On St. Patrick’s, remembering how the Irish became white

In case you missed it in this weekend’s New York Times – here’s a great op-ed about Irish immigration to the United States. I intend to share this with the next person of Irish (or Italian, or German, or Polish …) descent who I hear complaining about Latino immigration. Also, this reminds me that I need to finish reading How the Irish Became White.

It’s About Immigrants, Not Irishness

By PETER BEHRENS

Published: March 16, 2012

ON this side of the Atlantic, St. Patrick’s Day has become a boisterous, often bogus, celebration of America’s Irish roots. For most, the holiday is an excuse to drink, and perhaps pinch people who aren’t wearing green.

But for many Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians, including me, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t really about Ireland. It’s about our ancestors leaving that country, often in bitter circumstances, and risking everything on a hazardous journey and being met with fierce hostility and scorn. It is about immigrants struggling, and mostly succeeding, in their new life, or making success possible for their children and grandchildren.

It is a story that should describe all newcomers to America. This March 17, on this side of the water, we ought to be celebrating immigration, not just Irishness.

Before the mass exodus from Ireland provoked by the great famine of the 1840s, new arrivals to North America were either settlers or slaves. The Catholic Gaelic Irish were the first cohort consistently labeled as “immigrants” in the modern, quasi-pejorative sense, and their experience established a stereotype, a template, applied ever since to whichever national or ethnic group happened to be the latest impoverished arrivals: French-Canadians, Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics.

It’s embarrassing to listen to prosperous 21st-century Americans with Irish surnames lavish on Mexican or Central American immigrants the same slurs — “dark,” “dirty,” “violent,” “ignorant” — once slapped on our own, possibly shoeless, forebears. The Irish were seen as unclean, immoral and dangerously in thrall to a bizarre religion. They were said to be peculiarly prone to violence. As caricatured by illustrators like Thomas Nast in magazines like Harper’s Weekly, “Paddy Irishman,” low of brow and massive of jaw, was more ape than human, fists trailing on the ground when they weren’t cocked and ready for brawling.

Read the rest here.