More that they were discriminated against, forced to do indentured servitude, yadda yadda. “No dogs or Irish” was a popular sign back in the day (Now a collectible!)
A lot of it was a fear of their “Popery” from the Proddie Powers That Be (Been, whatever.)
Oooo, that’s harsh! Wouldn’t want to get stuck there
Kinda like “Better dead than red!” (Originally “red” was referring to Indians (native Americans for you whipper snappers,(or Amerindians if you write textbooks))
Disclaimer, I might have that saying wrong, but hopefully you should get the point.
In my social studies class back in school, they say at one point Irish was considered black.
I remember watching ‘Blazing Saddles’ and not getting the “Irish” joke. My Grandmother explained what ya just said there. As a child I didn’t understand it. As an adult, I still don’t. “Considered Black” has stuck in my head. You also have to remember that I was brought up on TOS Star Trek and taught to respect all peoples no matter race, creed, whutever. I thot the concept of racism and prejudice were fatuous even before I knew what those words meant. I mention Star Trek because I didn’t learn my values from church or school. Those were exclusive clubs. My parents grew up in a diverse neighborhood and instilled their values and encouraged the ones I adopted from Trek. Where I grew up there were literally railroad track, fences, parks, etc that seperated groups of ethnicity. There were German, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Black, Asian parts of my neighborhood. If you were one you tread lightly to go into others. Each was considered by the other as a “bad part of town”. So whenever someone says that expression I laugh and think, “Hey I lived in the bad part of town.”
Yeah, the Irish get the poop end of the stick, definitely. But, to be fair, every time a new group arrived, they got the poop end of the stick, too.
Also, regarding Biff, Biff actor Tom Wilson got religion and became a stand-up comic. He’s always on the road in comedy clubs, with a family-friendly act that’s still funny. A highlight is this, his “Biff Song”:
//youtu.be/v/iwY5o2fsG7Y&hl=en&fs=1
He also does Spongebob voices. Check him out at:
In fact, 'cuz the Biff song made me laugh, here’s his schedule thru the end of the year:
October 29, 2008
Historic Tennessee Theatre
604 South Gay St.
Knoxville, TN 37902
865-684-1200
November 6 - 9, 2008
The Funny Bone
145 Easton Town Center
Columbus, OH 43219
614-471-JOKE
November 19 - 23, 2008
The Omaha Funny Bone
New Village Pointe Suite
17305 Davenport Street, Upper Level
Omaha, NE 68118
402-493-8036
December 3-6, 2008
Helium Comedy Club
2031 Sansom St.
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215-496-9001
December 18 - 21, 2008
The Comic Strip
1646 Bourbon St.
West Edmonton Mall
Edmonton, AB T5T 4M2
Canada
780-483-5999
Edit: Pike made the sign note first. My bad form for not reading the thread first.
That is quite literally true. The whole concept of ‘whiteness’ is a fascinating one. There’s a book called “How the Irish Became White” that is worth searching out. A lot of the slurs that are leveled against other groups actually originated as slurs against folks from the next island over (from the Brits.)
… hey, did you guys watch “Bend it with Beckam”? The bit where the Indian girl was venting about feeling trapped by her family, and bigotry in England, and then Jon Rhys-Meyers retorted back, Yea, I know; I’m Irish. My sister & I just just went, “whoa”.
btw, I hear that Native American Canadians call themselves “First Nations Peoples” because people kept getting confused between native American Indians and Asian Indians. Besides, “aborigine” has a very Australian connotation, and a negative one at that. The word, “Abo” is very, very rude Down Under. 
You can ask Michaela about that, I’m no authority on Aussie lingo really.
… True story : when a Singaporean travel journalist (or was it a diplomatic mission? I can’t remember) was on a visit to the Emerald isle, they were going on about how much we have in common. Then someone remarked that the Irish are like the “Chinese” of Europe : being made to feel like pariahs among Whites and the Irish nation being “kicked in the balls”, so to speak, by the Castle.
When I was the equivalent of grade 7, we were taught Chinese history 101, about the 5 great powers who tried to divide the Qing empire like a cake, how Victorian England flooded Chinese market with opium and made addicts of the whole nation, the “sick-man-of-asia” rhetoric, the Boxer uprising by anti-foreigner elements, Chiang Kai-shek & all that jazz about the 1911 revolution. I’m just saying, that kicked-in-the-balls feeling the Irish have? We know it too well over here.
Of course, Singapore is NOT part of China, but a tourist can be forgiven for thinking that way if one came down to visit. We’re all mostly 3 generation citizens after our immigrant grandparents, myself included. (Ironically, my mother’s Portuguese/Dutch family can claim to have settled around this region centuries longer than my father’s Chinese immigrant parents, who left China around the time of the Rape of Nanking)
It’s not just the Irish, either… Italy, Spain, basically anyone who comes from a “Catholic” country… there is all sort of interesting stuff out there about the construction of whiteness - for example, also think of the elites of Latin America, who are usually not of mestizo background, are grouped as “Latino” here in the US. Anyways there’s a lot more to “whiteness” than we usually think about. (Just as there’s more to “Blackness” or any other racial category)
oh wow, i see a conversation wild fire has been lit 
A couple of Colbert Reports ago, Colbert went to interview the Iraqi Embassador to the US of A. Colbert turned the interview into a sort of census styled questionning, one of the question was “What ethnicity are you?”
To which the embassador answered “Arab”. Colbert replied “But I only have the choices of White or Black”. The embassador said “Then white”. Colbert faked that he was thinking about it, then jokingly said “I’m going to put you down as black”.
I have to say I am semi-shocked about the Arab answer, because I didn’t know Iraqis considered themselves Arabs, but I wasn’t really suprised that they would think that.
Though I was truely socked by the White answer. I had no idea that Arabs considered themselves white. I knew the Muslim world also have their version of black racial discrimination, but I just had no idea that they thought of themselves as white.
I guess I always thought they’d say they are Asian or something. Shows how much I know about the middle east. I guess I am pretty ignorant to that part of the world. And Colbert’s fake ignorance going to show how most westerners think, that if one is not within a certain culture back ground, and you have to choose white or white, they’d be black.
I am Taiwanese myself. And Taiwanese had our share of being discriminated against. I guess if you were colonized, or in Taiwan’s case colonized over and over again, you’d be discriminated often by every single race of people that conquered the island. For Taiwan that’d be Dutch, Spanish, Qing dynasty manchus, French, British, Americans, Japanese, the Chinese nationalists… with the CCP as possible candidates for new conqueror.
Taiwanese Aboriginals used to be persecuted to the point the languages and cultures faced extinction, with many of them already gone. But these days things are turning aroudn. People are taking a little more pride in being Aboriginals. It saddens me to hear that in Australia Abo or Aboriginals has a negative connotation to it. It really shouldn’t be.
I would hope that most “westerners” would understand the definition of the words “black” and “white.” I however, have seen how people on forums do not understand the meaning of words and can totally misread something because they are either skipping over words that I type or they are making up their own definitions on the fly. Then again, I try not to think of most of the people that live in the same part of the world as I do as stupid, ignorant, mouth-breathers.
Wait. What?
Ditto?
baltar
Here are some famous Americans one might not have guessed as having Arab lineage :D:p
[ul]
[li]Tony Shalhoub (Lebanese)
[/li][li]Paula Abdul (half-Syrian Jew)
[/li][li]Catherine Bell (half-Iranian)
[/li][/ul]
PS for the benefit of those in the dark, I’m guessing that the han in hansioux refers to Han Chinese right?
No time to read the posts, but I just wanted to drop this pic. In the TNG seventh season episode “Sub Rosa” (where Crusher’s grandmother dies, and her creepy lover begins to make his move on the Doctor), there’s a graveyard scene with “McFly” on one of the tombstones.
I knew about Paula, but had no idea for the other 2.
But Han refers to the Han Chinese. hansioux is intended to signify that i am of mixed cultures And as of yet, I never had to come up with something else when I register for an account anywhere.
you just blew my mind…
Not to mention Casey Kasem, the voice of Shaggy. (Is Don on the phone?)
And, at the risk of drifting the thread drift back to the original topic, “someone on the podcast” 
mentioned wondering how Marty and Doc became friends. Didn’t we see that in this movie? They first met in 1955, decades before Marty was even born, so of course Doc Brown befriended him as soon as he could. It was fate. 
If I can bring it back to bttf-verse for a second, and forgive me if this has been hashed out in the forum elsewhere, or even in the movies and I just missed it.
So when Doc sends einstein in the deloreon in the beginning, he sends him into the future, where he disappears and reappears. Now, how can Marty live his life and have a wife/kids/family in the same timeline that he jumps into the future to help save, wouldnt the fact that he left the timeline not allow that future to happen? I would think that if Doc needed a way to save Marty’s kids, he could have come up with a better way without screwing up time.
But then we wouldn’t have the flying skateboard chase scene, which is every kids dream.
The only reason the premise of the second movie started out that way was because of the end of the first movie. The writers actually say in the commentary how they shot themselves in the foot, in that they never thought a sequel would be made, and if there was one they wouldn’t have ended the first movie like that. They just never thought that BTTF would be such a success!