The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, what does it mean for my community to call ourselves Irish Americans?
When I was applying for universities for my undergraduate studies, I was thrilled that one university allowed me to write in my own answer for “race or ethnicity.” I took out my pen and wrote down “Irish.” That university, Rockhurst, is the one which I chose and attended throughout my undergraduate years, and it remains the one that I list today before the others. Rockhurst holds a special place in my heart because it is so intrinsically linked with the Irish American community here in Kansas City, and it is one of those anchors that’s tethered me to this community where I’ve been able to make my own impact and presence.
That adjective I chose to write however is perhaps more complicated. I am not Irish by birth but by descent, though one generation too far removed to qualify for Irish citizenship in that manner. Still, Irish is a better descriptor of me than the generic American white, a category which my people were only accepted into for the sake of preserving the flimsy-footed tableau that is racism in America. When I moved to London, I was surprised to be confronted with three categories of white to choose from rather than the monolith I was used to. I technically qualified for all three: I have both Irish and British ancestry, yet I am from a country other than those two. I marked the box for White Irish as long as I was living and studying there because it felt the truest to my nature. Yet again, I am not Irish per se; rather I am Irish American, a member of one of the larger camps within the diaspora created out of the centuries of trouble caused by English and later British colonialism in Ireland. In this perspective, my people are victims of colonization, yet here in America we are the colonizers. So, amid all these tangled webs of identity and nature what are we, Irish Americans?
It is notable to me that in France there is no particular legal sense of identifying oneself as anything other than French. Trevor Noah put this well when he spoke about an immigrant who was granted French citizenship by President Macron after a tremendous act of heroic bravery in saving the life of a child. Yet when I’m in France, I find that if people are confused about my name I go toward my heritage to explain why it’s not your typical Anglo-American name, that my family comes from Ireland instead. I hear a similar tone from the varied generations of nativists in this country, even in the writings of President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who I overall admire a great deal, who wrote in opposition to us persisting as “hyphenated Americans.” This country ought to be a melting pot where all of the immigrants and their descendants shed away their own national and ethnic trappings in favor of becoming one people with one common identity. Yet again, I find this perspective runs contrary to my own lived experience.
To be an Irish American means to remember the place where our ancestors came from, and to remember their struggles as they sought to live their lives first at home and later in this place their newly adopted home. To be an Irish American is to remember that we too were the immigrants not that long ago and to offer a warmer welcome to the newcomers than our ancestors often received. For me, to be an Irish American is to have roots in two countries, better reflecting the interconnected and global nature of our world. Yet at the end of the day, we are Americans. In Ireland, I refer to myself as “an American cousin,” with a slight nod to that infamous play of 1865. The Ireland that many of us know is the Ireland of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the Ireland of the revolutionary generation and the twentieth century when our families left to come to this country. The Ireland of 2025 is still the same country, yet it has grown with the last generations into something that many of us find incongruent with our expectations. It is less an island than ever before with more outposts of the global world on its shores.
Our experiences greeting this global world are different because we encountered it here in America rather than in Ireland. We relate to all the peoples of the Earth through our friendships, rivalries, and mutual circumstances with the other diasporic immigrant groups in this country. I’ve wondered for a long while, including in this outlet if we are slowly with each new generation becoming less Irish Americans and more deeply rooted in other tribes in this country. We tend to be more religious than our cousins in Ireland, and as there are less Catholic schools and parishes that are explicitly Irish are we then becoming Catholic Americans more than Irish Americans? Or are we contributing to a general secularization of that larger white American demographic resulting in both our ethnicity and our religion fading into the background of our identities as ordinary Americans trying to survive in an ever more chaotic world? The key here is that our community is diversifying between political persuasions and regional identities and an overall willingness to remain connected to the lives and histories and passions of our ancestors.
I for one have kept in touch with all of that because I believe it is intrinsic to understanding who I am. My Dad grew up under the same roof as his grandmother who came to this country from Mayo in 1920, and the fact that my parents chose to name me Sean demonstrated to me that this history was an important part of who I am even before I really began to understand what it all meant. For the record, I decided to add the fada to my name (Seán) when a little before my 10th birthday I learned that’s how it is spelled in Irish. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to learn the Irish language even though it’s not all that useful here in America because I know that it’s what my family once spoke, and in order to better understand them and by extension myself as well, I decided I ought to use one of my talents and learn it.This week we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with our usual parades here in Kansas City. I marched in two this year, the warm-up parade on the Saturday before here in my neighborhood of Brookside and the big parade down Broadway in Midtown Kansas City on the holy day itself. Normally, I end the big parade and the holy day itself rather annoyed at how the old caricatures of Irishness and Irish Americanness persist along the route both in the parade and among the spectators. And while I did see some of that, I was more focused on marching with my brothers in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Many of us continued the celebration of our brotherhood and our common heritage later that day and it proved to be one of the better, and sunnier, St. Patrick’s Days that I’ve experienced in a long time. We, Irish Americans persist in our stubborn identity because we’ve built our communities in this country around our roots. It defines us distinctly from our fellow Americans, and with all good intentions demonstrates to our cousins across the water that we haven’t forgotten about them.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 