Cultural Loneliness, Irish Americans, & how Millennials and Gen Z Could Reclaim Diasporic Identity
The following was originally a Tweet thread I did when curating for the Motherfoclóir podcast Twitter feed in August of 2020. Curators are changed weekly. Some abbreviations, typing errors, and grammatical issues due to Twitter’s character limit have been adjusted for this article.
So hey, I’m American. As you can see from the news, that’s getting weird. Education & discussion are important. Let’s try and do a big thread on Irish American mythos, increased heritage visibility, and HOW it got to the state it is today.
I’m from a long line of southern, working class people, with relatives who were proud and knowledgeable about what it means to be part of the diaspora. From a young age I knew about this rich history of protest. I am also from a biracial family*.
Americans have earned (& I mean EARNED) a reputation for being clueless, belligerent, and doing sweet backflips into racism via the false “Irish were slaves” mythology. To put it mildly, this ain’t my jam. What gives? Cracker Craic (you may have heard the term Plastic Paddy or PaddyWhackery) and Romantic Highlandism. I learned those two terms from the work of Patrick R. Ireland (that NAME… we get it, calm down). His work is on comparative politics or comparative immigration. So he ends up studying the Scots-Irish diaspora that aren’t, you know, the Kennedys or whoever Scorsese creates for his next film. Usually Protestant. Usually immigrated in dire circumstances.
There’s David Emmons, a historian at University of Montana, who studied the Irish diaspora in Butte, Montana, working in mines. He found that the nature of the work of mining combined with a strong sense of Irish identity lead to a dissolution of “aristocracy of labor.” This means that people not of aristocracy were no longer using work to assert a sense of power or class where there really was none. Where our boys Ireland and Emmons meet in the middle is in regarding that initially there’s no concept of class or whiteness in mixed communities with Irish immigrants. So what changes?
People smarter than myself have covered the advent of whiteness amongst the Irish & Italian in American through positions of authority, say policing, or by using the workplace to assert themselves, so I don’t wanna try to touch on that.
If you’re here [meaning the Motherfoclóir Twitter page], you care about culture and legacy. I trust you’re familiar. I want to scoot to right now, where in America St. Paddy’s is becoming more and more a thinly veiled celebration of white supremacy, where the very very wrong Irish Slave narrative is seeing a resurgence, where, frankly, it’s especially dangerous given, you know, [gestures at the current U.S. administration].
There’s been a huge genealogy boom. Some of it comes from how much more accessible DNA tests are but we can’t deny the combination of increased poverty/American identity crisis and the strange loneliness that comes from 100–200 years of assimilation. Here’s where I think Millennial & Gen Z Irish Americans, who care deeply about protest, decolonizing, preserving culture & language NOT preserving whiteness. We can recognize the nightmare that assimilation was. We can reclaim ancestry/culture. Where to start?
Back to Cracker Craic and Romantic Highlandism. Most of us are Ulster Irish or Scots Irish, especially on the East Coast, and my focus is specifically on Appalachia, as I’m from Appalachia/Piedmont. Tell me now, do you notice a difference in how we celebrate St. Paddy’s and how we do Highland Games & Celtic Festivals? Pause here, think a minute.
…is it a little uncomfortable?
The cultural revival as it stands is serving deeply ingrained, capitalism self worth issues in America. We assimilated, lost a lot of what it means to be in a country of immigrants, but we hold on to the idea of bootstraps and capital as humanizing.
Here’s a thread about Scots-Irish in Appalachia. Short story: initially Scots in the N of Ire thought they were being given a gift by the English but ultimately they were still pawns. The move to America started pre famine was largely a “fuck you”.
[I am referencing a former thread of mine which can be found here. These works will be continued upon in March 2021]
In our establishment of whiteness, moving out of the mines, textile mills, into police forces, politics, churches, we needed to erase the idea that we were no better or no worse than the other immigrants who had settled those lands than the freedmen who had come to work alongside us. You don’t get power if you remain equal.
This is a long thread, I know, but do me a favor. Sit with this, an examination of the alarming amount of Irish Americans at Fox News and in right wing, downright fascist administrations.
Now back to cultural capital and ancestral tourism. Who are the Highland Games and Celtic festivals for? Who is the $1 bin St. Paddy’s decor and drink specials once a year for? Is it the same people? Or is that PERHAPS another class divide?
Our current understanding of our identity as Irish American serves the OG Colonial mindset (which America has made a really disgusting fan fiction of). Who can afford to buy a family pass to their local Highland Games every year? The wealthy.
The upper middle class to the 1 percenters. It’s fun for them to talk about bootstraps, immigration, even the famine, without ever looking at the reality of it. It’s a brag about surviving without ever putting yourself in the shoes of the first people in your family to get here.
Meanwhile, working class Irish Americans, well, they can’t afford that. They can’t get a kilt every year, they can’t give their kid private bagpipe lessons. In Appalachia, your family might all play the fiddle and banjo and bodhrán still but you’re not allowed to pursue music. That’s for rich boys and ultimately we’ve feminized the art as an extra step in how awful and rigid we are about strength and manliness. You got to come to America, you lucky bastard, now WORK WORK WORK.
What they can afford is to spend $10–30 once a year on something green and to get black out and start fights once a year. Boys will be boys. Tough, working class men. Every bartender I know HATES St. Paddy’s because it’s violent. Scots-Irish identity has been split into Scottish and Irish, and it’s a thinly veiled way to split rich and poor… The sense of entitlement and anger comes from somewhere.
We’re roughly ~3–8 generations who were told that heritage isn’t language, celebration, love, or tradition. It’s working yourself to death and complaining the least or being the most fun version of a walking coping mechanism that you can be. Cultural heritage as it stands is weaponized. It’s a tool for economic development & political power for the people who always had a leg up & who were willing to step on other immigrants & willing to participate in Jim Crow.Tourism, festivals, & politics are all using it to define whiteness, grab cash, & keep us indignant about nothing. But it doesn’t have to be that. Federal government grants & Historic preservation trusts can be applied for by ANY OF US.
We can choose where we go on St. Paddy’s, if we go at all, and HOW we celebrate it. We can be vendors at the festivals, we can choose what we’re proud of, and if/how we reconnect to our past. Were we ever really taught? about the Famine, about private plantations, about immigration to America, why the Irish diaspora is so large in school? Oh absolutely not. But you know who usually doesn’t get the truth of it all either? The branches of our family tree that stayed.
I’m a little lucky. I had a grandparent who cared I knew the truth of it & encouraged protest & political engagement. I have biracial grandparents & know how policing & justice look different depending on the shade of cousin. But I had the opposite of that too & the C-PTSD to prove it. But I get to choose. You get to choose. We all get to choose. To unlearn our generational trauma and social conditioning to play these games and either disengage or reclaim ancestry, heritage, and tradition.
I think there’s a very real loneliness in being American. We’re seeing it all come to a head because we’ve ignored every warning sign for so long. We decided that fascism was a German problem and imperialism was an English problem and we sat on our hands for Reagan and Bush and when Obama was still found with blood on his hands, and hope was still shackled by a GOP house & senate, a lot of us gave up. But now we have no jobs, 6 million of us could be evicted tomorrow, our federal government & most state governments don’t care if we can BREATHE.
But how did you get here? How brave did someone have to be to get on a ship and come here? What about your ancestors who were forced onto that ship? How brave can we be? We do have culture. Tradition. Family. History. And we can reclaim it.
Talk to your weird racist family, sure. But it’s the season for leaving racist grandpas behind. So what can you do for you right now to connect to who you might’ve been? It’s scary to march, to stand up, fight, make phone calls, to find out that maybe your whole line moving backwards was a nightmare. But hey, you don’t have to get on a ship. You can do a 23andMe and go to a library. next St. Paddy’s if someone orders a Black & Tan or a WORSE, you can get in a fight for a fun reason.
Here’s a JSTOR link in any case for Emmons.
Patrick Ireland hasn’t done much more work in the Irish American community, but the main work I discuss is in International Journal of Cultural Policy. Aug2014, Vol. 20 Issue 4.
