“That’s impressive,” I hear myself saying. “Of course it must have been difficult; if it’s not done correctly, one side will think you’re favoring the other.”

She thinks on this for a second, gazing around at the other party goers and taking a sip of beer before replying. “Nah, I took a conflict resolution course in college.”

Right, of course! — Conflict resolution. If only both sides had thought of that thirty or fifty or five hundred years ago. Maybe my family wouldn’t be in America. Maybe I wouldn’t have to have this conversation.

We’re talking about Ireland. She’s a friend of a friend who’s just finished documentary work in Northern Ireland covering the Troubles and the Twelfth. I know a lot about the Troubles. My family is from Belfast. In 1973 my grandmother got on the phone with Ted Kennedy and didn’t get off until he’d agreed to fly her and her four American children to the States. She’d just lost her husband, a soft-spoken American man and things in Northern Ireland had taken a nasty turn. She did what she had to do. She left her mother, two of her sisters and her home because it was no longer a safe place to raise her children.

If only my grandmother, who worked from fourteen at a chippy, had thought to take a conflict resolution class. I’ll have to remember to ask my cousins back home if Queens University in Belfast offers it.

Saltiness aside, it is possible to sympathize with a marginalized group, but problematic to try to tell their story for them when they can and have attempted to tell it themselves. It is appropriative and disrespectful. And while Irish immigrants have the relative privilege of being able to come to America and look and speak just like the dominant open culture, we are still very much our own. Ireland has created some of the greatest writers, artist poets and other creative types whose work is still studied and praised to this day — I’d like to think we are more than capable of telling our own stories.

Later, as I watch snippets of her documentary on her Vimeo, I recite their names to myself to diffuse the rage-sweat I can feel prickling under my skin. She’s layered uptempo punk-rock over slick images of the Parade and burning tri-colors.

Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde…

My identity is important to me. It has been firmly planted in my head through baking and singing and Irish dance lessons. It’s my duty to keep our culture in this new country. I wear that promise to my family in the painfully intricate knot tattoo between my shoulder blades that she sees when I take off my jacket.

“Oh, you’re Irish, Irish.” She says after a beat.

“Yep.” I’m used to this question — though rarely, if ever, do I hear it from non-Irish. And, as much as I resent it, I understand an ex-pat’s need to clarify if I am truly ethnic or just another green-beer-swilling American. It’s their way of asking me for my credentials.

What county are you from? When did your family come to America? Are you actually Irish or just an American trying to sound more interesting?

And, for the record, I am as Irish as aggressive hospitality and framed pictures of the Pope. It’s a strange thing to have my identity questioned by the same person churning out slick grief-porn appropriated from other people’s struggles and hardships. There are nuances upon nuances to what happened in that tiny corner of that tiny island. Even those who have lived it don’t dare speak with the flippant certainty of this young woman who spent less than a summer there, gathering b-roll of pasty-faced parade-goers and glum Catholic children.

My family is working-class Catholic. When my American grandfather died, my grandmother sold her home and fought to get her four children to the States. By then there was a curfew and explosions that terrified my mother. Towards the end of her life my grandmother made sure I knew the songs and recipes and prayers. Our identity is deeper than b-roll.

Nothing terrifies me more than having that identity paraded out like Europe’s answer to the Invisible Children. I believe cross-cultural storytelling can be a powerful tool for building empathy and understanding. The issue arises when someone silences or speaks for those marginalized groups to further their own agenda of monetary gain or cultural clout or artistic “grit”.