Blog #3

From this week’s reading, I have concluded that African Americans were not the only ones that suffered the cruel fate of discrimination. Although African Americans were forced into slavery and had to endure a lot of horrifying treatments, the group of Irish immigrants did not go through the process without any scars either. What was heartbreaking was the passage about the famine years in Ireland and how many of those people had to eat only potatoes. As an individual growing in this century, I cannot imagine what it would be like to worry about whether or not I would have anything to eat the next day.  Some Americans in the South actually prefer risking the lives of Irish by employing them in high mortality jobs than to “risk the loss of valuable Negro slaves” (Daniels, 137). I also found it sad that the women found the occupation of being a servant was actually better than working conditions back in Ireland, when they were only getting paid about $1 to $2 a week. It makes me question how bad the conditions in Ireland must have been and what a day in the life of an Irish immigrant was like. It also raises the question of why did "Americans" have so much hate for these immigrants when their ancestors immigrated to this new land as well?