I'm looking out the window of my apartment in Harlem, and I don't see too many folks walking around wearing green. St. Patrick's Day is not the most celebrated holiday in the African-American community, but as author Noel Ignatiev points out in an interesting piece on The Root, Black and Irish had a lot in common but failed to coalesce around their common interests.

Like Blacks, the Irish were oppressed when they came to this country. Blacks were in slavery, but the Irish were also given dirty, dangerous jobs and confined to the lowest rungs of society. They sometimes were given jobs that slave masters thought were not worth risking a slave for. At first, there was a somewhat forced relationship at the bottom of America's melting pot.

Ignatiev writes:

(Irish) commonly found themselves thrown together with free Negroes. Blacks and the Irish fought each other and the police, socialized and occasionally intermarried, and developed a common culture of the lowly. They also both suffered the scorn of those better situated. Along with Jim Crow and Jim Dandy, the drunken, belligerent and foolish Patrick and Bridget were stock characters on the early stage. In antebellum America, it was speculated that if racial amalgamation was ever to take place, it would begin between those two groups. As we know, things turned out otherwise.

In 1841, 60,000 Irish in Ireland issued an address to their compatriots in America, calling upon them to join with the abolitionists in the struggle against slavery. Six months after the address, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote what may be the saddest words ever written about the Irish Diaspora: "Even to this hour, not a single Irishman has come forward, either publicly or privately, to express his approval of the address, or to avow his determination to abide by its sentiments."

Instead, Irish began to fight freed Blacks over jobs on the waterfront and in the factories. The Irish did not support the abolition of slavery. Ignatiev, the author of "How the Irish Became White," argues that Black and Irish fought over jobs, because the labor market was artificially altered by the presence of slavery.

"Some have pointed to competition for jobs as the cause of Irish animosity toward blacks. But in the wage system, all workers compete for jobs. It is not free competition that leads to enduring animosity, but its absence. The competition among Irish and black laborers failed to lead to unity because it did not take place under normal labor market conditions but was distorted by the color line. However much the Irish were oppressed as a race in Ireland and exploited as workers in America, once landed in Boston, New York or Philadelphia, they enjoyed one marked advantage over refugees from Southern slavery: No one was chasing them with dogs," Ignatiev writes.

Race was used to divide two groups of people who should have been on the same side. Imagine the force and speed with which social change could have been achieved in this country if people of the same class had joined together to fight for changes that would benefit all. Instead of fighting for a place at the table, Blacks and Irish bickered over the scraps.
The same thing is happening in this country today. Debates about health care reform, taxes, schools and the equitable distribution of wealth always comes back to race: Blacks are in favor of some sort of health care reform, because we are lazy and used to handouts, the racist thinking goes.

In his piece, Ignatiev writes about an Irish-American caller to a radio show who asked: "If we made it, why couldn't they?"

"What most appalled me about his question--more than the willful ignorance it showed of how the white-skin privilege system had operated--was his belief that he had "made it," Ignatiev writes.

Many working-class whites have the same issues as African Americans. Forty-six million Americans do not have health care, yet a story on this site about a black woman whose family said she died from pulmonary hypertension-because she could not afford insurance-brought about the inevitable, ignorant comments:

"She probably was too fat like most blacks," some wrote on these message boards.

Pulmonary hypertension is not necessarily related to weight.

"She should have gotten a better job so that she had health insurance," others wrote. How many millions of Americans go to work every day at back-breaking jobs but don't have decent health care?

I know for sure that African Americans are not the only people suffering from our broken health care system - the astronomical costs of going to college, the inability to save for retirement, the ridiculous disparity in wealth. Imagine what would happen if we threw those racial stereotypes aside and united to get things done based on our common needs.

It sounds corny, but if that happened, we could make the world green with envy.