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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