Some theorists assert that the term was adopted in some cases by Irish Americans who wanted to conceal interracial unions with African Americans, paralleling the phrase "Black Dutch" which was also used in the United States to hide racial identity.
[9][10] By the 20th century, "Black Irish" had become an identity played out by Irish-American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert E. Howard.
Researching in 2022, Professor Mary M. Burke of University of Connecticut found that the term "Black Irish" emerged in the United States as early as the 1830s, although was popularised in the 1840s following the Great Famine.
The academic Christopher Dowd describes the Black Irish identity as being "performed" by early 20th-century Irish-American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, Margaret Mitchell, and Robert E.
[6][10][14] In reality, of the roughly 5,000 Spanish sailors who were recorded as being wrecked off the coast of Ireland and Scotland, the few that survived the wrecks were either murdered by local Irish people, handed over to English troops to be executed or immediately returned to Spain,[18][19] and thus could not have impacted the Irish gene pool in any significant manner.
Academics researching the multi-racial Melungeon ethnic identity and other Native American groups in the southern United States found that "Black Irish" and "Black Dutch" were amongst a dozen myths about "dark" European ancestors used to disguise the African heritage of interracial children.
", in which he applied the term "Black Irish" to interracial Afro-Irish Caribbean people on islands such as Jamacia and Montserrat.
[14] In the 1950s, Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam would occasionally assert, alongside claiming Italians were descended from Carthaginian Africans and the Spanish were descended from the Moors, that the Irish were also of Black descent by invoking the 'Black Irish' myth in conjunction with the Spanish-Moors argument.