entry response to the "black irish" entry in Wikipedia

Check out the wikipedia entry here first and then read this person's response below. You can also go to this link to see discussions about the entry in wikipedia. People have such strong opiniouns on this term. Let us remember that the isle of Eire was occupied by the British for a long time and during this time their language Irish (Gaelic) was prohibited to be spoken destoying the oral history and books written in Irish (Gaelic) were burned. Thus much of the sources we would go to in order to investigate this term are only written in English the language of the oppressor. Is the history of the minority ethnic/ race/ linquistic/ religious group ever really unbiasly preserved? Anyways the reply that I wrote of is below:

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You are perpetuating a farce
This entire article is perpetuating a complete and fabricated misuse of the term. The term "Black Irish" does not refer to people of Irish heritage or descent with black hair. It refers to a class of Irish people, generally the Catholic underclass of Ireland. Black is often used as an unfavorable term in this and similar contexts: e.g., Black '47, the Black Rose. The term "Black Irish" was used to distinguish from the "noble" Irish, i.e. the families of the Protestant Norman English settlers. It has vague ethnic overtones, in the same broad sense that the English called not only the Africans "black," but also the Maori, the Australian Aborigines, etc. The Celtic, Catholic Irish, especially those in the poor rural areas, especially those in Western Ireland, were not necessarily seen as "white." It's important to understand that these perceptions were vague and not as clearly defined as they are in the late 20th- or early 21st-century Western World. This is a concept that would not have been articulated or classified as it is now. But, when censuses were taken in the mid-19th century, "Irish" was not the same classification as "white." The Irish, like the Italians, were a different race than the "Anglo-Saxon" (also a misnomer, as most descendants of families who consider themselves Anglo-Saxon generally have at least as much Celtic (via Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales, and old Britain) and (especially) Norman blood as they do that of the Angles or the Saxons). So, the term "Black Irish' has been used by different people at different times in slightly different ways, but it was always a variation on the same theme - referring to the poor, Catholic Irish underclass. It was mostly employed by those who wanted to make a distinction in the fact that there were Protestant, educated, "civilized" "Irish" folk.
I don't know when this "Black Irish" term in regard to hair color and the further extrapolation into theories about insertion of (e.g.) Iberian blood came up, but it is quite obviously a relatively recent fabrication and a misuse of the historical term. Perhaps it came from Irish Americans who had heard the term referred to by their ancestors, but had no idea of the meaning, since the context had made it an outdated term by then and no longer employed, except as a historical term of self-reference - much is the same way that African-Americans would refer to, or in extreme cases even use, the term "nigger" when it may have fallen out of use or favor by those who originally employed it as a pejorative. The oppressed like to keep their history alive more than do the oppressors (see, for example, which side preserves the history of the Holocaust more - the Jews or the Germans). So, my theory is that these young Irish Americans would hear their grandparents use the term in conversation, but not having lived through the oppression of the Irish themselves, never heard it used against them. The term was obviously of some import, but they had no idea of its meaning. So, a conjecture meaning was created, the obvious one being that it referred to those with dark features. And, as has been pointed out already, although dark coloring is held by a majority of Irish, the stereotype, especially in America, is that the Irish have fair hair, especially red. It's not hard to see where the conjecture would originate, but the fact is that this is not the historical origin of the term and this encyclopedia should stop perpetuating it.

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I really like this person's reply. Everything is realive my dear Einstein. Definitions are not absolute. It is a chair because you and I agree on the definition of the word/ thing. Definitions are arbitrary.

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How is identifying a myth perpetuating a hoax?
No one here is claiming the story of the Black Irish, in its various permutations, is historically valid. People are simply attempting to verify its origins and usage as a term and the veracity of the various definitions. Indeed the inclusion of the page and such descriptions should aid people coming to a decision about whether it is hoax or not. Furthermore, those who claim it is spurious need to state their reasons and using source material to debunk the various claims. Otherwise their argument is just as baseless as those they are targeting.