I, um, am also laughing about that "Irish-Americans don't have a culture" thing. Hell, I'm named Erin explicitly to suck up to my very Irish-American grandmother. That is a consequence of the nostalgia and deliberate attempts to keep immigrant culture intact without fully assimilating into a new culture, retaining a cultural memory of heritage and meaning: the name to invoke the memory of where you came from, the memory of migration, the memory of who you are. And I'm lace-curtain Irish--you know, the social climbers--to boot. That doesn't mean that there isn't a distinct culture there, and I mean, I'm at least the fourth generation born in the USA and yet: this is my culture, it isn't default WASP even though it's lumped under "white." White assimilation carries with it the price of forgetting your people and where you come from, and that's always a bargain that immigrant communities and diasporas have an uneasy relationship with. Those bargains create a very different context than cultures of origin grapple with.
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.
no subject
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.