Comments by "" (@A86) on "Analyzing Evil: Bill The Butcher From Gangs Of New York" video.

  1. Also, at that time the Irish were not seen as white people. As hard as that can be for many modern Americans to wrap their minds around, in the 1600s through the mid 1900s the Irish were not seen as white people in the US. Initially only white Americans of Anglo descent were viewed as "white". Benjamin Franklin even described Germans as "swarthy" in his personal diaries. By the 1800s the definition of "white" stretched to include Germans by defining white as "Anglo-Saxon". But Italians, Greeks, Irish, Scottish, Spaniards, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarians, Russians, Ukrainians, and Ashkenazi Jews were not viewed as "white" in the US until WWII and the 1950s afterwards.
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  2. He was definitely a racist too. He made racist comments about black people on several occasions, even calling black people racial slurs, was pro-Confederacy and pro-slavery. The Know-Nothing Party he was a prominent member of was explicitly pro-slavery as the signs they held up made clear. They were anti-Lincoln and pro-Jefferson Davis.
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