Dear Prudence: My POC Friends Say Being Interested in My Irish Heritage Is a Dog Whistle.

[minoanmiss]

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.

Comments

[sciatrix]

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.

[juniperphoenix]

This is a great comment.

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.

[minoanmiss]

This is wisely and beautifully said.

[mirlacca]

Oh hear hear.

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.

[sciatrix]

Oh yes! I need to remember to bring that one up and tell the story. I'm pretty sure I can think of others, but it's always useful to have a little pre-considered list of historical moments that inspire and invoke solidarity moving forward. (Of course there are also plenty of historical moments that invoke pain and infighting; those are to be honored and remembered, but perhaps as an example to be avoided in favor of the more positive moments which can be burnished with pride and used as an example to be emulated.)

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.

[mirlacca]

And again like!