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agonyaunt2021-08-11 12:08 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2021-08-11 12:08 pm
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Dear Prudence: My POC Friends Say Being Interested in My Irish Heritage Is a Dog Whistle.
I’m a third-generation American. All four of my grandparents were born in Ireland and moved here as young kids. According to my parents, when my great-grandparents moved here, they moved to an area with little to no Irish community and had to assimilate pretty quickly. They changed their names to something more American, cooked only American foods, etc. Obviously, nowadays, Irish last names are very common in the U.S.
When I was growing up, I really didn’t know anything about Irish American culture because my grandparents didn’t like to talk about it much. Now I’m an adult and I live in a very heavily populated Irish American area. About a year ago I started to get more interested in the culture and wanted to research it a bit more. This basically consisted of me reading a few books about the history of Irish Americans, making a few new recipes, and learning about the origins of my family’s original names.
I didn’t really think it was a big deal until I mentioned it in passing to my group of friends. To my surprise, my POC friends got upset, saying that Irish Americans have no culture and that it was just a dog whistle to become interested in Irish history. I would never, ever suggest that Irish Americans had it worse than Black Americans or anything like that; I was simply trying to learn about my ancestry.
My first thought was to write them off, but now I’m worried that I am somehow signaling racism. Am I doing something wrong?
A: Not at all. If you ask me, reading history books and making a little corned beef and cabbage sounds like the ideal way to get excited about your heritage. We’d be so much better off if more white people chose this route instead of, say, waving a Confederate flag, railing against the 1619 Project, or trying to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools. It sounds to me like either something’s missing from this story or there was a big misunderstanding that might be cleared up by another talk about what you’re doing and why. If these people are truly mad at you for researching your family’s history, you may need new friends.
And a comment:
Q. Re: Accidental racist: The only thing I can think of that would precipitate this response is if the writer either has brought up the “Irish were slaves” myth, conflated “Irish need not apply” with racism toward BIPOC people, or their friends think that’s where they’re heading. The writer may want to interrogate if they’re using their heritage to feel better about their role in white supremacy. (I say this as someone who is part Irish, and feels the most comfortable about exploring that because it is the least oppressive of my cultural heritages. But y’know, I’m still white with everything that means.)
A: If the letter writer brought this up, they left out a big part of the story; none of it falls under research on family history, recipes, or names. But letter writer, if any of this feels familiar, give it some thought.
I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
I can understand LW's friends to an extent. I've been told that the Irish had it worse than Black people in the US and also that they were 'too proud' to be enslaved, unlike us. I can understand the immediate wince. But LW seems aware of that history of misusing Irish-American history as a weapon: " I would never, ever suggest that Irish Americans had it worse than Black Americans or anything like that; I was simply trying to learn about my ancestry." was a statement that really inclined me favorably towards them. If LW has told us the full story I think their friends should put their faith in LW over their bad expereinces. If LW were my friend and hadn't hurt me with this I would be researching recipes for them, but you all know me and food. :)
Re: I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
yeah, I was very curious as to your take on this; this was my read, as well.
Re: I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
ahahahah I'm pretty amused that we both recently looked at a letter and thought "I wonder what she thinks" about each other.
Re: I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
That's pretty much how I feel, with a side of:
Irish people from Ireland and first generation immigrants generally find Irish-american culture pretty ridiculous and often annoying.
I'm all about LW connecting with her heritage, but she needs to deal with the fact that her culture is Off Brand White American. Her heritage foods are cream of soup casserole and Oscar Meyer weiners burned on the grill and served with ketchup and mosquito bites. Her white assimilated culture, although she knows "what kind" of white people she is, is no different than the average (variable class) mutt type white people she may be trying to separate herself from.
I pick up on this because IME it is extremely common among assimilated white people but it's almost never mentioned or examined. And dealing with that baggage can be distressing.
And, as you know MM, a whole frick of a lot of white people who get really invested in what kind of white people they are can pick up some nasty white supremacy along the way. Investment in what kind of white people one is can also be an expression of heretofore unknown or unexamined white supremacist beliefs.
"You don't have a culture" is a rude thing to say, but I don't blame the friends for their caution.
Re: I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
Re: I deliberately did not use my dubious icon
That is a sadly common condition. wry smile And yeah, the whole framing of "worse" and "not so bad" doesn't fit with reality, anyway -- there are no medals to be won in any Oppression Olympics.
Underneath discussions like these there's another layer, I think, about the arbitrary nature and massive power of the social construct that even is 'race'. I was thinking about that in a loose unwoven way. I may try to tighten it into a journal post.
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I kind of wish I could send LW some cookbook recs.
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Whiteness is a complicated category, and the boundaries of whiteness change over time and cultural context. Moreover, "white" and "not white" aren't a binary--there are always people who are conditionally white, or who are currently viewed as uncomplicatedly white but retain memories of a more complicated past. Some people try to invoke those complications or a history of having been excluded from Whiteness to shut down a modern, contemporary, and local discussion of racial relations and experiences--but those people will look for any tool they can find to shut down calls for equity, justice, and equality. Other people look at the same history and see "just as I was treated unfairly then, so were other people treated more unfairly" or even "so were other people who were treated unfairly then not lifted up alongside my people to enjoy a more equitable space", and say "So we should lift those people up alongside us in memory of our own rise." The memory and the learning isn't so much the problem as the people trying to use their own memories--especially warped and weaponized memories--to strangle conversations that are taking place in and about the here and now.
In general for people who are in privileged categories, I think you need to construct a positive understanding of what that identity can mean to go on with instead of either constructing an identity based entirely out of shame or holding onto an empty lack of identity that exists only as an apology. For other people in the Irish-American diaspora, I think that can be a powerful way to understand what our roles in both justice and injustice have been in the past with an eye towards shepherding more justice into the world to come.
At the same time, tho--I'm not so surprised to see flinches from friends because, well, the people who try to weaponize this history do exist, and if you only ever encounter it in the hands of people who are trying to claim that your complaints of poor treatment both now and then are invalid, you're going to form some really nasty associations. There's not really a cure for that besides listening to each other and figuring out whether you can trust one another to not hurt each other. I don't think the OP's friends are willing (or able?) to do that judging from the letter, and I mean, that's a choice they get to make.
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The Beyond Kin Project is another example of how family history research can be a form of anti-racist solidarity. The idea is for genealogists who are descended from slaveholders to share information (e.g. names of enslaved persons found in wills) in order to create a resource Black genealogists can use to help identify their ancestors.
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Also, you can add the Irish withdrawal from the International Lacrosse tournament in favor of the Mohawk Nation to your list of links between the Irish and American Indians.
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History is all about the stories we tell ourselves about things that happened, you know? And those things that happened are, well, happening every day still--just like the withdrawal from the International Lacrosse tournament. We write our own histories, every day.
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That is my reading on it. Reading a few books and trying out a few online recipes is different than joining a local org that has competitive irish dancing that leads to meeting people in those orgs that might be less interested in being anti-racist. Once you know that those people are in those orgs than it is easier to decide what you want from your relationship with them. And it might be you want nothing to do with them, you just want to read some more books and try a couple more recipes.. maybe even visit the island. But at least your friends have given you a clue as to how other people might look upon your new found hobby.
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My mom is the youngest of five, and her older siblings are all in their 70s now. A few years ago, my aunt and uncle were talking about what it was like to have an ethnic Ukrainian surname when they were in elementary school and junior high during the Cold War. My uncle had tears in his eyes when he talked about how his best friends stopped being allowed to play with him because "What if the [surname] family is Russian spies?" There was a 25-year period where my grandmother had no contact with her cousins in "the old country" because it was too risky to have letters going back and forth too often.
It strikes me as really sad that we've gotten to the point where people of certain skin colors aren't supposed to take interest in their ancestry and ethnic heritage.
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Saying that someone has no culture is as ignorant as saying someone has no accent -- these are human universals in their diversity. It's deeply sad when someone says that of themselves, and both ethically lacking and inherently a lie when someone says that of someone else.
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But the phrase "[white people] have no culture" tends to be a very specific marker that the friends are the ones who are pretty far down a different rabbit hole. :(
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Which is not a justification. These are all unjustifiable statements -- everyone has a culture, that's intrinsic to humans.
And this feature of the ongoing discussion is part of why this letter reminded me of the one about the LW who was getting into exercise and their friends who were displeased. In both cases, looking at an activity a friend has gotten into and being concerned within one's head about a potential incidence of a bad pattern one has experienced before, that's one thing. Preemptively hitting back against that friend before one is attacked and despite not being attacked is definitely a very different thing, especially ethically and in terms of level of unkindness.
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I would absolutely believe it started as ironic reversal, and that most Black people still encounter it more often that way! In previous decades I saw it more often in contexts that were obviously ironic. If LW's Black friends were using it that way and LW just didn't catch the context I retract my comment above.
Weirdly the people I see using it in an anti-racism context in the past few years don't seem to have any knowledge at all of its history (or its opposite) as a white supremacist talking point.
And yes, it's super tough! Trendy diet/exercise stuff and European heritage stuff are both cases where I would try to at least throw out a few feelers to an enthusiastic friend to make sure they're aware of things to be careful about before they're in too deep, because there are patterns and psychological/social trapdoors there. Especially Scandinavian and Celtic. (other things on that list: MLMs. My Little Pony fandom. Gun ownership. Cable news. Every religion I have personal history with. Certain paranormal topics like ancient aliens. Various Tumblr communities. Some of them I enjoy myself! But you need to know what to look out for.) It's even tougher when you have the experience that makes the whole topic personally painful for you.
But balancing between warning people of a danger, protecting your own boundaries, and not stomping on people's joy is so hard.
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white culture, in other words, IS white supremacy
that doesn't mean the cultures it is trying to flatten are white supremacist, but it does mean that to the extent they have assimilated to whiteness, they have had to assimilate white supremacy along with it.
What I kind...a little telling about the LW's approach is that they did not attempt to figure out either modern Irish culture, or the Irish culture of their ancestors -- they attempted to figure out modern Irish-American culture. That culture is as assimilated as fuck to whiteness.
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FWIW, I do not get the impression that LW is focused exclusively on modern Irish-American culture. They said they don't know Irish-American culture, but their research is on Irish-American history and their ancestry.
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Excuse the fuck out of me? What does "assimilated as fuck to whiteness" mean? There IS, in fact, a modern Irish American culture. As it happens, most modern Irish Americans are white, as well. So were the Irish historically. I think you're trying to conflate two different ideas of what "culture" is here. Have contemporary Irish Americans assimilated into US "white" culture? Yes. Does that mean they don't also have a culture of their own? No.
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Many, MANY aspects of Irish-American culture lie on a bedrock not of Irishness, but of Whiteness. Any Irish-American who claims different needs to sit down, shut up, and read a book.
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And I have read many, many, many books.
I still want to know what you mean by "a bedrock of Whiteness."
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But that's not "no culture." My culture is baseball and superhero comics and hamburgers and the 4th of July. My culture is also southern Ohio, which means shades of Kentucky and West Virginia (my bio family is mostly from WV). It's gliding short a's, so that "can" and "cabagge" sound different from "cat." It's a slight twang when we get in our cups, and never saying "y'all" in Cincinnati but definitely saying it elsewhere. It's saying, "please?" to mean, "sorry, could you repeat that?" It's U.S. Catholicism and "Hail Mary" in Latin. It's a culture.
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"Am I allowed to be confuzzled by the idea that people in the U.S. of European extraction who have no real identification with a European culture have no culture?"
Teenage me would be totally confused along with you (people kept telling me this, usually in a weird attempt at a compliment,and I would just stare at them.) It's that unmarked thing again.
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Nevertheless, I identify primarily as American, especially now that I'm an adult. (It was a little different when I was a child, when I had a harder time fitting into a Southern American culture that existed immediately outside my house but not inside it.) Maybe it's in part because I've spent enough time in NL and know enough Dutch people to understand how I'm culturally different. But it's also because, for all its faults, I see a lot of richness in American culture that I'm happy to claim as my own.
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There are hundreds of definitions of "culture," but the one that most people who have made a living actually studying the subject will accept comes down to: Culture consists of learned behaviors which are passed on from one generation to the next. Culture gets modified as it gets passed along--it's a telephone game--but the key is in transmission.
There's also some lateralism involved, as in cultural drift, or cultural diffusion. This is how cultures grow and change (and sometimes stagnate and die).
Is "White" a culture? I'm not sure. Is the GOP a culture? Is a religion a culture? Or are they elements of a larger idea of identity?
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Speaking as someone who grew up steeped in Catholicism, and who recently re-embraced that: YES. Yes, religion is a culture. It's part of many cultures and sub-cultures that make up my identity, but of course it's a culture. It has norms, values, rituals, shared stories, shared language, music, art...what is that if it's not a culture? Some religions have more of that than others, and almost all have varying levels to which a person participates in/is influenced by that culture, same as any other type of culture, and like all cultures, it overlaps others (the German-influenced Catholicism of my childhood is probably very different from what someone in an Irish-Catholic parish/diocese/city will have experience) but of course it's a culture.
And in this case, it has strong parallels to whiteness, in that there is a very strong default that people only really recognize in its absence. Most Americans, unless they are specifically part of a different religious culture, experience a kind of foundational Christianity (often specifically Protestant Christianity, but that's kind of splitting hairs). There's the holidays (and I know, secular Christmas, pagan roots, except it's really not if you are specifically religiously outside of it), there's an enormous influence over Western literature (try teaching James Joyce to people who've never read the Bible; it's a gas) and music and art. But it's the default, the norm, the unmarked form, so a lot of things that are Christian in origin have been flattened into what we call "mainstream" culture. Which is very much like what's happened to a lot of {insert European region}-American culture with regard to whiteness.
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I am just a girl, but something about it smells authentic to me. Maybe I just want to hope so. wry smile
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A side note: If all four of LW's grandparents were indeed born in Ireland, LW and parents may wish to investigate Irish citizenship, a very enviable thing to have these days and an important reason to research one's ancestral culture and village.
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I agree that if OP was trying on the "Irish were slaves," she may not have looked into the historical context. It is, in fact, true that Irish were imported to the Caribbean islands and worked in the cane fields next to POC. I haven't ever seen any evidence, though, that they were bought and sold (aside from the initial sale to plantation owners) or that families were split up or any things that POC were subjected to. The idea that "Irish were slaves first!", though, is not gonna fly. They were not slaves in anything close to the same way Blacks and Indians were. (I'm also enrolled in the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation, by the way. Intermarriage works that way.)
As far as "no Irish need apply," I do think that was flat-out racism, and references to "the Irish race" and "subhumans" back me up. "A Modest Proposal" may have been satire, but it was close enough to exactly what the British--and the American upper classes--believed to make it instantly recognizable. My father went to college in a sundowner town that called out Irish, Jews, and Blacks without distinction. At a distance, though, you couldn't tell an Irish Catholic beggar from a WASP beggar, at least until he opened his mouth (which is why my grandmother got off the boat and went to the nuns to lose her accent).
I'm not for one second going to try to minimize the horrific things that whites did to POC. I understand why they'd resent the hell out of someone who seemed to do so. I don't know exactly what the OP said that evoked that reaction. But I will say that Irish Catholics have more than 600 years of some pretty horrific history of their own, and I would take exception to anyone who tried to minimize THAT. We don't need to play "more persecuted than thou." We need to stop persecuting, period.
ETA: And as far as "Irish Americans don't have a culture"--do not get me STARTED on that; I got degrees in Anthropology and Communications in an effort to understand better the cultures I grew up in.
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Look, diaspora cultures are their own thing, not inauthentic shades of the mother country's "real culture". Corned beef and cabbage, for example, is explicitly an Irish-American cultural association, not an Irish-Irish one--it's a culinary response to immigration and a direct result of butting up against Jewish-American immigrants in NYC. That's my people, not the ones who stayed in Ireland! And of course people in the origin culture see these products of immigrant diasporas being ascribed to them and get confused and annoyed, but their annoyance isn't the problem--the failure to understand that immigration waves create new and specific subcultures and cultures as a consequence of new collective experiences is.
Also, good lord talking about Irish and Irish-American history gets complicated powerfully by the legacy of Catholicism and whether you're coming from Catholic or Protestant places--which is actually one of the big places that the experience of Irish-American (meaning US) and Irish-Canadian diasporas seems to differ; Canada having always had a very different relationship with Catholicism as a legacy of the influence of Quebec. You see a lot of conflation of the Scots-Irish (Protestant) and Irish-Catholic groups and that muddies water further, especially if you don't have a lot of understanding about just how far Catholic/Protestant tensions among US Christians went prior to the Moral Majority forming in the 1980s.
Anyway, remembering this story isn't necessarily about comparing Irish-American people to other descendents of immigrant diasporas who were treated poorly or worse. It's about remembering where we came from and the context of that coming, and using it to understand who we are today and how we can walk forward. It shouldn't be a competition about who was treated most poorly, as the "but Irish were slaves too" sloganeers often betray themselves to be, but instead should be a woven tapestry of understanding how we all came to be on this continent. You cannot solve pain by insisting it does not exist: only by talking about it, and talking about why it happened, and how we can accept that pain and move forward in it.
The price of fully assimilated Whiteness into a default culture is to forget who your own specific people were and are. One of the ways to kill that assimilation of anonymity, then, is to give people stories about who their own people were specifically. Kill the narrative of a default, anonymous Whiteness that came from nowhere and exploded into hegemony; create instead a set of marked narratives that remember and honor their own suffering, the suffering of others, and use those stories to cease promoting suffering in the future.
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This is really well said.
I think when I first posted this I should have pulled out and explicitly disavowed the "Irish Americans don't have a culture" line for its various levels of wrongness and stupidity. The cultures of diasporas and the patterns in how they differ from the source country are really interesting.