One of the most pernicious of the racist myths in the United States is the falsehood that

the first slaves here were not black Africans, but white Irish. Thus, whites are just as

much victims of slavery as blacks. This is completely false, and it is peddled purely to promote

a racist agenda. Today we're going to point our skeptical eye directly at this lie,

and break it down to see where it comes from and why. Irish slaves in America is today

on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. We're there Irish

Slaves in America. Today we're going to get close to the darkest period in American history,

this slavery era, which lasted hundreds of years from the early 1600s until the final abolition

during the Civil War in the 1860s. It is painful and sobering to remember for most of us,

as the imposition of a life of enslavement on our fellow humans is unthinkable. But for

some of us, it is less so. Because while the majority of us recognize it as the folly

of racial divide, some few see it as not necessarily a racism issue, and if accordingly

perpetuated a fabricated version of history in which blacks and whites were both equally

enslaved. While we've all heard at some point that slavery in America began not with

Africans, but with whites from Ireland, history tells us a very different story. The fact

is that slavery was defined at its basis level by racial division, and there were never

any Irish slaves in America. Beginning in the early 1600s, poor immigrants from the British

Isles, a majority of whom were Irish, came to the Americas by buying their ship passage

with indenturement contracts. This gave the maticate across the ocean, but to pay for

it, they entered a contractual obligation to work for nothing more than room and board

for a period of time, usually four to seven years. This began as soon as they stepped

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