McKone: Irish-American progress and paradoxes | Perspective | timesargus.com – Barre Montpelier Times Argus

The idealized vision of America, with the Statue of Liberty as a beacon welcoming the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse, and the homeless of the world people with nowhere else to go doesnt ring as true as we used to think it did. In reality, Liberty and its inspirational, pro-immigrant poem have always been symbols of hope, more than signs of acceptance.

As discouraging and abhorrent as some of the current anti-immigrant rhetoric is, it is not new, and St. Patricks Day is a good time to focus on the Irish-American experience, as one component of our messy history with race and immigration.

The concept of the statue in New York harbor welcoming immigrants took hold after Emma Lazaruss poem, The New Colossus, was cast on a bronze plaque and installed there in 1901. The poem reads, in part:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Despite those glowing words, most immigrants to the United States, including Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans and many others, have not received a warm welcome. They have often been considered inferior, diseased, dangerous, ignorant or generally undesirable. Not surprisingly, given our centuries-long history of racism, skin tone has been a determinant in whether or how soon new arrivals would be accepted into the dominant white culture.

In Working Towards Whiteness: How Americas Immigrants Became White, David R. Roediger describes how industry and political leaders sometimes played different nationalities and racial groups off each other to undermine labor unity and to keep wages down, and how they restricted voting.

The U.S. census, for example, counted the foreign-born and the children of the foreign-born as white, but in separate categories from whites whose parents were U.S.-born, Roediger writes of light-skinned people of the 19th century, noting that, originally, only whites were allowed to vote. However, the third-generation immigrant disappeared into the white American census category.

Neither was discrimination just on the national scene. In his memoir, The Road Taken, Sen. Patrick Leahy writes of prejudice against the Irish in Vermont.

(My dad) told us about the signs in Montpeliers storefront windows: NO IRISH NEED APPLY, or, if you could not understand what that meant, NO CATHOLIC NEED APPLY.

While Leahy said those stories seared into his father and family a fierce sense of right and wrong, an earlier Vermont native son, Calvin Coolidge, while he was president, signed restrictive immigration legislation claiming Nordic superiority, favoring the right kind of immigration, and endorsing (a) sense of racial peril, according to Roediger.

Coolidge held that racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside made it clear that divergent people will not mix or blend, Roediger writes.

In How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev narrows the scope.

The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave, Ignatiev writes. He later writes that, in the U.S., (No) one gave a damn about the poor Irish. Even the downtrodden black people had Quakers and abolitionists to bring their plight to public attention.

While Ignatiev gives examples of extreme mistreatment of the Irish here, he emphasizes that those conditions were still not as bad as being enslaved.

To those who insisted that the lot of the free white laborer was worse than that of the slave, Ignatiev writes, Frederick Douglass liked to point out that his old position on the plantation had been vacant since his departure, and encouraged them to apply.

In 1845, after Douglass published his autobiography, in which he describes growing up in slavery and his escape to the North, for his personal safety, he went to Ireland, staying there and in England for two years. He was treated well in Ireland and grateful to the people, but the provoked bitterness between Black Americans and immigrants, colored his view in America.

The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro, Douglass writes.

A caller to an NPR radio program asked, since the Irish and Blacks were both horribly treated in the past, why is there talk about reparations to make up for grievous past wrongs for Blacks but not for the Irish?

The reason is what came next: The Irish, like many other immigrants, were gradually accepted and then even welcomed into the dominant white culture; whereas, people with black and brown skin many of them whose ancestors were brought here involuntarily have never been completely accepted.

Many individuals have shined, and it is obvious that our lives are greatly enriched by the achievements of Black Americans; however, Blacks as a whole, still notably lag behind white Americans in all measures of social, educational and economic opportunity. While the Irish have made steady progress, for generations after the Civil War and the end of slavery, Black Americans were forcibly held back by segregation, voter disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and racist violence that went unanswered by government.

If the spirit and intent of emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had been honored, Blacks could have been as successful, in terms of economics and power, as the Irish and others, and there would be no discussion of reparations.

Once despised for many reasons, including their religion, Irish Americans are now fully integrated into mainstream American society, belonging to various political camps, and filling national leadership positions; those positions currently include the presidency (a Democrat), the Senate minority leader (a Republican), and seats on the Supreme Court. This is progress for Irish Americans, but Douglasss words still haunt us. Where do todays Irish Americans stand?

Many are fighting for social justice, equity for Black and brown Americans, helping the poor of all backgrounds, defending the right of every person to be their true self, welcoming immigrants, and, remembering the horrid conditions in Ireland during the centuries-long British occupation, speaking out in defense of those in occupied countries.

Others ignore what their ancestors went through, arguing that the emancipation of enslaved people ended racism in the United States, prescribing narrow views for how others should live, blaming poverty on the poor, and ranting against immigrants.

When I was a boy, I learned that the words at the Statue of Liberty celebrated Americas greatness, and I still believe that. My mothers parents came here from Ireland in the 1920s, escaping war and its aftermath, and my fathers grandparents and great-grandparents arrived in the 1850s, escaping famine and British oppression.

The Irish heritage I appreciate, to quote Frederick Douglass, readily sympathize(s) with the oppressed everywhere in our own country and abroad. That is a venerable heritage to build on, a reason to be proud of being Irish American, and a reason to speak up for all marginalized people.

Tom McKone lives in Montpelier.

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McKone: Irish-American progress and paradoxes | Perspective | timesargus.com - Barre Montpelier Times Argus