Saturday, March 16, 2019

Becoming White (Saint Patrick's Day 2019)



In grade school, I recall green-iced cupcakes and parent-coordinated parties for Saint Patrick’s Day.  I think we were allowed to wear green that day—a departure from our Saint Jude uniforms—and I most likely partook.  One Saint Patrick’s Day, I recall eating shepherd’s pie at Nana’s. I didn’t know anything about Irish or Irish-American heritage, but this was something we did, sort of.

In high school, I remember becoming a little more aware—aware that being Irish meant not being Italian, at least.  Unless one was both, I guess.  I recall Mr. Turner ripping on Mr. Parisi’s Italian-ness and by extension ripping on Justin Philemeno, Chris Curci, and the other Italian last names in our class.  This was during instructional time, but we didn’t mind taking these frequent tangents from our world history textbook.  In counterposition to Philemeno, etc., I became cognizant of fellow classmates with Irish last names: Bonner, Clark, McAllister, O’Connor, Toole, O’Toole, Fagan, Egan, and Dougherty.  The last one, Dougherty, was the most popular name in our graduating class. There were eight of them.  I recall, too, the occasional Irish pride bumper sticker on cars in the parking lot: “IRL,” the US and Irish flags intertwined, or even “26 + 6=1,” referring to the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland and the six counties of Northern Ireland making up one future united country.  

In college, I dressed up in green on Saint Patrick’s Day and, as a new fan of “Fighting Irish” football, on six Saturdays every fall.  I did not partake in the underage binge drinking, but on Saint Patrick’s Day and those six Saturdays, plenty of classmates paraded around green and drunk.  Even though we were French-founded, Notre Dame does have some legitimate Irish connections and Irish-American roots. There are robust academic and co-curricular partnerships between Notre Dame and institutions in the Republic.  The controversial Gerry Adams, no less, gave a talk on campus my senior year.  But more important than Irish politics, I met Haneys, Hugheses, Murrays, Murphys, Lynches, O’Briens, Reillys, and others.  They were from Catholic prep schools similar to mine, in suburbs similar to mine, but instead of outside Philadelphia, they were from outside Chicago, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.  With a couple of the tamer ones, i.e. ones less likely to drink on a Wednesday afternoon (when Saint Patrick’s Day fell on a Wednesday), we ate soda bread sent by one guy’s mom and listened to “The Wild Rover.”  After a couple more Irish folk classics, we then made a generational and cultural jump to U2’s Rattle and Hum, and in particular, to Bono’s mid-“Bloody Sunday” political rant.

In the navy, I made up for the aforesaid lack of binge drinking, both on Saint Patrick’s Day and other days.  I drank green beer and listened to the Chieftans and Dropkick Murphys at Cassidy’s Irish Pub, while wearing my green short shorts.

But aside from a ten-day backpacking trip to its rugged west coast in 2010, I have no real connection to Ireland.  No one that I know of has done the ancestry.com research to explore our Fitzgibbons side.  And so, I am admittedly a “plastic paddy.”  We plastic paddies abound in the Philadelphia suburbs and at Notre Dame and places in between.  While it can be obnoxious, that plasticity and the March 17 kitsch that goes along with it, for the most part, is harmless.

*

Along the way, sometime between the first generations’ arrival and today, the Irish in American became “white.”  There was a time when we weren't white, as the early-comers suffered great poverty and discrimination.  Through the generations however, they fought, made alliances—some holier than others—and worked hard to make it out of the lowest social and economic rungs.  Like German Americans around the same time and later southern and eastern European groups, they assimilated relatively well over time and became part of mainstream American culture and society.  It didn’t hurt that they had the right pigmentation and language, mostly.  To make it was to become “white.”  This assimilation and acceptance process was simultaneous with, more broadly, Catholics' becoming mainstream in the United States.   

Even though we are no longer underdogs, among our semi-diaspora today are members who like to play up the underdog side of the Irish, who like to play up their heritage.  I’ve been guilty of this myself.

Being mainstream, being privileged and suburban, being white, having “made it” in the U.S., is a nice perk.  That is a truism.  But at the same time, it can be boring, or lame. It can be boring because it lacks a good underdog, edgy story, and everyone wants to think they’re part of a good story.  And so, with a loose sense of British-Irish relations and of Irish-American history—and sometimes a couple drinks in—many of us indulge in a little victimhood-working-class-days nostalgia.  Many of the old Irish folk songs point that way.  Perhaps that’s how the “26 + 6=1” bumper sticker can be found on an oversized luxury SUV in the parking lot of LaSalle College High School, no bastion of radicalism (btw, yearly tuition in 2019: $24,000). Similar victimhood-indulgence was present when we listened to the “Bloody Sunday” rant on repeat.  

Rattle and Hum, in my opinion, was U2 at its rawest peak.  But by the 2000s, when we were watching that DVD, U2 had already become “white” as well.  And preferring philanthropy to fair taxation I suppose, Bono stopped paying taxes in Ireland.

*

Becoming white has brought great privilege.  But, becoming white has also brought new moral hazards.  Once victims of poverty, racism and nativism, and empire, we now have become practitioners of these great sins.   

On wealth and poverty.  Irish-Americans (as much one can define us as an ethnic group now, with both generational distance from the homeland and mixing with other ethnicities) are one of the wealthiest and best educated ethnic groups in the United States.  This upward social mobility and assimilation in our history can be cause for celebration.  By themselves, they do not warrant repentance.  No group wants to remain on the outside, and no sane, sober person should want to remain destitute or persecuted.  But, as Eileen Markey wrote this time last year for The New Republic:



The Irish in America are tenacious in their cultural identification, claiming an Irish identity a century or more after our forbearers stepped off the boat. We keep our poetry and our grudges, but in the long years of assimilation we seem to have shed what was once a hallmark of Irish identity: a solidarity with the oppressed….

As the Irish left the subway tunnels, mills, and nursery wards for the middle and upper middle class, maybe we held hard to the wrong things. Step dancing classes and children’s names with complicated Irish spelling, but not the old neighborhoods’ practice of shared advancement. Donations to the Irish Studies Departments at prestigious colleges, but not commitment to the on-ramps that did us so much good.  

In the mid-1800s, many Irish fled to the United States because of the potato famine, as is well known.  What is less well known is that while 400,000 Irish starved to death, British landlords, with the blessings of the British government and the Anglican Church, continued to export 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry from Ireland to Britain and other markets.  Thus, in addition to biology and geography in the potato famine saga, it was a strange, cruel, early-global-capitalist logic that caused so many more to perish.  Now, we have been fully assimilated into an even more sophisticated, yet equally strange and cruel global-capitalist logic.  We sit near its helm.

Another symbol of our collective forgetting is the Molly Maguires.  Again, Eileen Markey:  



The Sons of Molly Maguire, a clandestine organization of Irish and Irish American labor radicals in coal country Pennsylvania in the 1870s, took their inspiration—and possibly some members—from a group of the same name in Ireland that set fires, killed livestock, and assassinated the gentry who had starved them off their land when the potato crop failed.... Likewise, there was no lack of income in America’s coal country. The Molly Maguires directed their rage at the mine owners growing fat off their bent backs and blackening lungs. Their actions helped pave the way for unions and collective bargaining.

I am not for sabotage and assassination, but at the least I am for this knowing this history.  In my college dorm that Saint Patrick’s Day eating soda bread, we listened to “The Molly Maguires,” by the Dubliners, but we didn’t know what it was about.  We didn’t care to ask either.

On race.  Daniel O’Connell, in 1854, wrote from Ireland:



Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice, saying, come out of such a land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer....  Passage to the United States seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning, they were pure, loving, and innocent; in the evening, guilty.

Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, and other scholars argue that in many circumstances the Irish in America gained white status by resisting abolition and taking up the mantle of anti-black racism.  Furthermore, “While Irish-American repealers maintained a pride and love for their homeland, they acted unabashedly American in the way they dealt with the slavery controversy,” Angela Murphy writes in American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal.

Throughout the past 150 years or so, the heavily Irish-American composition of police departments has colored our relationship to the historically over-policed African-American community.  Today, with the more blue-collar Irish Americans who become police, an intra-class cultural war plays out between the Fraternal Order of Police and Black Lives Matter.  Meanwhile, we middle- and upper-class Irish Americans, who would not think of joining the police force ourselves, nevertheless find more in common and therefore have more sympathy with Officers McMellon, Carroll, and Murphy, for instance, than we do with Amadou Diallo .  We read “anti-police brutality” as “anti-police,” and ask obtusely, “Don’t all lives matter?”  

On immigration and nativism: Irish Americans now as the gatekeepers is one of the greatest ironies.  The first anti-immigrant law in our history, the Alien Act of 1798, targeted the Irish.  For much of the next century, the Irish landing in America—before there was much of an established way to “come here legally” (“We came here legally!  Why can’t you?”)—were treated with nativist contempt and as second-class citizens.

By the 1930s, still mostly working-class, we felt we had made enough of ourselves to bully the newer groups that had arrived.  Irish antisemitism, often fueled by the Church’s bad theology and bad faith, was rife in Boston, Philadelphia, and places in between.

And now, we arrive at today’s scene.  The Trump team, both official and unofficial, both past and present, is littered with Irish Americans: Bannon, Flynn, Conway, Kelly, Mulvaney, Hannity, O’Reilly, Ryan, McConnell, Kavanaugh, to name a few.  Mike Pence boasts of his Irish roots (his grandfather named “Cawley”).  About fifty percent of the 33 million Irish Americans voted for Trump.   Not that supporting another candidate, in that or any other election, grants full absolution—we all have “dirty hands” (R. Neihbeur) in this “filthy rotten system” (D. Day)—but Trump’s message was and is so clearly racist, nativist, and nationalist.  Those who voted for him are complicit in his anti-immigrant agenda.

The Hannitys-Ryans-McConnells of this world hold up the image of the Molly Maguire miners (or the police officer)—gritty, working class, in theory socially mobile—at the same time that they do the bidding of the mine owners.  Many working-class whites fall for this millionaire-populist ruse.  And too many Irish Americans in the middle—in their management offices with shirt and tie, neither Paul Ryans nor Molly Maguires, and perhaps feeling insecure about their own lack of grit—take the bait.  Nationalism sells.  

This nationalism leads and feeds, finally, into empire.  In becoming assimilated, while taking up residence in the halls of power, we have become the practitioners of war and empire.  This has been an interesting historical twist.  Having suffered at the hands of the British empire for hundreds of years before crossing the Atlantic, we now hold the imperial offices, both civilian and military, in the empire that has replaced the British.  Under some administrations, this U.S. empire has been slightly more benevolent.  Under other administrations, including the current one, it doesn’t even pretend to be.  Under both types, Irish Americans of recent generations have been in lock-step.

As the trump-ets sound for war in Venezuela or Iran, as drones reign over and rain on Somalia, as weapons sales flow to regimes of all stripes, where do we fall in?  To the degree that we care or even know, most of us fall in line.

Which Irish-American spirits will we invoke, if given the choice?  The Robert McNamaras in our country or the Daniel Berrigans?        

(Aside: In a potentially terrible twist of imperial fate, Britain returns to its pastime of redrawing borders even after its own empire has dissipated.  The Brexiteer clowns who voted to “take their country back” and leave the European Union did not think—or did not care—about what effect that might have on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  A border and a region that has seen its fair share of troubles.)   


            *

Wealth accumulation; racism and nativism; empire and war.  Irish-American practice of these sins is not exceptional in the United States.  Other European immigrant groups who have assimilated are guilty of the same.  And in the long view of world history, the United States is not exceptional in these pursuits.  We are just the latest and greatest.  It nevertheless warrants lament, repentance, and conversion.

Could we learn from other groups?  While no people is a monolith, we can learn from those groups in our nation’s history who have been the leaven, the mustard seeds—who have called us to be our best selves.  For one, African Americans steadfastly remain a "blues people."  They have converted their trauma into prophetic witness.  Jewish Americans, informed by their own historical trauma and prophetic tradition, famously became allies in the civil rights movement, and they remain courageously committed to social justice broadly today.  

If we must dig into our own heritage—and even exaggerate it, for those of us who are the plastic version—let us then hold up the Irish and Irish-American stories, prophets, poets, mystics, musicians, and activists who have bent the arc toward justice.  Yes, we have become white, and we need to be honest about that.  There are too many of us to even be special anymore.  But we could become “green” again, and not just on Saint Patrick’s Day.  If that involves standing with today’s victims and instead of standing by triumphantly, then so be it if it’s a little kitschy, indulgent, or overplayed.  


            *

In Ireland, the backdoor Brexit border question looms.  Tension from the Troubles lies just below the surface still in many corners in the north.  The economy eventually rebounded after the false real-estate promises of the “Celtic Tiger” had gone bust and wreaked havoc, but now chasing that gold once again, at the other end of the rainbow, could bring peril.  The Catholic Church’s unquestioned power and abuse has cast dark shadows over the island.   

And yet, Ireland is a sign of hope, at least for me.  It became the first country to divest from fossil fuels, for example.  The Irish lower house passed a bill to ban goods from the illegal Israeli settlements.  And in a beautiful thumbing of the nose to church hierarchy, several years ago, Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote.

Sure, these are only three hand-picked stories, to my liking, from the past several years.  Ireland is no monolith. Nor are the Irish people, whether they be here or over there.  But, hope is where we find it.

Erin go bragh!  (“Ireland forever.”  I’ve seen this around for years and finally looked up what it means).  

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