Dear America: Please Get Over Ireland and Italy Already

I am Euromuttboy but the last name's Irish and there's plenty of Irish and Scottish blood on both sides of the family. Don't fetishize it but don't mind it -- there's also French, Italian, German, English...

who goes 'don't fuck wit me - I'm one quarter french'?

The Quebecois, les Metis and ME, an Acadian.

(a) One St. Patrick's Day -- I was standing in a bar with some guy I'd just met, and he went on for about ten minutes about how he'd recently been to Ireland and it was a powerful experience to see "his people" but now it was just so sad and heartbreaking to see what's happened to that beautiful old Irish culture. In the interest of actual two-way conversation I said something like "Yeah, dude, I know how you feel, my family's from Ethiopia," to which he actually went "No no no, but this is Ireland, you know," etc. etc.

(b) Same thing except substitute drunk girl at party going sloppily on and on about how she was going to Italy and would really, you know, "connect" with her history and her culture &c. After ten minutes cue me: "Yeah, it really is a pretty interesting experience" and so on, and her basically like the Irish guy.

I hated the Irish guy more, though. Pretend we're just talking about Ireland, then, fine.

My mom reminds us occasionally of our scotch-irish blood, but that was several generations ago, so...

your ancestors were heavy drinkers?

Remember that sketch from "The State", where everyone was a stereotype - they had a Jew, an Italian, etc. Then in one sketch, they had an Irish person with red hair who wore an Aran sweater and a Notre Dame hat.

scotch=liquor.

But never-the-less, alcoholism is in the family tree.

Top 10 Prize Cultural Ties for Americans

1. Irish
2. Native American
3. Italian
4. Latino (for not-so-Latinos only)
5. "African"

Also per Tracer and Kerry: really, why Irish? To be completely honest, from what I've seen among college-aged males Irish affiliation serves primarily as an excuse for binge drinking. I see the obvious arguments that there was a ton of Irish immigration, and Irish culture is "close" enough to the prevailing English-derived culture of America, and the Irish were easy to quickly consider "white," but still -- it seems to me that it needs some unpacking. Also: if not for the World Wars, would Germany be a big one here, too? (It only is in certain parts of the Midwest, from what I can tell.)

Pete Baran to thread!

Nabisco what did yr Irish guy think was so bad about 'what had happened' to Ireland?

It's not really even an immigrant thing so much as a metropolis-regions thing (partly anyway) - in Britain for instance the nation urbanised rapidly over relatively few generations so there's this need to overstate or fake a felt connection to 'the countryside' (Robin C to thread too!) and this is a more extreme cousin of the same imagined-utopia thing.

Unless I'm misreading, nabisco isn't talking about anyone who's resisted the melting pot -- he's talking about the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents melted in ages ago -- people who were raised without any ethnic identity beyond "American" -- but who have suddenly decided "Fuck it, I'm Irish," because they saw a particularly moving Liam Neeson movie. Or because the IRA makes them sad. Or they look good in green.

If he's NOT talking about those folks ... well, I am. And fuck em :)

From what I gathered, he wasn't even talking about Northern Ireland troubles but about the death of some imaginary rural-Ireland peasant idyll, the collapse of the economic viability of the picturesque farming hamlet and whatever hardships and dislocations have stemmed from that. (Those poor Irish with their economic modernization.) I wasn't completely clear on what he meant, but whatever he was talking about it was apparently worse than anything that's ever gone on in Ethiopia.

Noodles: no, they're not.

Mary: I am thinking of those cultural ties that people, all other things being equal, foreground in their senses of identity. I think if you take a given youngish American person who is 1/4 Irish, 1/4 Danish, 1/4 Swedish, and 1/4 Dutch, chances are that that Irish portion will have been teased out to occupy much more of their self-identification that any of the others. The same is true of Native American ancestry to a massive extent: people who are 7/8 everything in Europe ever and 1/8 Cherokee will inflate that last bit to create a sense of their own exceptionalism, even if they've never met or associated with a full-on Cherokee in their lives. I hate to generalize but I do think this is a trend that tends to be broadly true of significant groups of people.

Nick Tosches actually gives a good sense of what it meant to grow up "Italian" when he did.

In Chicago it STILL means something to be Irish, at least in most areas of the city. The police force is, for example, something like 60% irish as is the city government and the democratic machine is probably somewhat more.

And there's a smaller trend of people attempting to reclaim Jewish heritage they might not actually have, in Texas and the Southwest -- descendents of the Spanish colonists who, because an unknown number of those colonists were secretly Jewish, have started to celebrate Jewish traditions in addition to the Christian ones they've been brought up with for the last four hundred years. There's a term for it I'm not remembering because it was only brought up in passing in my Spanish Colonial history course -- maybe someone else will know what I'm talking about, though.

I grew up in New Hampshire, which is about as whitebread as you can get, and you run into the I'm-Irish-because-my-great-grandmother's-maiden-name-was-Fitzhugh thing a lot: my brother did a long stint in the New Hampshire prison system, where there are so few black inmates that although the gangs still split along ethnic lines, there are only two types: the Puerto Rican gangs and the Irish gangs. A large number of the guys in the "Irish gangs" have Polish, French, and German names.

The IRA gets most of its funding from the US; the mere fact that bars such as this one exist shows there is at best a tolerance and at worst a glorification of such things among certain people. I am sad that Americans had to deal with terrorism on their own turf before some of the more bigoted, pointless ones got a picture of how loathsome it is.

Mary: March 17.

The whole terror and violence thing is not news to many American immigrants -- all my ancestors dodged bullets, literally, to get here.

Sorry if my "because the IRA makes them sad" comment sounded dismissive, Mark, cause it's not how I meant it -- and it wasn't meant to necessarily imply that these borrowed-heritage-Irish folks are anti-IRA, either, but whether they're for it or against it (I've met both), "sad" seems to sum up how they feel. I'm deliberately understating cause I was being dismissive of their feelings: it has never come across to me as genuine sympathy for or outrage at either side, but simply a way to lend drama to one's life by associating oneself with an "exciting" ethnicity.

(And of course, I'm not suggesting Americans shouldn't have any feelings about the IRA, or aren't entitled to them -- I have family in Belfast, so I heard a lot of debate about the IRA from people who'd lived in Ireland long before I was hearing it in the college cafeteria, which might be why I have so little patience for what I see as jaded kids trying to snort an emotional high off of someone else's tragedy.)

Marc C, am I wrong cause it really sounds like you are actually glad that America got its lesson on terrorism.

Oh, and I am Danish, Scottish, and either Mexican or Native American or some blending thereof (my great-grandmother had a little affair and my paternal grandmother was the result - the great-grandmother never settled on who it was that she slept with - the story changed based on how much alcohol she had consumed and who was present to listen o the story).

What's the Commitments quote? "I'm black and I'm proud"? Yeah. That was how it looked in high school, but that could've just been in response to House of Pain, too.

... not that I'm suggesting HoP were a bunch of actual badasses ...

I *do* think a number of (though not, I'm sure, a majority of) Americans, from its leaders downwards, did not have a well developed sense of the emotional impact of terrorist activity before September 11th, and I was conjecturing this may now have changed. This, I think, may be a good thing.

Tep, thanks for the explanation. I guess in my ire I didn't really try and understand what you were saying.

What I do apologise for are my insensitive comments about moving onto Al-Qaeda in my first post. It was unnecessary and spiteful, although it was purely an outburst caused by the anger I was feeling once again.

I'm of Italian origin. Perhaps I should have just concentrated on that side of things :)

I would say that the Oklahoma Bombing (1994?) was the US's real first-hand taste of large-scale terrorism. They had to retrofit all the federal buildings and tightened up a lot of security measures.

Have they rebuilt the Pentagon yet?

I have a hard time asserting what other individals think, let alone a majority, for reasons I explained upthread. At least this is true for me, I shouldn't speak for others.

And yes, they have rebuilt the Pentagon, though I'm not sure if everything is back to normal in that particular section.

Yes.

I'm at least half-flippant (tiltant?) in most of my posts anyway, so it doesn't bother me to clarify when need be :)

"jersey shore" is an ethnicity in and of itself.
― Tad (llamasfur), Wednesday, February 5, 2003 3:34 AM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol six years before Snooki et al. prescient me.

fuhgeddaboutit

This is interesting for someone like me who is 2nd generation Irish but who looks more Jewish/Arabic in appearance.

"DNA analysis of the Neolithic woman from Ballynahatty, near Belfast, reveals that she was most similar to modern people from Spain and Sardinia. But her ancestors ultimately came to Europe from the Middle East, where agriculture was invented.
The males from Rathlin Island, who lived not long after metallurgy was introduced, showed a different pattern to the Neolithic woman. A third of their ancestry came from ancient sources in the Pontic Steppe - a region now spread across Russia and Ukraine."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35179269

Not many Americans I know are all about bragging up their German ancestry. Hard to imagine why.

I'd read a few years ago that the main traces were back to modern day Turkey so its not hugely surprising xp