Question for the Americans

[james_davis_nicoll]

When Irish-Americans go off on rants about the evils of demographic change do you think they are in any way aware that a century ago people making that speech would have been complaining about the Irish?

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Probably not; irony is lost on "conservatives."

[boxofdelights]

Yeah, they do, and they will tell you completely seriously that that means they understand irrational prejudice in a way that most people don't, and that is how they know that their prejudices are rational.

[bcholmes]

"Like"

[mmegaera]

This makes my brain hurt.

[dsgood]

Add: People whose ancestors came from the Scottish Border or from Sicily complaining about lawless immigrants.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, sometimes not. When they are aware of it, they think it's different this time.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Yup. Their shtick is that they came here and worked hard and didn't depend on either government handouts (lol) or criminality (LOL) to assimilate.

Works almost every time!

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

My paternal grandfather, a lifelong Democrat, refused to vote for Kennedy because he didn't think an Irish Catholic was capable of being an honest President. His daughter, my aunt, eventually married an Irish Catholic, and later in life thought exactly about Hispanics as her father had thought about the Irish. Part of assimilating is learning to look down.

[hano.livejournal.com]

Further proof, if it were ever needed that O'Reilly's an asshole

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

If you are listening to Fox News the you are already in deep doodoo

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The Irish are white.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Now.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Try renting a house in London with an Irish surname and see how long it takes you to run into "no blacks,dogs, Jews or Irish".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, tell that to Ben Franklin.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

See http://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744/ ("Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs" by David Roediger for one theory on how the Polish, the Irish, the Jews, the Russians, etc. all became "white" in America. The last chapter is some theorizing about if the same process will apply to Latinos.

[elizaeffect.livejournal.com]

See also a statement I read a while ago by a white supremacist neonazi with a Polish surname. Wish I could find it again.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

"There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his wet robe hung heavy and chill;
Ere the steamer that brought him had passed out of hearin’,
He was Alderman Mike inthrojuicin” a bill!"

A Kipling chapter-header for one of his Indian stories.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

The one I know certainly is not.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

I love this anti-racism ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miUKTDMtTXg

Though I'm happy they disabled comments. They were awful last time I looked.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

There are a few members of my family who were around when that was still going on in Toronto/ And they manage to not know it.

[bastets-place.livejournal.com]

I confess (as a very pale-pink skinned female) that I sometimes wonder what my (far distant) native American ancestors would make of the "America for Americans" movement.

Given the sense of humor of my family (unchanged for 4 generations, now, that I know of) I suspect hysterical laughter with nothing of good humor to it.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

"This is our land! We stole it fair and square!"

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And I'm Anglo-German-Scots-Irish-Cherokee-etc. (My maternal grandmother's branch of my family traces its American roots to a pre-Revolution 13-year-old German stowaway.) Green eyes, white skin, black hair, and not a whole lot of markers of my American Indian ancestry save possibly slightly high cheekbones. (My Native ancestors, according to family lore, are people who were on the Trail of Tears who managed to drop off and blend into the countryside, shedding their nominal "cultural heritage" in return for not being marched off to Fort Stinkindesert.) But I reckon that nearly anyone who looks at me, I'm "white." I certainly have all the White American Male Privilege there is to have, I reckon. My mother says that I have enough Native American ancestry to qualify as Native American for census and other purposes, save that we've never culturally identified that way. (Or, as one school counselor put it, "Do you feel Indian?")

As a walking example of the Great American Melting Pot, I've never really understood the desire of everyone who comes to America to pull the gangplank up behind them, and am horribly annoyed with how the US government's immigration and "security" policy leads to idiocy like the Peter Watts affair or of Cheryl Morgan being refused entry to the USA despite having followed all the written rules and being afraid to go to the Toronto WFC on account of how the USA can unilaterally and without reason or practical recourse deny airline boarding to anyone going to Canada, Mexico, etc. even if the flight doesn't cross US airspace.

[sahdwholurks.livejournal.com]

One of our neighbors is Irish (as in 'We moved from Belfast to Dublin'), who married an American and moved to Illinois. Someone asked her if she ever thought about moving back to Ireland and her response was 'No, there's too many foreigners there.'

Why, yes, they do have a Romney sign on their lawn, how did you guess?

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Well, it makes as much sense as some black politicians being against marriage equality but not remembering that slaves couldn't legally marry, or the huge funds spent by the LDS (Mormon) church to strike down same-gender marriage in California, even though Utah outlawing polygamy was necessary before it could be admitted to the union. In other words--it kind of makes a lot of sense, because it's perfectly in line with other groups also not remembering where they came from and what their forebears experienced. A very convenient form of amnesia that is practically required in these situations.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

They might be aware of it. We can't know.

Some people think "My people used to be attacked by bigots. Therefore I should work to make sure nobody is attacked by bigots in the future." This way of thinking generates a fair amount of anti-bigotry activism.

Others think, "My people used be attacked by bigots. Therefore I should work to make sure the bigots don't attack me or the people I love. It's safest to support the bigots and be on the side of the bigots while they attack other victims." This way of thinking is WRONG, but it's the evil kind of wrong, not the stupid kind of wrong.