The racist songs seem to come from the era of railroad-building and gold mining, when the majority of those working on the rail routes being thrown across the USA were Irish, mostly from the west coast of Ireland, and Chinese. It's said that an Irishman died for every yard of rail track; I'm sure the conditions for the Chinese workmen were even worse.

There was intense competition and mutual distrust between the Irish and Chinese workmen, as there was between the Irish and black working people on the east coast after the Civil War when the end of slavery brought highly skilled black plantation workers north in search of work. Such distrust is, of course, useful to those who would exploit working people and is, perhaps unconsciously, often fostered by their agents and enthusiasts. After all, if the Irish and Chinese had got together to demand proper wages and working conditions, where would we be at all?

The story of the Chinese gold miner is interesting, because Chinese laundries are (in folk memory) considered to be the only real profit-keepers from the gold rushes of California and the Yukon - laundry was sent on ships to China, washed and returned, I've been told.

Following on the Irish Shanty thread and this, could I again request that if there are to be such threads, with their underlying sense of a snigger at racism (not from all posters, of course), they be subsumed into a larger thread on racist songs? Or maybe the drop-down menu of subjects (Lyr Add Request and so on) could include Racist Songs?