Ancient To Modern History - Africans & Irish
History / Genetics / Culture / Pattern Recognition
The Red Thread
An untold story written across 3,000 years of genetics, labor, language, music and pop culture — 13 independent data points that, when connected, reveal a relationship history has worked hard to keep buried.
There is a pattern hiding in plain sight. It runs from the tombs of ancient Egypt through the tobacco fields of colonial Virginia, through the sawdust rings of the American circus, through the music that built an entire industry, and straight into the casting decisions of modern Hollywood. Taken individually each data point is a curiosity. Connected, they form something far more significant — an untold story about two groups of people that history has worked hard to keep separate, despite the evidence suggesting they never really were.
Point of OriginAncient Origins: Red Hair in the Land of the Pharaohs
The story begins in Africa. When Ramesses II — arguably the most powerful ruler in Egyptian history, a man who commanded an empire stretching across northeastern Africa and into the Levant — was examined by scientists, his mummy revealed red hair. Not a brunette that had oxidized over millennia. Red. Ramesses III showed similar pigmentation. Multiple high-status Egyptian mummies have been documented carrying red or auburn hair, and Egypt sits firmly on the African continent.
This is the first and most important data point because it immediately dismantles the modern assumption that red hair is an exclusively Celtic, exclusively European, exclusively "white" trait. The MC1R gene variant responsible for red hair and the extreme UV-sensitive pale skin that accompanies it clearly had a distribution in the ancient world that modern racial frameworks cannot comfortably accommodate. A physical marker we now associate almost entirely with Ireland and Scotland was present on African rulers at the height of human civilization. That is where the thread begins. What follows is where it goes.
Biology
The Biology Nobody Talks About
Before moving through history it is worth pausing on a biological fact that makes this entire pattern even more striking. Redheaded people with MC1R variants represent one extreme end of the human melanin spectrum — the palest skin human biology produces, burning within minutes of sun exposure, highly freckled, maximally UV-sensitive. Black skin with full melanin expression sits at the absolute opposite end — evolved specifically for high UV equatorial environments, the most photoprotective skin the human body can generate.
These are not just different shades of the same thing. They are biological opposites. And yet across 3,000 years of documented history, these two groups keep appearing in the same places, doing the same work, speaking the same words, and being treated by the same systems as interchangeable at the bottom of whatever hierarchy was in power at the time.
The biology says maximum contrast. The history says something else entirely.
Linguistics
The Word That Crossed an Ocean
One of the most elegant proofs of this hidden connection is a single word. The pronunciation of "ask" as "ax" or "aks" — common in African American Vernacular English today and frequently stigmatized as incorrect or uneducated — is not a modern linguistic error. It is a direct survival of an Old English form dating back to the 8th century. Both "ascian" and "acsian" existed in Old English simultaneously. Chaucer used "ax." The first complete English Bible used "axe." The form was standard for centuries.
It became non-standard only because the London dialect won the standardization war. But in Scotland and the rural British Isles the older form survived. Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers brought it to the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Enslaved Africans, forced to acquire English rapidly, learned primarily from the people physically around them — and in the American South those people were very often Scottish and Scots-Irish overseers, indentured servants and laborers. The "ax" pronunciation passed directly from Gaelic-influenced mouths into African American speech and has been preserved there for centuries while the rest of the English-speaking world moved on. A word spoken daily by millions of Black Americans is a linguistic fossil of Scottish English.
Genetics
Blood and Surnames: The Genetic Record
The linguistic connection is matched by a genetic one. Research and DNA data suggest approximately 38% of African Americans carry some degree of Irish ancestry. The average African American genome contains roughly 20–24% European DNA, with a significant portion tracing back to the British Isles including Ireland and Scotland. This is not an abstraction. It shows up in surnames — millions of Black Americans carrying Irish and Scottish last names reflects not just enslaved people taking enslavers' names, but generations of actual biological intermingling that predates and runs parallel to the formal slave era.
Muhammad Ali, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, Billie Holiday, Colin Powell — all carry documented Irish heritage. These are not outliers. They represent a pattern so widespread that organizations like the African American Irish Diaspora Network exist specifically to document and connect it.
Labor History
Built by the Same Hands
The colonial and post-colonial American economy was physically constructed by these two groups working side by side under nearly identical conditions of exploitation. Canal records from Virginia document the workforce shifting mid-project from "two-thirds Irish" to "two-thirds tractable Negroes" as if the two were functionally interchangeable parts. The transcontinental railroad's eastern workforce was Irish immigrants and Black Americans together — both receiving lower pay than white Anglo workers, both assigned the most dangerous tasks, both largely erased from the celebratory historical narrative.
The canal system, the railroad network, the basic physical infrastructure of a nation — built by the people at the bottom of two different hierarchies that were, in practice, the same hierarchy operating under different names.
Entertainment History
The Circus and the Circular Economy
Between 1845 and 1920 the American circus industry documented perhaps the most vivid example of this shared exploitation. Irish immigrant roustabouts formed the backbone of the canvas crews. Black workers were confined to manual labor, sideshow exhibitions, and musician roles, receiving lower wages than white workers performing identical tasks. Both groups were excluded from mainstream trade unions and forced to form their own mutual aid societies through churches and fraternal organizations.
The most revealing detail is economic. Circus companies deliberately timed their touring routes to coincide with harvest paydays and construction paydays across the South and Midwest — arriving precisely when Black field workers and Irish construction laborers received their wages. The workers who built and in some cases performed in these shows then spent those same earnings attending them. The same hands that raised the tent paid to sit under it. Full documentation of this history is preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Music
The Music They Made Together
What those Black sideshow musicians created while confined to the margins of the circus economy became the foundation of American music. The "Negro jig" — documented by scholars as the direct ancestor of tap dance — was itself a creole form born from Irish challenge dance tradition merging with African rhythm and movement in the 1840s. The banjo, now associated with Appalachian folk and bluegrass, is an African instrument that enslaved people recreated in the New World and that Irish and Scots-Irish settlers in Appalachia adopted and integrated into their own tradition.
Bluegrass and blues share the same parentage. Tap dance is an Irish jig with African rhythm underneath it. The most distinctly American music that exists emerged specifically from the contact zone between these two groups — a fact the Smithsonian Folkways archive has documented in detail.
Political History
Natural Allies Separated by Design
The most sobering thread in this history is what happened when the system recognized the potential of this alliance. A Catholic priest in Philadelphia was documented in 1845 advising newly arrived Irish immigrants to underbid Black workers for every available job — live on less, work for less, monopolize the menial labor market. The Irish largely took that advice. By doing so they traded their natural alliance with the group most like them — oppressed, linguistically distinctive, at the economic bottom — for partial admission into whiteness.
Frederick Douglass, who had been received as a hero in Ireland during the Famine and was called the "Black O'Connell" by Irish nationalists, watched this happen in real time. Enslaved people had contributed famine relief to Ireland. The potential for solidarity was real and documented. The wedge driven between these groups was deliberate and effective and its consequences shaped American racial politics for the next two centuries.
Pop Culture
Hollywood's Unconscious Confession
Which brings the thread to the present. There are now 29 documented cases of redheaded comic book and fictional characters being race-swapped specifically to Black in live action adaptations and reboots. Mary Jane Watson. Iris West. Wally West. Jimmy Olsen. Commissioner Gordon. Ariel. Little Orphan Annie. Batwoman. Starfire. Hawkgirl. The list is specific and remarkably consistent in its direction — not brunettes, not blondes. Redheads, swapped to Black.
Red hair in fiction has always been the shorthand signal for Celtic outsider energy — fiery, working class, emotionally intense, resilient, marginalized. When casting directors and studios reach for a Black actor to fill a role built around that archetype, they may be operating on an intuition they cannot fully articulate but that this entire history explains. The archetypal weight carried by the redheaded outsider and the archetypal weight carried by the Black American character map onto each other because the two groups have shared the same cultural, biological and historical DNA for centuries. Hollywood may be unconsciously acknowledging a connection that mainstream history spent two centuries trying to bury.
Each of these points stands independently in the historical, genetic, linguistic and cultural record. Connected, they suggest that the separation between these two groups — biological, historical, cultural — has always been more constructed than real, and that the evidence of their shared story has been hiding in plain sight across three thousand years. The data is there. The connections are documented. What has been missing is someone willing to draw the line between them.
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