My Cultural Roots, Continued

In my previous blog, I detailed my family's Irish-American heritage, and the practices that carried over into our modern day lives.

However, when my family arrived in the United States, our cultural differences were hardly celebrated. They moved, as stated earlier, in order to escape the potato famine. The Great Famine, as it is known in Ireland, was largely a manmade catastrophe. Aside from the potato,

there was a great deal of food—such as beans and wheat—being produced in Ireland. However, the British landowners exported most of their Irish tenants’ food back to Britain, even though the Irish were starving (Corrie). The British did so because they perpetrated this system upon the Irish for many years prior without consequence, and they generally considered the Irish to be subhuman. The United States, largely populated by descendants of the English, took a similar attitude to the gangly, starving, “uncultured,” burr tongued immigrants invading New York during the time of the famine. The papers of the era most memorably vilified America’s newest citizens by means of cartoons, often portraying the immigrants as gorillas

(A Dublin famine Irish-American monkey)

In order to fit into their new hostile environment, my ancestors—like many Irish-Americans—tried to abandon a lot of their former cultural practices. The dialect went first as it was the easiest way to single out the Irish from the non-Irish. The accent, however, did not completely disappear because it changed the regional dialects, such as giving the Appalachian accent

harsher R’s. The Gaelic language, on the other hand, did disappear. Irish-Gaelic had already flagged for years under British rule of Ireland. In the new country, without any use for or anyone to teach them the language, Irish-Americans simply lost their native tongue. Many of them, as my family did, also converted to Protestantism. This caused them to abandon the Latin that had been a necessity for church. Class and educational values additionally superseded their own beliefs—though this seemed a welcome change. The British rule in Ireland generally perpetuated a system of British landowners and Irish tenants class system (Corrie). As in many farming societies, the Irish were afforded little opportunity for education and generally saw little point to it. In the United States, however, the class system made social mobility possible—though they began at the lowest possible rung. In addition, the economy and government necessitated higher education. Gradually, my ancestor’s went from farmers, to factory workers, and then to small business owners. Each generation saw an increased level of education ending with myself being the first person in my direct line to attend college.

As I said in my previous blog, probably the least similar kinship and cultural system is the one of the modern American portrayed in the media—living away from family, being a

divorced/single parent, interacting with mostly the grandparents, not being expected to support the older/younger extended family. Furthermore, the current media also portrays all Caucasians
in the same light as the bland, elite, dominant class. Many tend to forget that Irish-Americans escaped from starvation and the life of the tenant farmer to come to the United States where they faced rampant racism. Many forget that it is only within the last fifty years that either an Irish-American or African-American president was elected—and President Kennedy was a descendant of the Ulster-Scots, the ruling class in Ireland (Corrie). In summation, no matter how similar or different Americans may look, beneath our shared culture lies a vast and exciting mixture of unique values.

Bibliography

A Dublin famine Irish-American monkey [Newspaper cartoon]. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://www.travelgolf.org/images/a_dublin_famine_irish_american_monkey.jpg

Corrie, E. (2011, September 22). Conflict and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. Lecture
presented at Reinhardt University sponsored by The Year of Ireland Committee and the
Chaplain's Office, Waleska, GA.