Ethnic Unawareness

I’m not Irish but I always feel bad for Irish people on St. Patrick’s Day. Why?

But mostly it seems that people celebrate it by getting stinking drunk, feeding into the stereotype of the Irish being big drinkers and alcoholics.

Personally, I wouldn’t be real cool with my people’s history being honored with pub crawls.

    — More Than Green Beer

Not that there’s anything wrong with having a good time, but it’s too bad that people don’t make more of an effort to use the occasion to learn a little more about Irish and Irish American history.

I found a couple of recent pieces in the New York Times pretty interesting:

• For Bronx School’s Dancers, the Moves Are Irish
  … With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny? …
• True Irish
  … Listless, their bellies bloated before death, many Irish were reduced to foraging in fields; contemporary accounts mentioned the green stains on their teeth from eating grass. Herman Melville wrote of “endless vistas of want and woe staggering arm-in-arm.” And the Choctaw Indian Nation sent cash for relief. …

I’d heard of Chinese resorting to eating grass during times of famine. It’s hard to imagine what that would be like. It’s probably going on now in some African nations. When I lived in NYC I went up to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx fairly often and once, when walking back to the subway, I came across a very old Asian woman and a very young girl (a granddaughter, perhaps) collecting weeds at the side of the road. The woman looked up at me and smiled. At the time I assumed she was happy with their “harvest.” I was stunned. Which I suppose is why I didn’t stop to talk with them and ask them if they needed any money. I just kept walking, typical stupid American.

Maybe this is why St. Patrick’s Day kind of bugs me. Instead of it being about the Irish, it’s marketed to the Almighty Me. “Me” the individual, “me” who gets another excuse to party. It’s like Chinese New Year and Cinco de Mayo: supermarkets put fortune cookies and taco fixings on sale. This allows us to feel “multi-cultural” without actually having to learn anything about a minority group. African Americans are lucky; Black History Month spreads out the celebration and removes the opportunity for a one day fling of superficial “ethnic awareness.”

Do I sound cranky? Sorry. I don’t feel cranky, except I still haven’t gotten over this cold yet and since I decided to go vegetarian I don’t get to have corned beef tonight. Plus the Mets are playing the Nationals right now and the game is not being broadcast.