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

[mirlacca]

This.

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?

[cereta]

Is a religion a culture?

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.