The Reach of Whiteness and Irish-American Cultural Identity
In May my Aunt, Una Cadegan, published an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Catholic immigrants didn’t make it on their own. They shouldn’t expect others to.” her headline read. In her article my aunt talks about the hypocrisy of those who share our heritage, but do not share the opinion that contemporary immigrants deserve the same “variety of government programs [that] helped white American Catholics get where they are today.” Her mother, my grandmother, (along with a handful of siblings, as you do) was a naturalized Irish immigrant. They didn’t come over during the wave of anti-Irish sentiment, if I remember correctly they came in the ’50s; However, knowing that history of anti-Irish sentiment made those exercises during elementary school of “what would you have done if you lived as a targeted ethnic minority” that much easier when looking at examples of systemic oppression. Living as I did in the mid-nineties, checking off white on standardized test ethnicity sections, was fought for, and my cultural identity as an Irish-American is built around the idea that we didn’t get here alone and it is a great disservice to act as if we did on bootstraps alone. Hand in hand with not getting that equity comes the expectation we would extend it as those to whom the reach of whiteness has been afforded both to those who were excluded in the process of inclusion, and to those to whom the equity was owed but perhaps not the category of “white” would apply to at current.
I’ve been thinking a lot about whiteness since the election, especially given the rise in racist anti-immigration rhetoric leading up to it. One of the more useful things for me is that the idea of whiteness as a privileged position and equity as something to be obtained isn’t foreign. Examining what I had in comparison to my dad, to my grandmother, to those famine-prompted immigrants is how I’d always constructed my own cultural identity. The lack of equity between white and non-white groups wasn’t too far a leap from that. Sara Ahmed’s claim in The Phenomenology of Whiteness that “ we inherit the reachability of some objects” isn’t a foreign one at all. While the weight of some 63% of white Catholic women who voted in the presidential election ultimately choosing to vote for Donald Trump (despite leaning Hilary in earlier polls, 49% for her to 38% for Trump), I found some solace in the comments from contemporary Irish immigrants on St. Patrick’s Day, which is typically a day filled with internal conflict for me. This year, though, the rebuke of the underlying hypocrisy of Trump’s anti-immigration comments aimed squarely at non-white immigrants, the statements of solidarity heartened me.
One of the first objects I’ve always looked at in terms of “reachability” afforded by whiteness was my dad’s exodus from the small tristate steel mill-town where my grandfather worked, explicitly because my Grandpa William would not allow him to get a job at the mill, ever. He wanted my dad to keep his eyes on his literature, that was the ticket out of the mill life, and into academia. The cost-balance meant that my dad made about 15 dollars less an hour as a lifeguard at the city pool, but never got tracked into working the mill. It was worth it to my grandfather. My dad spent two years at a local school, then transferred to a public university on the other side of the state where he’d eventually go on to get his Masters of Education. The ability of my father to push out of living in the same small town their whole lives is not one afforded to every son or daughter of someone working at a business like the mill. A lot depends on solidarity. We are a union family. The mill, nurses, and teachers. “You do not cross a picket line” was one of the earliest complex social rules I took to heart. Compassion and solidarity are tied conceptually for me. The gap in access afforded to me by freckled pale skin isn’t fair. Without equity in reach, there cannot be wider equity. Without solidarity to bring that reach regardless of the social situation of a person, without acknowledging their personhood and not reducing them to immigration or naturalization status, especially a racialized one, the progress towards equity cannot start.
