Disclaimer: I am not trolling, I am an autistic person who doesn’t understand so many social nuances. Also I am from New Hampshire (97% white), so I just don’t have any close African-American friends that I am willing to risk asking such a loaded question.
Corned beef seems to have originated in Ireland and Scotland, but was commonly used throughout the British Empire for the past 400 years. I assume the cooking and salting process makes it last much longer without going bad, which would make sense for long voyages.
A traditional corned beef has potassium sulfate (saltpeter) which often had red dye in it, lending the meat a pink color. So it was also about making bad meat look better.
Yeah you know except the whole part where it was brought to the US by the Irish potatoes famine refugees. But yeah nothing to do with ireland just the thousands of Irish people from Ireland that fled the famine.
The whole reason the Irish subsisted on potatoes was that the corned beef they were wage slave raising and producing was to be eaten only by English and French folks that could afford the extravagant costs. Another type of corned beef was here already in the US. It was the Jewish kosher corned beef that became synonymous with Irish American culture.