Honoring this bigoted racist by naming clubs after him puts our GAA to shame The Irish Times

[ad_1]

Last week Trinity College Dublin decided to remove the name of the great 18th century philosopher George Berkeley from its main library. This raises the trickiest question of all the GAA clubs named after another furniture slavery advocate, John Mitchel.

It’s probably true that most Irish people don’t know or care much about Berkeley, which makes it relatively easy to name a university library. Confronting the truth about Mitchel, hero of the Irish national struggle, is much harder, and therefore all the more necessary.

The abduction, enslavement and transport to the Americas of approximately 12.5 million Africans is central to Western modernity. Its consequences are very much alive today, we cannot understand ourselves or our world if we ignore them.

In October 1857, Mitchel co-founded a newspaper, the Southern Citizen, to promote the value and virtue of slavery, for Negroes and white men alike.

Three Irish personalities played a significant role in promoting and maintaining the ideology of white supremacy in North America. One was Berkeley, who bought human beings to work his small plantation in Rhode Island and, more influentially, argued that slavery was entirely compatible with Christian conversion: slaves would only become better slaves by being Christians.

The second was John Calhoun, the most eloquent and powerful advocate of slavery in the US government and Senate in the decades before the Civil War. Calhoun grew up on the plantation established in South Carolina by his father Patrick, who had emigrated from Donegal.

[ Trinity College Dublin to dename Berkeley library due to philosophers link to slavery ]

[ What does the denaming of Trinitys Berkeley Library mean? ]

The third was the Irish revolutionary Mitchel, an enthusiastic racist and extreme defender of the cause of slavery. He used the rhetorical skills honed in his Irish nationalist activism to, as he put it, deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to to keep slaves at their work by flogging or other necessary coercion.

Mitchel therefore did not content himself with propaganda for slavery as an institution. He encouraged the use of torture to keep slaves under control.

He didn’t just defend the status quo as he found it in the American South. He wanted to enlarge it.

During the Civil War, Mitchel was a fanatical Confederate. He was so extreme that he even broke with the leadership of the Confederacy

In October 1857, Mitchel co-founded a newspaper, the Southern Citizen, to promote the value and virtue of slavery, both for Negroes and white men, to press for the reopening of the African slave trade and to encourage the spread of slavery in the United States. West.

During the Civil War, Mitchel was a fanatical Confederate. He was so extreme that he even broke with the leadership of the Confederacy: he considered them too soft because they did not approve of attacks on pro-Union civilians, and not racist enough because they wanted to recruit black soldiers an affront, as he saw it, to the purity of the cause.

Mitchel’s white supremacist bigotry exacted a terrible personal price. Of his three sons, John and Willie were killed fighting for the Confederacy and James was maimed in the same cause, suffering multiple wounds and losing an arm. But Mitchel considered it a worthy sacrifice.

None of this diminished Mitchels’ heroic reputation back home. In the early years of the GAA, there was a vogue for naming hurling and football clubs in its honour.

Many of these names survive. There are GAA clubs called (with slight variations) John Mitchels in Tralee; at Kilmacthomas, County Waterford; in Belfast; in Solihull (outside Birmingham); in Liverpool; in Claudy, Co Derry; at Castlebar; in Magheracloone, Co Monaghan and in his native Newry (where there is also a statue of Mitchel).

Why is this important now? Firstly, because Mitchel, as a brilliant political journalist and propagandist, had a considerable influence on the creation of the ideology of modern Irish nationalism.

His version of this ideology was that Ireland should be free, not because national freedom is a universal right, but because Irish people are white. One of the state’s founders, Arthur Griffith, idolized Mitchel for this very reason.

Griffith paid tribute to Mitchel’s pivotal work in dissolving the case of Irish independence from theories of humanitarianism and universalism. He indignantly denied that Mitchel’s racism should be excused as if an apology was needed for an Irish nationalist refusing to hold the Negro as his rightful peer. He praised Mitchel for freeing the cause of Irish nationality from the theory that black is equal to white.

Retaining Mitchel’s name belies that GAAs are one of Irish society’s greatest assets in the fight against racism and xenophobia

This racist configuration of Irish nationalism as a predominantly white identity is currently flourishing on the far right in Ireland and Irish America. Mitchel is the ideological source.

Specifically, keeping Mitchel’s name belies GAA’s position as one of Irish society’s greatest assets in the fight against racism and xenophobia. County players like Boidu Sayeh of Westmeath, Wexford captain Lee Chin, Jemar Hall of Armagh and Ikem Ugwueru of Clare epitomize the associations’ much wider ethos of inclusion.

As Trinitys’ experience shows, it is possible to reconsider historical names without hard feelings and in a way that engages a community in positive reflection on their past and present identities. The GAA has so much to be proud of that its clubs need not be ashamed of having to rethink what they call themselves.

To continue to honor a bigoted racist through the names of certain clubs dishonors the hugely important achievement of the GAAs in breaking the chains that bind Irish local and national identities to toxic notions of racial superiority. It literally gives good clubs a bad name.

[ad_2]