I’m only a few pages right now, but there already are some surprising things I’m learning our heritage (of course you don’t have to be Irish to be a redhead, as I am a mix of Scottish and Irish, but most of us have it somewhere in our lineage). Something I noticed growing up as a redhead was I noticed how it was socially acceptable to be ridiculed just for having red hair and pasty white skin. To be made fun of for getting sunburned so easily. I noticed how common it was to get rejected romantically based purely on being ginger. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize that it’s technically racism, but I didn’t realize it used to be worse. The way Europeans used to view us is insane. Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom for most of the 1800’s, said that we were a “wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race” and that our history is one of bigotry and blood. Charles Kingsley, a British priest at the time, said this about Ireland: “I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only more of them then of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule then they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” I know that this is not the main point of the book (the book is mostly about the Mission of the Irish Monks) but seeing that paired with my own experiences growing up has made me wonder if there are other examples in history of Irish or ginger racism, and if there is a lot of evidence to point towards that, why is no one talking about it in the age of “wokeness” for lack of better terms? 

Prejudice