St. Patrick’s Day and Cultural Appropriation

You can’t avoid it.  It’s everywhere:  little girls Irish-dancing their way through your facebook feed, parades, articles on the Irish, overcoming adversity to prosper here and in their home country, and the fabled green river.  Specials on corned beef & cabbage at the grocery store, as well as shamrock trinkets of all kinds.  (Thank God my kids are old enough that their teachers don’t fill them with tales of leprechauns any longer.)

Now, I admit it:  I’ve never identified with this whole “Irish” business in the first place.  Yes, my great-great-grandfather was Irish, so I have a smidge of Irish ancestry, but we didn’t actually know this until we started researching genealogy (I would have thought that Stapleton was an English name, nothing more). We went to the Greek Festival or to Greektown sporadically growing up, we knew that Dad’s father’s parents had come from Denmark, but there was nothing special about that, so we never had a big connection to any particular ancestry.

At the same time, it’s still true that “everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.”   No proof of ancestry is required to take Irish dance classes, or go to a party, or wear green today.  Everybody “culturally appropriates” Irishness, and no one seems to mind.

And that had me thinking:  is it conceivable that, a couple generations from now, being of Mexican ancestry will be much the same?  Pull out a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, dance to Mariachi music at a party, have a feel-good bond with a country, and then go on with your work-a-day life?  Or will the bean-counting that happens now, the politicization of the identity, the insistence that it is one’s adopted country that is the oppressor, not the government/colonial power of one’s native country, prevent this?  Or will, in fact, the continuing influx of Mexicans reinforce Mexicanness as the key overriding identity, even of long-ago-arrived Americans, rather than as just a fun piece of cultural background and the source of a few favorite family recipes?

And besides this — well, it’s striking that for every St. Patrick’s Day parade and party, there’s a story of “cultural insensitivity” by a group hosting a Mexican-themed party, such as this sorority or this one or this fraternity fundraiser.  Will these sorts of stories fade away, or reinforce cultural divisions?