A wake-up call to Irish, Basque, Scottish, Welsh, and other descendants of colonized European peoples living in the Americas
Introduction: The Lie You’ve Been Living
Let me tell you a story about amnesia. Not the medical kind—the political kind. The kind that makes millions of people forget who they really are.
If you’re a white American whose ancestors came from Ireland, you probably know bits and pieces of “Irish pride.” Maybe you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe you’ve heard family stories about the Great Famine, about ancestors who came to America with nothing. Maybe you’ve been told your people “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.”
If you’re descended from Basque immigrants in Oregon, Idaho, or Nevada, you might know even less. Maybe you know your grandparents spoke a strange language. Maybe there’s a Basque festival you go to once a year. Maybe you think of yourself as vaguely “European” with some interesting ethnic quirks.
But here’s what you probably don’t know: Your ancestors were Indigenous. Your ancestors were colonized. Your ancestors had their languages banned, their lands stolen, and their cultures systematically destroyed by empire.
And here’s the even more disturbing truth: When your ancestors came to the Americas, they were offered a deal. They could forget they were colonized, accept “whiteness,” and help colonize others. Most of them took the deal.
This article is about remembering what was forgotten. It’s about understanding that the same systems that destroyed your ancestors’ worlds are still operating today, still stealing land, still crushing languages, still maintaining hierarchies of oppression. And it’s about making a choice: Will you continue to identify with the colonizers, or will you finally join your true family—the global movement of colonized peoples fighting for liberation?
Famine (1997), sculpture by Rowan Gillespie commemorating the Great Famine; in Dublin.
Part I: Ireland — The Template for American Colonization
Eight Centuries of Occupation
Let’s start with Ireland, because the British colonization of Ireland was, in many ways, the template for European colonization of the Americas. The tactics tested in Ireland—land theft, language suppression, divide-and-conquer, engineered famine, racial pseudoscience—were later exported across the Atlantic.
The Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169. For the next 800 years—let that sink in, EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS—Ireland was occupied, colonized, and brutalized by its neighbor. This is one of the longest continuous colonial occupations in recorded history.
The English (later British) didn’t just want Ireland’s land. They wanted to eliminate Irish identity itself. They wanted to turn the Irish into Englishmen, or failing that, into a permanent underclass that could be exploited for labor and resources.
Language as Genocide
The Irish language—Gaeilge—is one of the oldest languages in Europe, with written records dating back to the 4th century. It’s a Celtic language, completely distinct from English, with its own grammar, its own worldview, its own way of understanding reality.
The colonizers knew that if they wanted to control Ireland, they had to kill the language.
The Penal Laws, enacted between 1695 and 1829, made it illegal for Catholics (the vast majority of Irish people) to speak Irish in official settings, to establish Irish-language schools, or to hold positions of authority while maintaining Irish identity. Irish-language education was criminalized. Children caught speaking Irish in school were beaten.
By the time of the Great Famine (1845-1852), English colonization had already devastated the Irish language. After the Famine—which killed or displaced a quarter of the Irish population—Irish went from being the majority language to a minority language in a single generation. Entire regions where Irish had been spoken for thousands of years became English-speaking.
Today, less than 2% of Irish people speak Irish as their daily language. The language of an entire nation, thousands of years old, was nearly eliminated in just a few centuries of colonization.
Sound familiar? It should. Because this is exactly what happened to Indigenous languages across the Americas. Nahuatl, once spoken by millions across Mesoamerica, now endangered. Lakota, once the language of the Great Plains, now spoken by only a few thousand elders. Cherokee, Ojibwe, Diné—hundreds of languages pushed to the brink of extinction by the same colonial tactics used against Irish.
Land Theft: The Plantations
Between the 1550s and the 1650s, the English Crown orchestrated what it called “Plantations”—systematic land theft on a massive scale. Native Irish landowners were dispossessed. Their lands were given to English and Scottish settlers. Entire regions were ethnically cleansed and replaced with colonists.
By 1778, Irish Catholics owned only 5% of the land in Ireland. On their own island. Where they had lived for thousands of years.
The logic was simple: If you control the land, you control the people. Landless people can’t feed themselves. They become dependent on their colonizers. They can be forced to work for starvation wages. They can be controlled.
This is the exact same logic later used for the reservation system in the United States. Steal the land, corral the Indigenous population onto the worst land possible, make them dependent on the colonizer for survival, then slowly starve them into compliance or death.
Cromwell’s Genocide
In 1649, Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland with explicit orders to crush Irish resistance once and for all. What followed was genocidal violence on a scale that shocked even other European powers.
Entire towns were massacred. Drogheda, Wexford—thousands of civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. Soldiers were given orders to kill all Irish fighters and Catholic priests. Cromwell’s own letters describe his intent to exterminate Irish Catholics.
By the time Cromwell’s campaign ended in 1653, an estimated 600,000 Irish people had been killed—about 40% of the population. Thousands more were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. Ireland’s population didn’t recover to pre-Cromwell levels until the 20th century.
The British Parliament, in official documents, referred to the Irish as “savages” who needed to be “civilized or eliminated.” They used the same language—almost word for word—that American colonizers would later use about Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
The Great Famine: Genocide by Starvation
The Great Famine of 1845-1852 is often presented in American schools as a natural disaster. “The potato blight came, the potatoes died, and a million Irish people starved. Tragic, but nobody’s fault.”
This is a lie.
Yes, there was a potato blight. But Ireland was producing more than enough food to feed its population throughout the Famine. Wheat, oats, barley, beef, pork, butter—Ireland was exporting massive quantities of food while Irish people starved to death by the hundreds of thousands.
Why? Because the food was owned by English landlords, and British economic policy prioritized profit over Irish lives. Armed guards protected food shipments headed to England while Irish families died in the ditches.
The British government refused to stop food exports. They refused to provide adequate relief. Charles Trevelyan, the British official in charge of Famine relief, wrote that the Famine was “a mechanism for reducing surplus population” and “the judgement of God” on the Irish people.
This was genocide by starvation. Deliberate, calculated, and justified by racial ideology.
Over one million Irish people died. Another two million were forced to emigrate—many dying on overcrowded “coffin ships” before they even reached America.
The Irish population went from over 8 million in 1840 to 4 million by 1911. Ireland still hasn’t recovered its pre-Famine population—170 years later.
Scientific Racism: “The Irish are racially inferior”
Throughout the 19th century, British scientists, politicians, and popular media promoted racial theories about the Irish. Political cartoons depicted Irish people with ape-like features. “Scientific” texts claimed Irish people had smaller brains, lower intelligence, and criminal tendencies.
The Irish were racialized—constructed as biologically inferior to Anglo-Saxons. This justified their colonization and exploitation. If the Irish were naturally inferior, then English rule was natural and proper.
This is the same pseudoscientific racism that was used to justify the enslavement of African peoples and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The same skull measurements, the same claims about brain size, the same fabricated “racial hierarchies.”
The colonizers didn’t just want Irish land. They wanted to prove that they had a right to it—that they were superior beings entitled to rule over inferior ones.
Part II: The Deal — Trading Memory for “Whiteness”
Irish in America: From “N-words Turned Inside Out” to White
When Irish immigrants began arriving in America in large numbers—especially after the Famine—they faced immediate discrimination. They were not considered “white” in the way that term was understood at the time.
“No Irish Need Apply” signs were common. Irish workers were relegated to the most dangerous jobs—building railroads, digging canals, working in mines. Irish neighborhoods were slums. The Irish were compared to Black Americans as racially inferior, as a separate, lower race.
Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, wrote about this. He noted that Irish immigrants, when they first arrived, often had sympathy for enslaved Black people. They recognized similar oppressions. Some Irish immigrants were abolitionists.
But then something changed.
The Bribe
American capitalism had a problem: If poor Irish immigrants and poor Black people (enslaved or free) recognized their common enemy—the capitalist class extracting wealth from their labor—they might unite. And if they united, they could overthrow the system.
The ruling class couldn’t allow this. So they made an offer to Irish immigrants:
“You can be white. You can be included. You can get better jobs than Black people. You can vote. You can own property. You can join the police and enforce the racial hierarchy. All you have to do is forget you were colonized, forget you were oppressed, and help us keep Black people down.”
Most Irish Americans took the deal.
Irish-American politicians built power by appealing to racial solidarity with other white groups. Irish-American police became notorious for brutalizing Black communities. When Black people tried to organize for better conditions, Irish-American workers often led the violent resistance.
The Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City are a painful example. Working-class Irish Americans, angry about being drafted to fight in the Civil War, took their rage out on Black New Yorkers. They lynched Black people. They burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. They attacked any Black person they could find.
Why? Because they had accepted the logic of white supremacy: that their enemy was not the rich men who were exploiting them, but the Black people “beneath” them who might rise up and compete for jobs.
The Tragedy: Identifying with Your Oppressors
Here’s the tragedy: Irish Americans were taught to identify with the very people who had colonized Ireland.
Think about that. The British Empire starved a million Irish people to death, banned the Irish language, stole Irish land, and called the Irish racially inferior. But in America, Irish people were offered “whiteness”—which meant identifying as part of the same Anglo-Saxon racial group that had oppressed them.
They were told: “Forget the Famine. Forget the language. Forget the colonization. You’re white now. You’re one of us. And ‘we’ are superior to Black people.”
And most Irish Americans accepted this. They traded their memory of oppression for proximity to power.
Boston, Massachusetts: The Irish-American Power Structure
Nowhere is this tragedy clearer than in Boston, Massachusetts. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish Americans dominated Boston politics. They built political machines. They controlled the police department. They had power.
But how did they use that power? Did they use it to fight all forms of oppression? Did they stand with Black Bostonians, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups?
No. They used it to maintain racial hierarchies. Boston’s Irish-American leadership fought against school desegregation in the 1970s. White Irish-American neighborhoods in South Boston became synonymous with violent resistance to civil rights. The same people whose ancestors had been called “white n-words” in the 1840s were now calling Black children racial slurs and throwing rocks at school buses in the 1970s.
The colonized had become colonizers.
Part III: The Basque — Europe’s Oldest Indigenous People
Who Are the Basque?
Now let’s talk about a people most Americans have never heard of, despite thousands of their descendants living in the Western United States: the Basque.
The Basque people (Euskaldunak in their language, Euskara) are the Indigenous people of the western Pyrenees, in what is now northern Spain and southwestern France. They have lived in this region for at least 7,000 years—longer than any other population currently in Europe.
Euskara, the Basque language, is a language isolate. That means it has no known relationship to any other language on Earth. It’s not Indo-European. It’s not related to Spanish, French, or any other European language. It’s completely unique—a linguistic survivor from pre-Indo-European Europe.
Genetic studies confirm what linguists suspected: the Basque are descendants of the hunter-gatherer populations who lived in Europe before the arrival of Indo-European peoples. They are, by any reasonable definition, Indigenous Europeans.
Centuries of Colonization
The Basque Country has been colonized for centuries. The Kingdom of Navarre, which was largely Basque, was conquered and divided between Spain and France in the 16th century. Basque political autonomy was systematically dismantled.
But the most brutal suppression came in the 20th century under Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain (1939-1975).
Franco was obsessed with creating a unified, centralized Spanish identity. Regional languages and cultures were seen as threats. Euskara was completely banned. Speaking Basque in public could get you arrested. Basque names were outlawed—parents couldn’t name their children traditional Basque names. Basque cultural organizations were shut down. Books in Euskara were burned.
The message was clear: Being Basque was illegal. You could be Spanish, or you could be a criminal. Choose.
In France, the suppression was less violent but no less real. After the French Revolution, the French state promoted a policy of linguistic and cultural uniformity. Regional languages, including Euskara, were systematically marginalized. In schools, children were punished for speaking Basque.
Despite all of this, Euskara survives. It’s now spoken by about 750,000 people—a miracle of cultural resistance. But it remains endangered, facing pressure from Spanish and French on all sides.
Basque in America: From Indigenous to “White”
Basque people came to the Americas, particularly the Western United States, in significant numbers starting in the late 19th century. They settled primarily in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, California, and Wyoming. Many became sheepherders and ranchers.
Cities like Boise, Idaho have substantial Basque populations. Basque cultural centers exist. There are Basque restaurants, Basque festivals, Basque athletic competitions.
But here’s the contradiction: The Basque came from an Indigenous people who had been colonized, yet in America, they participated in colonizing others.
Basque sheepherders grazed their flocks on land stolen from Shoshone, Paiute, and other Indigenous nations. Basque ranchers benefited from the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the American West. They were offered the same deal as the Irish: “Forget you’re Indigenous. Forget you were colonized. You’re white now. You’re European. Take your place in the hierarchy.”
The Erasure of Basque Indigenous Identity
Today, if you ask most Americans, “Are the Basque Indigenous?” they’d look at you like you’re crazy. Indigenous? They’re European. They’re white.
This erasure is deliberate. The category of “white” or “European” flattens all distinctions. It erases the fact that Europe has its own history of colonization, with some European peoples colonizing others. It makes “European” synonymous with “colonizer,” when in reality, many European peoples were colonized.
Most Basque Americans today don’t think of themselves as Indigenous. They think of themselves as ethnically Basque (maybe) but racially white. The Indigenous identity has been replaced with a generic “whiteness” that erases the specificity of their history and makes them complicit in a racial hierarchy that oppresses other Indigenous peoples.
Part IV: Other European Indigenous Peoples
The Irish and Basque aren’t the only examples. Let’s briefly look at a few others:
The Scottish Highlanders
The Scottish Highlands had their own Celtic culture, distinct from Lowland Scotland and England. Highland Scots spoke Scottish Gaelic (a different language from Irish Gaelic, but related). They had a clan system, traditional music, and ways of life that had existed for centuries.
The British state saw Highland culture as a threat—especially after Highland clans supported Jacobite rebellions against British rule.
The Battle of Culloden in 1746 was the death blow. The British Army crushed the Jacobite forces. What followed was cultural genocide: Gaelic was banned, tartans were outlawed, the clan system was dismantled, bagpipes were prohibited. Thousands of Highlanders were killed or forcibly displaced.
The Highland Clearances (18th-19th centuries) saw landlords forcibly evict tens of thousands of Highlanders from their ancestral lands to make room for more profitable sheep farming. Entire communities were destroyed. People starved or were forced to emigrate.
Many Highland Scots came to America—settling in Appalachia, the Carolinas, and other regions. But in America, they became “white Southerners.” Many participated in slavery. Many participated in the dispossession of Cherokee, Creek, and other Indigenous nations in the South. The colonized became colonizers.
The Welsh
Wales was conquered by England in the 13th century. For centuries, Welsh culture and language were suppressed. The “Welsh Not” was a wooden token hung around the neck of any Welsh schoolchild caught speaking Welsh—a tool of public shaming to eliminate the language.
Welsh people came to America, particularly to Pennsylvania and Appalachia, often working in coal mines and industrial jobs. But like the Irish and Scots, they accepted “whiteness” and participated in maintaining racial hierarchies, forgetting their own history of colonization.
The Sami
The Sami people are the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia (northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia). They are reindeer herders with their own languages and distinct culture that predates the arrival of Norse and Finnish populations.
The Sami faced (and continue to face) colonization: forced assimilation, residential schools designed to eliminate Sami identity, land theft for mining and development, and suppression of Sami languages.
Though fewer Sami emigrated to America, those who did often hid their Indigenous identity to avoid discrimination. And in America, they too were categorized as “white” Europeans, erasing their Indigenous status.
The Pattern
Do you see the pattern? Across Europe, there are Indigenous peoples—peoples with their own languages, their own lands, their own cultures—who were colonized by larger empires. And when they came to the Americas, they were offered a deal: forget your Indigenous identity, accept whiteness, and help colonize others.
This isn’t ancient history. This is within living memory. My point is not to create a competition of oppression, but to reveal a system: racial capitalism requires the creation of racial hierarchies, and it creates those hierarchies by offering some colonized peoples the “privilege” of oppressing others.
Part V: The Lies They Told You
Lie #1: “You’re White, Therefore Superior”
Let’s be brutally clear: Whiteness is not real.
It’s not a genetic reality. It’s not a culture. It’s not a heritage. It’s a political category invented in the 17th and 18th centuries to justify slavery and colonization.
Before racial capitalism, Europeans didn’t think of themselves as “white.” They were English, Irish, French, Castilian, Genoese, etc. National, regional, and religious identities mattered. “White” as a racial category didn’t exist.
The concept of “whiteness” was created in colonial Virginia and other American colonies to solve a specific problem: How do you prevent European indentured servants and enslaved Africans from uniting against the ruling class?
Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 terrified the Virginia ruling class. Poor Europeans and enslaved Africans fought together against the colonial government. If that kind of unity became common, the whole system would collapse.
So the ruling class created “whiteness.” They passed laws giving special privileges to Europeans—even poor Europeans—that Africans didn’t have. They created a racial caste system. They told European laborers: “You may be poor, but at least you’re not a slave. At least you’re not Black. You’re white. You have racial status.”
This is what “whiteness” has always been: a bribe. It gives working-class white people just enough privilege to make them complicit in the oppression of others, while the ruling class continues to exploit everyone.
When you identify as “white,” you’re not identifying with a culture or a heritage. You’re identifying with a position in a racial hierarchy—a hierarchy built on genocide and slavery.
Lie #2: “Your Ancestors Built This Country”
This is technically true but deeply misleading.
Yes, Irish and Italian and Polish immigrants built railroads, skyscrapers, and bridges. Yes, they worked dangerous jobs. Yes, they faced exploitation. But they were building the infrastructure of a colonial state on stolen Indigenous land, often in an economy built on Black slave labor.
Your ancestors didn’t “build” America in some noble, neutral sense. They were used as tools by a capitalist ruling class to extract wealth from land stolen by genocide and labor extracted by slavery.
And here’s the thing: the ruling class didn’t care about Irish or Italian workers. They were expendable. When Irish workers demanded better conditions, the capitalists imported Chinese workers to compete with them. When that caused labor unrest, they imported other groups. The capitalists were happy to let working-class people of different ethnicities fight each other—it kept them from uniting against the bosses.
Your ancestors were exploited. That’s true. But they were also offered a choice: solidarity with other exploited people, or complicity in a racial hierarchy that gave them slightly better treatment.
Most chose complicity. And that’s why we are where we are.
Lie #3: “You Have Nothing in Common with Black and Indigenous People”
This is the biggest lie of all.
If your ancestors are Irish, Basque, Welsh, Scottish, or other colonized European peoples, you have everything in common with Black and Indigenous peoples of the Americas:
- Your ancestors’ languages were banned.
- Your ancestors’ lands were stolen.
- Your ancestors’ cultures were suppressed.
- Your ancestors were told they were racially inferior.
- Your ancestors were exploited for labor.
- Your ancestors were offered “inclusion” only if they betrayed other oppressed peoples.
The only difference is that your ancestors were offered “whiteness” as a consolation prize. Black people and Indigenous peoples in the Americas were not.
But whiteness is a trap. It gives you just enough privilege to make you complicit in oppression, while the ruling class continues to exploit you too—just less brutally than they exploit Black and Brown people.
Your real class interests align with Black and Brown working people, not with white billionaires and politicians who will sacrifice you the moment it’s convenient.
Part VI: It’s All the Same System
Here’s what I need you to understand: The system that colonized Ireland is the same system that colonized Turtle Island. The system that tried to eliminate Euskara is the same system that tried to eliminate Lakota. The system that engineered famine in Ireland is the same system that destroyed the buffalo to starve Plains nations.
It’s all the same system: racial capitalism built on land theft, labor exploitation, and cultural genocide.
Let me connect the dots:
Land Theft
Ireland: The Plantations dispossessed Irish landowners. By 1778, Irish people owned 5% of land on their own island.
Turtle Island: The Dawes Act, Indian Removal, reservations, and countless broken treaties dispossessed Indigenous nations. Today, Indigenous peoples control less than 3% of land in the United States—on their own continent.
The tactic: Take the land. Make the people landless. Control them through dependence.
Language Genocide
Ireland: The Penal Laws banned Irish language education. Today, less than 2% speak Irish daily.
Basque Country: Franco banned Euskara entirely. Thousands were imprisoned for speaking their language.
Turtle Island: Residential schools banned Indigenous languages. Children were beaten for speaking their mother tongues. Today, hundreds of Indigenous languages are extinct or endangered.
The tactic: Kill the language, kill the culture, kill the identity. Make the next generation forget who they are.
Engineered Famine
Ireland: The British government allowed (engineered) the Great Famine. A million dead.
Turtle Island: The U.S. government systematically destroyed the buffalo—the food source for Plains nations—to force them onto reservations and starve them into submission. Millions of buffalo killed deliberately to create famine.
The tactic: Control the food, control the people. Starvation is a weapon.
Scientific Racism
Ireland: British “scientists” claimed Irish people had smaller brains and lower intelligence.
Indigenous Americas: American “scientists” claimed Indigenous peoples were “vanishing races” who were biologically inferior.
Black Americas: The same pseudoscience justified slavery, claiming Black people were biologically suited for servitude.
The tactic: Biological determinism. Claim that oppression is natural, that hierarchy is inevitable, that some people are simply born inferior.
Divide and Conquer
Ireland: The British promoted divisions between Catholics and Protestants, between different regions, between those who collaborated and those who resisted.
Turtle Island: The U.S. government created divisions between “federally recognized” and “non-recognized” tribes, promoted conflicts between different nations, and recruited some Indigenous people to police others.
Black/Indigenous divide: The system created divisions between Black people (who had been enslaved) and Indigenous people (who had been dispossessed), even though many people were both and faced the same system.
The tactic: Keep oppressed peoples fighting each other instead of uniting against the oppressor.
Do you see it now? It’s the same playbook. The same tactics. The same logic. The same system.
The British Empire that colonized Ireland became the global empire that colonized much of the world. The logic of that empire—racial hierarchy, land theft, resource extraction, cultural genocide—was inherited by the United States.
You can’t separate these struggles. When you fight for Irish language rights, you’re fighting the same system that’s trying to eliminate Diné. When you fight for Basque cultural autonomy, you’re fighting the same system that’s denying Indigenous sovereignty in the Americas.
It’s all the same fight.
Part VII: The Call for Solidarity
So here’s where we are: If you’re descended from Irish, Basque, Welsh, Scottish, or other colonized European peoples living in the Americas, you have a choice to make.
Option 1: Continue the Amnesia
You can continue to identify as “white.” You can continue to accept the lie that you’re separate from and superior to Black and Brown people. You can continue to benefit from a system built on genocide and slavery.
You can continue to enjoy the privileges that whiteness affords you: less likely to be killed by police, more likely to get hired, more likely to get approved for a mortgage, more likely to be believed by institutions.
You can continue to identify with your oppressors—with the British Empire that starved your ancestors, with the Spanish Empire that banned your ancestors’ language, with the American Empire that’s built on stolen Indigenous land and Black slave labor.
You can continue to betray the memory of your ancestors who resisted colonization.
Option 2: Remember and Resist
Or you can reject whiteness.
You can remember who you are: the descendant of colonized Indigenous peoples who had their languages stolen, their lands taken, and their cultures nearly destroyed.
You can reconnect with your roots and recognize them for what they are: proof that you belong to the global family of colonized peoples, not the family of colonizers.
You can recognize that your liberation is bound up with the liberation of all oppressed peoples.
You can join the fight for:
- Black liberation and reparations
- Indigenous sovereignty and Land Back
- The dismantling of police and prisons
- The end of racial capitalism
- The creation of a world based on mutual aid, not exploitation
You can use whatever privilege whiteness has given you—not to maintain your position, but to undermine the system itself.
You can be a traitor to whiteness and loyal to humanity.
What Solidarity Actually Looks Like
Real solidarity is not performative. It’s not posting a black square on Instagram. It’s not saying “I support BLM” and then doing nothing.
Real solidarity requires risk. It requires sacrifice. It requires changing your life.
Here’s what it looks like:
1. Support Land Back
Indigenous peoples are fighting to reclaim their stolen land. Support those movements. Donate money. Show up to protests. Amplify Indigenous voices.
And if you own land, research whose territory you’re on. Look into what returning land might mean. Yes, this is uncomfortable. Yes, this might mean giving up something. That’s what decolonization requires.
2. Support Reparations
The descendants of enslaved people are owed a debt. Not a symbolic apology—actual wealth redistribution. Support policies that redistribute wealth to Black communities. Support taxes on the wealthy (mostly white people) to fund reparations.
3. Defund and Abolish Police
Police exist to protect property (mostly white-owned property on stolen land) and to control Black and Brown populations. Defunding police and working toward abolition is decolonization work. Support community defense alternatives. Support abolitionist movements.
4. Learn Your Ancestors’ Language
If you’re Irish-descended, learn Gaeilge. If you’re Basque-descended, learn Euskara. Reconnect with what was stolen from your ancestors.
Then recognize: This is exactly what Indigenous peoples in the Americas are doing—fighting to keep their languages alive against the same forces that tried to kill yours. Support Indigenous language revitalization programs.
5. Reject American Nationalism
The American flag is a colonial flag. “Patriotism” is loyalty to a genocidal state. Reject it. Your loyalty should be to the liberation of all colonized peoples, not to the empire that colonized them.
6. Educate Yourself
Read books by Black and Indigenous authors. Study actual history, not the sanitized version taught in American schools. Learn about the details of slavery, genocide, and ongoing oppression.
7. Organize
Join organizations led by Black and Indigenous people. Show up. Listen. Follow their leadership. Use your resources and your “white privilege” strategically—to shield activists from police violence, to leverage resources, to speak up in spaces where they might face retaliation.
8. Accept Discomfort
Decolonization is uncomfortable. You will be challenged. You will have to give things up. You will have to sit with guilt and complicity. Don’t center your feelings. Don’t demand that Black and Indigenous people make you feel better about your complicity. Do the work anyway.
Part VIII: Responding to Objections
I know what some of you are thinking. Let me address the common objections:
“But my ancestors came here legally / after slavery / worked hard!”
First, there is no “legal” way to settle on stolen land. The entire United States is an illegal occupation of Indigenous territory. Every deed, every title, every property ownership is built on theft.
Second, even if your ancestors arrived in 1920 and never personally owned slaves, they still benefited from a system built on slavery and genocide. They still received benefits denied to Black and Indigenous people: the ability to own property, access to better jobs, freedom from police violence, access to New Deal programs that excluded Black people.
Third, hard work doesn’t justify complicity in oppression. Enslaved people worked hard—much harder than any European immigrant—and received nothing. Hard work in an unjust system doesn’t make the system just.
“Isn’t this divisive? Shouldn’t we all be unified as Americans?”
Unity without justice is not unity—it’s surrender.
You can’t have unity between oppressor and oppressed without addressing the oppression first. You can’t have unity between colonizer and colonized without decolonization.
Asking Black and Indigenous peoples to “unify” with white Americans without addressing centuries of genocide, slavery, and ongoing oppression is asking them to accept their own oppression. That’s not unity—that’s complicity.
Real unity will come when the colonial system is dismantled and all peoples are truly free and equal. Until then, the call for “unity” is just a call to maintain the status quo.
“What about my Irish/Basque cultural pride?”
Cultural pride in your actual heritage is good. Learning Irish, celebrating Basque traditions, honoring Scottish clan heritage—that’s reconnecting with your Indigenous roots. Do it.
But “white pride” is not the same thing. “White” is not a culture. When people say “white pride,” they’re not celebrating Irish culture or Basque culture—they’re celebrating their position in a racial hierarchy.
If you want to honor your heritage, honor it honestly: as the heritage of colonized people who survived and resisted. Then extend that same respect to other colonized peoples.
“But what about class? Aren’t you dividing the working class?”
I’m not dividing the working class—the ruling class already divided it by creating race.
Yes, class is important. Yes, all working people are exploited under capitalism. But working-class white people and working-class Black people don’t face the same oppression. The system gives white workers racial privileges specifically to prevent them from uniting with Black workers.
Real working-class unity requires white workers to reject those privileges and stand in solidarity with the most oppressed. It requires understanding that fighting racism IS fighting for the working class, because racism is a tool the ruling class uses to divide workers.
Part IX: Choose Your Side
Your ancestors in Ireland faced a choice when the British Empire offered collaboration: resist or comply. Many resisted. Many died fighting for Irish freedom. The ones who complied were called traitors, and they were.
Your ancestors in the Basque Country faced a choice when Franco banned their language: speak Euskara and risk prison, or abandon their identity. Many chose to keep speaking, even in secret, even at great risk. They kept the language alive.
Your ancestors in the Scottish Highlands faced a choice after Culloden: maintain their identity in exile or assimilate into the empire that destroyed them. Many maintained their identity, kept their traditions, remembered who they were.
Now you face a choice.
The movements for Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty are growing. The old system is dying. Climate collapse, economic inequality, and social unrest are reaching breaking points. The question is not whether the system will fall, but what will replace it.
Will it be a new system with the same logic of racial hierarchy and colonial extraction, leading to ecological collapse and endless violence?
Or will it be a world built on Indigenous principles of reciprocity, communal care, and living in balance with the earth? A world where all peoples—Irish and Lakota, Basque and Yoruba, Welsh and Mexica—stand together in liberation?
That’s the choice. There is no neutral position. Your silence is a choice. Your inaction is a choice.
Every day you benefit from stolen land and racial privilege without fighting to dismantle those systems, you are choosing complicity.
Every day you claim “white” identity instead of reconnecting with your Indigenous roots, you are choosing the colonizer’s framework.
Every day you fail to stand in solidarity with Black and Indigenous peoples fighting for liberation, you are choosing the side of oppression.
Conclusion: Come Home
I want to end with this:
If you’re descended from Irish people who survived the Famine, you carry the memory of genocide in your bones. Your ancestors knew what it meant to watch the powerful export food while people starved.
If you’re descended from Basque people who kept Euskara alive despite centuries of suppression, you carry the memory of resistance in your blood. Your ancestors knew what it meant to risk everything to preserve identity.
If you’re descended from Scottish Highlanders who survived the Clearances, you carry the memory of displacement in your DNA. Your ancestors knew what it meant to be driven from ancestral land.
You come from people who knew what colonization looks like because they lived it.
So why are you standing with the colonizers?
Why are you identifying with the systems that destroyed your ancestors’ worlds?
Why are you accepting “whiteness”—a false identity created by the same empires that colonized your people?
It’s time to remember who you are.
It’s time to reject the lies of white supremacy.
It’s time to reconnect with your roots as the descendant of colonized peoples.
It’s time to stand in solidarity with all Indigenous peoples—red, Black, and brown—fighting for sovereignty, reparations, and liberation.
It’s time to understand that your freedom is bound up with theirs, that we are all fighting the same system, that we are all related.
It’s time to come home.
The movement for Black and Brown sovereignty, freedom, and independence is not someone else’s fight. If you’re descended from colonized peoples, this is your fight too.
The same system that colonized your ancestors is still operating today. It’s still stealing land. It’s still crushing languages. It’s still maintaining hierarchies of oppression. It’s still destroying the planet.
And it’s still offering you the same deal: “Forget you were colonized. Accept whiteness. Help us maintain the system.”
Don’t take the deal.
Remember your ancestors who resisted.
Join the fight.
Come home.
🔗 Read the Full Series: Now on Patreon
All power to all the people.
Land Back. Reparations. Abolition. Liberation.
From Ireland to Turtle Island, from the Basque Country to the barrios, from the Highlands to the hood—one struggle, one fight.
They tried to make us forget we’re all related.
It’s time to remember.
