A St. Patrick's Day Lament
My Irish heritage, whiteness, and longing
It’s difficult to take anyone seriously as they down a green beer wearing a shamrock headband, but for the next few minutes I’m asking you to try. That person with the cup of dyed alcohol, bedecked in campy headwear is me. Every year I go to the altar of St. Patrick’s Day, a deeply silly holiday on its face, to remember that people like me with Irish heritage in the US were not always generically white. We are originally from a different country, with an anguished history, and we fled abuse that changed shades with the centuries. Upon arrival in this country, there was a choice: To become white or resist. My family became white.
One of my third great-grandfathers was born in 1848 in Ireland, at the height of the Great Hunger, and arrived in Buffalo, NY, as a toddler. His future wife had a similar story. My great-great-great-grandparents were Catholic, coal miners, plumbers, and housekeepers, at least half of them born in Ireland and settled in northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1895, a different third great-grandfather died after being buried in coal when a mineshaft collapsed over his head. His obituary described him as “a staunch Republican.” I wonder if the liberty he believed his countrymen back in Ireland deserved extended to Black people in the US.
Every year at the St. Patrick’s Day Faire in Phoenix, I listen to the bands and tears stream down my cheeks. The fiddle, bodhran, flute, accordion. The clap of hands and the lilt of voices. I ask my people, how could we escape a famine manufactured by colonial rulers and then take up the mantle of whiteness? How can we side with the oppressor?
I track my ancestor longing by when I re-subscribe to Ancestry.com and spend hours reading two-hundred-year-old handwriting on birth and death certificates. On arrival documents there is often only the country of origin, not a county, or city, or parish. Ireland is small, but it’s large when hoping to find from where exactly my people fled. I also return to the search when I am feeling lost in the present.
A family story goes that my grandfather’s grandparents still had their Irish brogues at the end of their lives.
Noel Ignatiev writes in How the Irish Became White (PDF), “The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave. They came to a society in which color was important in determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted to it in short order.”
A family story goes that my paternal grandfather’s ancestors were Scottish, but when they came over pretended to be Irish to receive slightly better treatment.
My pen stumbles because I’m aware of how little I know. Why do I turn to the internet to research my history instead of calling my two living grandparents? But I pick up the pen, the thread of lineage, again because I want to know my past. I don’t want to wave my hands when someone asks about my heritage and jokingly say, “I’m whiter than sour cream,” laughing off my Irish-American-ness as something that doesn’t matter anymore. As if the identity of immigrant is one to erase over time, leaving a Real American. Claiming a heritage of oppression requires examining how much I’ve benefited from my family becoming white. And doing things differently now. The loud reclamation of a personal history that goes back farther than the US is not trivial. As the current administration demonizes and attacks immigrants, more voices and action in union with those targeted is a pressing need.
A family fact goes that my great-grandfather died while his wife was pregnant with my grandfather. My great-grandmother, who was Polish, was left widowed and with a child, mourning an Irishman. Her son didn’t (doesn’t) celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as far as I know, nor did he pass down any connection to that heritage to my mother and her siblings. He drank and eventually got sober and I can only imagine what never knowing his father felt like. It was my parents, looking back, as I’m now looking back, who brought our family history alive for me and my brothers through stories and putting green dye in the lemonade. And music, always. My parents played The Chieftains, The Cranberries, Battlefield Band, U2, Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy, The Dubliners, and Sinead O’Connor early and often enough that I experience the fiddle, the Gaelic keen, and the stamp of mournful feet as sublime.
March 17th is one day in the sea of a year, but it always comes when I need to experience something more than the story my country tells me. Tinsel in my hair, glitter shamrock on my cheek, beads around my neck. All of it worn as profane regalia. You, no matter where you’re from, are Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, remember that. Select your drink of choice and sit next to me. I’ll make an obscene toast, and we’ll weep for what we’ve lost and how we got what we have.
“When it's not always raining there'll be days like this.”
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