CNN didn't say anything about it.  The New York Times ignored it.  Even Bill O'Reilly didn't shout a word from his television studio.  I even went so far to search and Google my way halfway through the entire Internet.  Sadly, no one has said a word.  It's a week later and I am still waiting.  As a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, I consider myself an honorary Irishman, so today I speak up on behalf of my people, the Irish.

On Sunday night while speaking before the NAACP, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright said:

Some people thought that the Irish had a disease. When the Irish came here. Did you hear me O'Malley? O'Reilly? They thought you were - well they might have been...

No one defended the Irish.  Barack Obama said nothing about it on Tuesday when he repudiated the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Why is it that the entire Nation has ignored these remarks and left the good Irish people out in the cold? 

Stereotypes about the Irish in the United States are not often considered offensive, as they would be if they were directed at African Americans.  This is the reason the Reverend Wright could say such a thing on public television and get little reaction from the mainstream press or presidential hopeful Barack Obama.  The truth seems to be that the Irish and African Americans share a similar history.   In his article, L. P. Curtis, Jr., wrote:

In the 1860's, the debate among scientists about the relationship of humans to animals prompted British racists to make frequent comparisons between Irish people, Black people and apes. The Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley wrote to his wife from Ireland in 1860: "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."

This image was published in Harper's Weekly comparing Irish and African Americans as ape like.

So, it is truly a shame that the media and Senator Barack Obama failed to acknowledge this ugly comment by Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Stereotypes hurt everyone, not only African Americans.