Takaki Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of takaki was about the immigration of the Irish. The Irish main reason for coming to America was because of the strict new rule of Britain in there home land making it so that they exported the food that they used to eat, leading to one year that the cattle population was larger than the population of farmers, which led to most of them losing their jobs from the business basically doing it themselves. As time progressed the cattle was all being exported leading up to the Great Famine, which eventually lead to most of the Irish immigrating to America. When they got here they had to suffer hardships of bad jobs where they could die in possibly anything that they would try to do. Pretty soon, it became a fight with African Americans to get the better jobs, before hand they had almost saw the blacks as “brothers” but in seeing that most whites valued the life of a black over the life of an Irish, made them start to hate blacks and try to use the fact that they looked white to get in with white society. This came to them getting education and eventually getting people in the White House.

His idea in this chapter was very good. This actually shows that there were people that had it bad back then, and not just African Americans were oppressed in to the point that they were thought of as not men, as the book says, that the Irish were thought of as the “white niggers”. This almost led to a union between Irish and blacks, but just as they tried to unionize with the Chinese, it did not work out as planned. They begin to fight with the blacks for jobs and use the fact that they were closer to being white, thus easier assimilated into white America than the blacks. But, what would have happened if the blacks and the Irish had unionized instead of fighting each other? I think that the same fate would have still been unaviodable, my reason being that they were more focused on power, they wanted to be apart of something greater than what was in front of them. So somewhere down the line, the Irish would have still assimilated into the white America.

My views are that the Irish were not that far from the blacks, the only difference other then skin color is that they had a better plan on how to assimilate and take control, where as the black did and it was not as easy for them. But the Irish used that so they could get people in power and have more of a voice in what was done, and more so, that it would be in their favor as well. I have to say tat his was a very good plan by the Irish, since they could easily blend in with the society that tried to shun them.