From “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as “white” as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.
At that conjuncture, both in the Christian Crusades against Muslims and England’s invasion of Ireland, the transition from religious wars to the genocidal mode of colonialism is apparent. The Irish under British colonial rule, well into the twentieth century, continued to be regarded as biologically inferior. During the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by social Darwinism, some English scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and all people of color) had descended from apes, while the English were descendants of “man,” who had been created by God “in his own image.” Thus the English were “angels” and the Irish (and other colonized peoples) were a lower species, which today US “Christian Identity” white supremacists call “mud people,” inferior products of the process of evolution. The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1585. In the lead-up to the formation of the United States, Protestantism uniquely refined white supremacy as part of a politico-religious ideology.