"Je Suis Irish"

"What we look for in life are people who really see us." -- Actress Bebe Neuwirth.

St. Patrick's Day is March 17.


My mother and her family were 100% English. My Nana on my father's side was Irish.

I never understood that I was Irish, until I was grown and married. My parents told me that I was English. I suppose my parents wanted to protect me from the bigotry that was always hurled at the immigrant classes.

The Irish were no better, in society's eyes at that time, than Italian immigrants, or blacks. In fact, in many a shop window, there would be a sign that said, "Help Wanted. No Irish or Colored Need Apply" -["Wave of Immigrants Faced Trouble", Hartford Courant, June 22, 2014].

If I would mention my Nana to my family, and say that she was Irish Catholic, I would get shudders and eye-rolls.  I would be told :  "Oh. THAT." Then, the subject would be quickly changed.

My family's fear of bigotry BECAME bigotry. In the process, I lost my ethnicity. I also lost my Faith. My family thought it was cool, capitalistic, American, to distrust religion. From there, it became pretty easy for my family to declare that Christians, especially Catholics, were lame hypocrites who were a burden to society. . I started to fear, if I AM part Irish Catholic, what does that make me?

I ended up a cipher, with no accurate sense of my ethnicity. No religion. No faith. I even learned to hate my Irish freckles.

I once told a black friend of mine in graduate school, that on St. Patrick's Day, EVERYONE is Irish. She looked at her deep brown skin, acknowledged her black wiry hair --- and let out a roar of laughter.

Okay, literally, we are not all Irish!

But I look around at what has been going on the last few years. There was the Occupy Wall Street movement, attempting to make the 1% less invisible. . After several horrifying police shootings in the U.S., at black citizens, there has been the "Black Lives Matter" movement. After a shooting of three Muslim students in North Carolina, there has been a "Muslim Lives Matter" movement. In Paris, after the shooting of Charlie Hebdo for publishing a Muslim caricature, we had the "Je Suis Charlie" campaign. After the execution of Boris Nemstov, the Russian dissident, we had the "Je Suis Nemstov" campaign. In Paris and Moscow, we have had the "I  Am Not Afraid:" campaign.

What is going on in our world?

I think there is a human longing to really be seen as who we are. There is inevitable and permanent damage to our souls, when we are forced to pretend to be someone else, or worse yet, to be no one in particular..

 We do NOT want to all be seen as the same! Bigotry is not, cannot, be battled with a tolerance campaign, that casts us as all the same. No one wants to feel like we are safe, only if we are invisible! We can battle bigotry only by pointing out that we are ALL different, and that is OKAY.

On St. Patrick's Day, it is okay to be Irish. We Irish in America do not need to pretend that we do not come, generations back, from somewhere else on the planet.

On St. Patrick's Day, it is also okay to be Puerto Rican, Italian, Brazilian, German, etc, etc. On St. Patrick's Day, it is okay to be yourself! And our world is all the richer for this. . . .

Erin Go Bragh!

[Related Postings: "St. Patrick's Day", March March 16, 2011; "My Irish Heart", March 14, 2102].

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