I will note, also, that one of the big things that first spurred me to solidarity with people who are currently marginalized in American culture as a teenager was remembering historical acts of solidarity among Irish-American people with other marginalized groups. For example, I spend a lot of time talking about the Choctaw donation to Irish famine relief in 1847 and encouraging that to inspire Irish-American people to help First Nations groups again in solidarity--and that story getting told over and over again helped inspire millions of dollars of COVID aid, much of it coming from the Irish diaspora, going to the Navajo nation a year or two ago. A year or two ago I spent St Patrick's Day telling the story of the St. Patrick's Batallion, who defected from the US Army during the Mexican-American War and fought on the side of Mexico based on the general feeling that the way Mexicans were being treated was unjust.
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.
no subject
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.