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

[laurajv]

this whole discussion is taking me (as conversations about these issues often do) to the work of Beverly Daniel Tatum, who points out that all children need a positive racial identity, but that Whiteness attempts to erode the cultures and ethnicities of white people in order to create whiteness & white supremacy.

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.

[shirou]

This is a really interesting comment—thanks. I had never thought about how white supremacy flattens cultures of white people.

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.

[mirlacca]

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.

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.

[laurajv]

Among other things, I am Irish-American. I'm the granddaughter of an O'Reilly. You speak as though I do not know of what I speak: rest assured, I do.

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.

[mirlacca]

As may be. I'm Irish-American, and American Irish (with the passport to prove it), and a degree in cultural anthropology as well.

And I have read many, many, many books.

I still want to know what you mean by "a bedrock of Whiteness."