By Gideon Gordon
Photo Credit: Relief from the National Library of Ireland on The Commons
In current conversations about the intersection of masculinity and imperial oppression, a proper progressive line views masculinity as part and parcel of a larger colonial structure. Colonization imposed new concepts of masculinity onto colonized people; to properly decolonize society, we need to identify the range of ways that masculinity can be performed and recognize that the norms we take for granted are in fact historically constructed and can be reconstructed in different ways.
Colonization of non-European societies by European cultures produced distinctly new forms of masculinity, for both colonists and those displaced by them. Colonists became “real men” through colonization; Clive Moore notes how the process of colonization in Queensland, Australia created a mythology of masculine Australian men, with Queenslander manhood defined in contrast to recent arrivals from the British Isles, women, and the Aboriginal people of Australia (Moore 1998). The masculinity gained through colonization was by comparison to others: both native people of the region and the people of the colonist’s nation left behind at home.
While colonization affirmed the masculinity of the colonizer, it also meant denigrating the “uncivilized” masculinity of the colonized. Brendan Hokowhitu, writing about his experience as a Māori man in academia, describes how colonial and racist institutions in New Zealand ultimately defined Māori men by their physical strength and “untamed” power, especially as expressed through sport (Hokowhitu 2004). The masculinity of the colonizer, because it was structured in contrast to “inferior masculinities,” requires this negative comparison; ultimately it is in contrast to the colonized “other” that a colonist becomes a “real” man.
This paper does not challenge the substance of this academic literature. Instead, this paper will sound a note of caution regarding the uncritical acceptance of anti-colonial masculinities. I will do so through the lens of “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans,” an Irish rebel song.
The chorus to the song begins:
Come on out, ye Black and Tans — come and fight me like a man!
It continues:
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell her how the IRA
Made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra.
This tune crystallizes an anti-colonial form of masculinity. It mocks the manhood of the British “Black and Tans,” a counterinsurgent unit formed of World War I veterans who were deployed in Ireland to suppress the guerrilla attacks of the IRA (the original, active in the 1920s, not to be confused with the Provisional IRA which was active in Northern Ireland during the Troubles). Ultimately, former members of the “Black and Tans” would also be deployed to the Palestine Mandate in the 1920s and 1930s (Cahill 2009). However, the song was not written in the 1920s, but the 1950s or 1960s; the writer, Dominic Behan, became active as a songwriter in 1958. “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” is thus a commemoration of a previous generation of nationalists not written by them. This context is important in understanding how it constructs anti-colonial masculinity through the symbolic resources of the 1920s insurgency.
The song marks a very open challenge to the masculinity of British forces in Ireland:
“Come and fight me, hand to hand, like real men do; you won’t.” (paraphrased quotation).
In other words, as the British assert their manhood through the violence of colonial rule, the “real men” of Ireland puncture through these views by revealing them unwilling to “fight fair.” The presence of an audience — the wives of the British soldiers — makes their humiliation public. The “green” land itself seems to fight the British as they flee, whilst the Irish resistance forces the British to leave the (feminized) territory alone. The chorus thus brings together a number of strands: defiance against British soldiers’ manhood, invoking the soldiers’ emasculation in front of an audience, and its association with the protection of the lovely and feminine land of Ireland.
The first two verses of the song sharpen the poetic bombardment of British and non-nationalist manhood and the elevation of Irish nationalist manhood. The first provides background framing of the song as one that the narrator heard from his father, who would get in fights with pro-British neighbors every night. This links the manhood of the narrator to the manhood of his father, putting his honor in relation to the historic honor of his family and ancestors. The second brings current British dishonor into the context of recent martyrs of the Irish nationalist cause: Charles Stewart Parnell and the sixteen executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising.
The third verse of the song explicitly places the British war in Ireland in the context of other contemporary colonial ventures:
This verse is what moves “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” from a specific tale of Irish nationalism to a broader narrative of anti-colonial masculinity. It mockingly asks the British to show the same minimal courage they displayed crushing Arab revolts in the Middle East, when they often used air power to bombard recalcitrant tribes (Omissi 22-23), and in the Anglo-Zulu Wars, where they wielded “sixteen pounder” artillery against Zulus who the singer asserts, were armed only with “spears and bows and arrows.” The implicit argument is that the mighty British empire cannot win an even fight; it must resort to heavy weaponry when fighting weaker parties. The appeal here is not unlike one used to challenge a bully.
The call to “pick on someone your own size” is a powerful symbolic attack on the manhood of occupying armed forces, not necessarily restricted to the Irish context. Julie Peteet, an anthropologist present in the West Bank during the First Intifada, used Bourdieu’s analysis of “challenge” to understand how the Israeli army’s beatings of Palestinian youth became understood culturally to strengthen the masculinity of those youth, even though the beatings vividly illustrated their physical vulnerability (Peteet 1994). Peteet notes that, based on Bourdieu’s reading of challenge, masculinity, and honor (qtd. in Peteet 1994, 34), “a man dishonors himself when he challenges a man considered incapable of ‘taking up the challenge.’” The violence inflicted by a heavily armed Israeli soldier on a young Palestinian, which, in certain perspectives, revealed the Israeli army’s arbitrary power over Palestinian bodies, could thus be reinterpreted as a mark of the Israeli army’s lack of honorable masculinity. In other words, the very superiority of force which the ruling power enjoys also destroys its own claim to civilizational or moral superiority, within this framework.
Helpfully, this symbolic attack is likely to be available essentially anywhere imperial power occurs, because massively overwhelming force is a necessity for colonization. But this verse also reveals the deeply-rooted problem with anti-colonial masculinity. While elevating Irish masculinity, it simultaneously reinforces ideas of Arabs and Zulus as weaker and more vulnerable to British rule. In the case of the Zulu War verse, this is explicitly linked to British technological advantages, which emasculates other victims of colonial rule as “damn natives” frightened “to the marrow” by British firepower, even as it emasculates the British for resorting to that firepower in the first place. Masculinity comes from facing the superior power of the British Empire fearlessly, as the narrator does. Thus, that the Arabs and Zulus are cowed by British artillery and air power implicitly makes them “lesser” men than the Irish. There is a racial element too: the Irishman singing the song never categorizes himself with the “damn natives.”.
The role of anti-colonial masculinity in establishing a hierarchy of manhood also operates within the colonized society. While the explicit text of “Come Out, Ye Black And Tans” is about a confrontation with the British Empire, the subtext focuses on a slightly different set of enemies who the narrator’s father is calling out: Irish loyalists. An Irish journalist analyzing the song’s history notes that it is “textured by the [the writer’s family’s] bitterness about the way the Free State treated them after Irish freedom…” (Falvey 2019). The men emasculated by their failure in the song were not actually British soldiers, but fellow Irishmen who the narrator disagrees with politically in Dublin after independence. The masculinity of non-nationalists, unionists, or pro-British Irishmen can thus be called into question by linking it to the failed, emasculated British Empire, comparing as such to the heroic masculinity of Irish nationalists. This mirrors the hierarchy of manhood established by colonial masculinity, but with the colonists gone by the song’s time, the non-nationalists become identified with their weakness and cowardice.
In this framework, the only possible response to colonial rule is to do the brave but suicidal thing: to call out the colonial forces and expose yourself to superior firepower. Surviving violence at the hands of occupying forces makes you a hero, as Peteet notes. Not surviving, also a very probable outcome, makes you a martyr. Masculinity here becomes a competition for honor through participation in the national struggle; to not oppose foreign influence wholeheartedly means to no longer be a man.
“Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” remains a symbol of Irish nationalism decades later. In 2020, amid a controversy surrounding a possible event commemorating the Royal Irish Constabulary, a rendition of the song by the Wolfe Tones, an Irish band which often plays songs with nationalist themes, reached the top spot on Irish iTunes (“Come Out Ye Black And Tans Is Number 1”). And in the Irish general elections that same year, the Irish republican political party Sinn Fein, with branches in both the country and Northern Ireland, played the song as part of their campaign (McQuinn, “General Election 2020: The 10 Defining Moments”).
Ultimately, “honorable” standup bouts of fisticuffs did not drive the British from Ireland. Instead, the Irish insurgents of the 1920s waged their war as secretly and “unfairly” as they could. Much of the time, the experience of battle for the insurgents was an exercise in waiting on lonely roads to stage ambushes, often to no avail (Catháin 2023). And the war ended not in a complete victory for either, but in a compromise solution via treaty, including an un-glamourous provisional administration, a gradual handover of power, and the continued inclusion of Northern Ireland in Great Britain. The compromise produced intense debates across Irish society, and it was only accepted by the revolutionary Irish parliament, the Dáil, by the narrow margin of 64 to 57 (“The Treaty In Context”).
The Irish War of Independence was immediately followed by an uprising by opponents of the treaty, who felt that it sold out all that the war had been fought to achieve, and the resulting civil war occurring between 1922-23 cost over a thousand lives. Even after the provisional government defeated the anti-treaty faction, the ideological scars remained; the “Dublin street,” where the narrator was born, was one torn by continued controversies over the meaning of independence. “Come Out” participates in and reproduces wartime discourse a long time after the war.
Thus, in practical terms, there is a massive gulf between the heroic masculinity nationalists promote, and the messy process of true national liberation. Anti-colonial masculinity detaches violence from political aims. The nameless narrator of “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” does not have a specific aim in the fight he’s seeking. The fistfights with pro-British neighbors, “every night, when my Da would come home tight” is framed as a repetitive ritual of manhood, not as part of any long-term strategy. The goal of masculine anti-colonial violence is emotional catharsis — a rejection of colonial emasculation and an assertion of agency — not material improvement. And these structures of honor, shame, and hierarchy persist even once, supposedly, the war is won, as shown through the history of “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans.”
Future research could explore the legacies of these anti-colonial masculinities in more detail: How memories, especially the mythologies constructed around wars of independence shape how we think about masculinity today; what gender performance looks after periods of anti-colonial warfare; and how nationalists reconstruct masculine heroism out of the messy reality of wars of independence. The anticolonial masculinity of “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” is not an issue for the distant past; it remains alive, and the ethos of heroic violence it promotes continues to distort our thinking about how political change and social progress actually occur.
Works Cited
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Cahill, Richard. “‘Going Beserk’: ‘Black and Tans’ in Palestine.” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 38, Summer 2009, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78290.
Catháin, Máirtín Seán Ó. “The War That Didn’t Happen: Waiting for Ambushes in the Irish War of Independence.” Contemporary European History, vol. 32, no. 4, Nov. 2023, pp. 532–50, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777322000819.
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Falvey, Deidre. “Come Out Ye Black and Tans: Think You Know What It’s about? You Probably Don’t.” The Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/come-out-ye-black-and-tans-think-you-know-what-it-s-about-you-probably-don-t-1.3832601. Accessed 21 Mar. 2024.
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McQuinn, Cormac. “General Election 2020: The 10 Defining Moments.” Irish Independent, 8 Feb. 2020, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/general-election-2020-the-10-defining-moments/38938282.html.
Moore, Clive. “Colonial Manhood and Masculinities.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22, no. 56, 1998, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14443059809387359.
Omissi, David E. Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939. Manchester University Press, 1990, https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/169-history/36386-british-air-power-and-colonial-control-in-iraq-1920-1925.html#:~:text=The%20policing%20role%20of%20most,other%20populations%20under%20British%20sway.
Peteet, Julie. “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence.” American Ethnologist, vol. 21, no. 1, 1994, pp. 31–49, https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1994.21.1.02a00020.
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