St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish, and The Construction of Race in America

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

There’s an old joke that goes like this: Why are there more Irishmen in America than in Ireland? Answer: Irish Food.

My great grandfather on my father’s side migrated to North American in the early 1900′s, during the last big nativist fear culture, from County Leinster in Ireland. He settled in New York State and worked as a merchant marine. In his twenties, he married a girl from Elmira, New York, whose Scots Irish family (with a Scottish name) had emigrated from Scotland the generation before, and emigrated from Ireland before that. My great grandfather married in the Episcopal church, but family legend was that he remained Catholic until his dying day.

My mother’s side of the family always claimed to be “pure” English blood, and family settlement in the US goes back to colonial days. A little research, however, shows that my mother’s family had Scots and Irishmen in the tree as well.

When I was little, I was trained to say I’m “Irish, English, Welsh, Scots, German, and Dutch”. Usually these days I either say I’m Irish, or I’m “a mutt”.

When I was a girl in Vermont, the Irish were mostly assimilated. Only six years before I was born, the first Irish American President who remained Catholic was elected. The town I lived in had an “Irish Settlement Road” and “English Settlement Road” showing a legacy of segregation, and my father told stories of his boyhood in Orange, New Jersey, where kids who didn’t wear green on St. Patrick’s day weren’t just pinched, they were beaten up. My father often talked about his family donating to the “Irish Relief Association” (please note the initials) every year when he was growing up.

“White” ethnicities in the town where I grew up were, by the time I was able to pay attention, almost entirely a source of friendly rivalry, not discrimination. The Sullivans, Dowlings, and Kellners all played with the Tomasi, Mirabella, and Kanuto kids. The Lehouilliers and LeDucs and the Bouchers did too, and the fact that for the most part they spoke French made them exotic in a good way, not a negative way.

However, and I need to emphasize this, I grew up in what I would now recognize as a “sundown” town. During my entire childhood, only one black family lived in town, and they were “uncomfortable” there and moved fairly quickly. As I got older, a few Hispanic families moved in. I don’t remember the kids showing discrimination, but I can’t speak to how the adults in the families were treated.

Meanwhile, in the South and the urban centers of the North, the successive waves of Irish immigrants and Scots-Irish immigrants had become mostly, but not completely assimilated. In the deep South during slave towns, the Irish were often used as overseers and other jobs where they were “a step above” slaves. In the north, the Irish and free blacks fought fiercely for the same crappy jobs for over a hundred years, until suddenly the Irish were “white” and the blacks still weren’t.

Soooo, I come from a people who, a century ago, were nearly as completely and miserably discriminated against as African Americans (and not just in America — there are many who argue that English policies during the potato famines amounted to genocide — and not without justification). However, this same ethnic group shares in great measure the responsibility for original and continuing discrimination against African Americans. In fact, the story of the Irish in America is very much the story of a hardscrabble struggle from the bottom, and the success of the Irish in America is due in no small part to the fact that once the Gaelic is out of the accent, an Irishman or Scots Irishman looks more like a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant than any other ethnic groups other than the Germanic and Scandinavian groups.

As for St. Patrick, his influence on Ireland was a mixed blessing at best. We all know that the “snakes” he drove out of Ireland weren’t reptiles. It was a metaphor for driving paganism, the ancient Druids, out. The early Irish church was an incredibly progressive institution, with marriage allowed to its priests, male and female priests, and priests often doubling as the equivalent of modern day lawyers or other professionals. During this time, women could own property in their own names, and Brehon law, which is an ancestor of much of British and American civil law, was an incredibly humane, effective legal system. Unfortunately the Roman Catholic church, in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, stomped out the independent Irish church, and Ireland went from a center of culture and technology to being buried in the worst of the dark ages.

Like other ethnic groups, the Irish have had good times and bad, and have been oppressors and the oppressed. We have maintained a feeling of ethnic identity despite widespread loss of language, land and religion, and have maintained cultural traditions in the face of a massive diaspora. In light of all this, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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