals, is almost always good for nations. Guilty memories encourage second thoughts. In Germany recollections of the Holocaust limit the appeal of nationalism. In the US guilt over slavery and discrimination acts as a check to racism.

But in Ireland we are, literally, shameless. In our collective memory we are always the victims, never the perpetrators. We are innocent of the great crimes of inhumanity. We remember oppression, bigotry and injustice as forces directed at us. We lack a sense of historical shame and, in its absence, we are free to behave shamefully.

A big new musical, Ragtime, opened on Broadway this week, and it's so good that it will probably be there for a long time. It's based on E.L. Doctorow's panoramic novel of the same name on the birth of American modernity. It's smart and fluent and epic in its sweep. And for any Irish person watching it, the musical makes the cheeks burn with the healthy glow of shame. For at last, at a time of rampant Hibernophilia in popular culture, there is a piece of mass entertainment in which the Irish are the villains. We are the bad guys, not because of anti-Irish racism, but because of Irish racism.

In the novel Doctorow writes of the turn-of-the-century Italian and eastern European immigrants in New York: "They were filthy and illiterate. They stank of fish and garlic. They had running sores. They had no honour and worked for next to nothing. They stole. They drank. They raped their own daughters. They killed each other casually. Among those who despised them the most were the second-generation Irish, whose fathers had been guilty of the same crimes: Irish kids pulled the beards of old Jews and knocked them down. They upended the pushcarts of Italian peddlers."

In the musical, the pivotal incident is an attack on an "uppity" black man by the members of the Emerald Isle fire company (fire companies were little more than ethnic street gangs). Mark Twain remarked that people took out insurance, not against fires, but against the fire companies. The Irishmen ambush him on the road, abuse him with racial insults, and wreck the pride of his life, his new Model T Ford. When he goes looking for justice, the Irish policemen and Irish judges make sure he doesn't get it. The eventual result is, for both the Irish and the black man, mutual destruction.

It's shaming, but also liberating, to encounter such a truthful story about ourselves. We haven't had the guts to tell such stories ourselves. And the rest of the world has colluded in our innocent selfimage. In popular entertainment now, Irish is the thing to be. After years of negative stereotypes, we have embraced these positive ones. And it's bad for us. It stunts our awareness of the past as a complex terrain in which our best instincts and our worst have each been given full rein.

The truth is that our ambiguity about racism goes back over 150 years. In 1841, largely under the influence of Daniel O'Connell (his opposition to slavery was so strong that he refused to visit the US while it was legal), the black anti-slavery campaigner, Charles Lenox Remond, was given a warm welcome in Ireland.

About 60,000 Irish people, among them O'Connell and the temperance priest, Father Mathew, signed an appeal to the Irish-American community which Remond brought back with him to America: "Irishmen and Irishwomen! Treat the coloured people as your equals, as brethren. By your memories of Ireland, continue to love liberty, hate slavery, cling by the abolitionists, and in America you will do honour to the name of Ireland." But even with O'Connell's huge authority behind it, the appeal was a shameful failure. It was roundly denounced by the overwhelming majority of Irish-American newspapers and societies. The Irish Catholic Bishop John Hughes of New York, for instance, implied that the appeal was a forgery but added that, if it were not, then it was "the duty of every naturalised Irishman to resist and repudiate the address with indignation."

This episode was, and is, emblematic of an Irish double-think on race. In the abstract, secure within our own monolithic white Christian culture, we are all for justice and equality. In the concrete, placed in situations where we have to co-exist with people of other races, very many of us become racists.

Time and again in the US, Irish revolutionary demands for justice turned to excuses for white privilege. John Binns, one of the bravest and most indefatigable of United Irishmen, emigrated to the US after the 1798 Rising and became, as a newspaper editor, a major force in the politics of Philadelphia. There he denounced the free blacks of the city as a "very numerous and useless" class, and consistently upheld the rights of slave-owners.

There were, of course, very many Irish people in the US who lived and socialised and intermarried with blacks. But as a group, the Irish integrated themselves into American modernity largely by distinguishing themselves from the blacks. They didn't start out as "whites": they became that way. Initially they were equal to or even lower than blacks in the social order. Tenement landlords often preferred black tenants, whom they regarded as cleaner and more respectable than the Irish. The black leader Frederick Douglass complained that the Irish were replacing the blacks as servants, waiters and flunkies, because they were more servile and willing to endure worse treatment.

The Irish were often referred to as "niggers turned inside out". Blacks, for their part, were called "smoked Irish". In this context, racism was the easiest way to prove that you were white. The Irish forced their way into white society by turning on the blacks.

And the reason for remembering this shameful history is that we are in danger of doing it all over again. In the US in the last century we joined the modern world by inventing ourselves as a white race. In Ireland at the end of this century our arrival in the modern world is being coupled with a new consciousness of race.

We are working our way up from the bottom of the heap. We are elbowing aside our competitors in eastern Europe and other developing societies to take our place at the top table. Like our ancestors in the US, we are reminding the other latecomers to modern prosperity that we got here first.

And we don't even have the sense of shame that might give us second thoughts. Our ancestors did the same dirty business that every other European society has done. They picked on weaker and more vulnerable groups. They accepted the privileges of what Daniel O'Connell called the vilest of aristocracies, that of the skin.

They burned, lynched, abused and insulted to make the point that they were respectable, civilised whites. But they did it, conveniently, elsewhere. Emigration, for too long, has meant never having to say you're sorry. It's time to remember that other part of our history before we disgrace ourselves again.