FriendBurst Blog

Once again, I must be hard up for blog topics as I am posting a paper I just finished for my “Working With Diverse Populations” class as a blog…

“Some psychologists and students of human behavior say that today’s preoccupation with genealogy is less a matter of ego and personal vanity than it is for answers to searching questions.  As the blanketing cloud of anonymity approaches, one asks: Who am I? – What combination of circumstances brought me here? Perhaps it is also stirred by a fear of the future – a fear that coincided with the beginning of the Nuclear Age.  People seek reassurance in the thin, red line of ancestors who also survived misfortune, travail and catastrophe and are heartened that they, too, will somehow – in some way – survive.”

– Stuart McKenna
Port Washington, Wisconsin
1978

The quote above comes from The McKennas of County Kerry and The Western World – A Genealogical Biography, written by Stuart, my paternal grandfather.  Despite its rather broad sounding title, the book is a straightforward biography of his grandfather, George McKenna, my great-great-grandfather, who immigrated to the United States in 1869.

Given the tremendous influx of European immigration to the United States in the latter decades of the 19th Century and early decades of the 20th, like many Americans, I can trace my ancestry back 5 or 6 generations, but there it pretty much stops.  From there back, my heritage essentially becomes countries of origin; names of people replaced by nations. I know my ancestors came from Germany, Poland and Ireland and a small handful of other nations, but when I try to use genealogy to answer Stuart’s question of “Who Am I?”, what insight could examining this diffusion of nationalities, each somewhat different from one another,  possibly offer me?  If I want to understand my own personal culture, my heritage shaped by the cultures and circumstances of my ancestors, if I am 9/16th’s German, 5/16th’s Polish and 1/16th Irish, does that mean my individual heritage is influenced along those same proportions?  Am I going to need a calculator to figure out who I am and where I come from?  Such is the challenge facing a Diffused American.

One question that Americans of European descent will ask each other nowadays is “What are you?”.  This is commonly understood to be a request for the breakdown in percentages, quarters, eights and sixteenths of one’s ancestry, and is generally not a preclusion to discriminatory attitudes nor done in order to put the other into some hierarchy of ethnicities.  It is probably a unique question in the history of the world.  Where, when and amongst whom would this question ever have been asked? I would argue that ancestry amongst modern “Diffused Americans” has become more of a conversation piece and an item of trivial personal history than it is a source of personal culture. This is quite different than the motivations proposed by my grandfather when he looked at the role of ancestry two generations ago.

Despite my inability to point to a single country, religion or ethnicity as being “where I’m from”, I do not doubt that the mores, values and circumstances of generations past have influenced who I am and how I see the world.  It may be subtle, but it exists.  Moreover, I understand that I live a modern world where I interact with individuals for whom the factor of personal heritage plays a central role in shaping who they are. If I am understand these perspectives in a culturally competent manner, it would benefit me to not only understand a thing or two about cultures other than my own, but also get beyond the “non-race” of whiteness.

So what did these long dead, German, Irish and Polish individuals who make up my great-great-grandparents have in common?  Well, they all understood what it was like to be immigrants to America at a specific time and a specific place, 100 (or more) years ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Therein I find the common threads that I can weave together to begin the tapestry of my individual cultural heritage.  My ancestors’ cultures may not have had a lot in common, but they had similar experiences upon arriving here, and from this, I can draw a sense of personal heritage.

My grandfather’s telling of the story of his grandfather gives me a rich, detailed account of what it was like for an immigrant to this country in the 19th Century.  George McKenna lost his sister to a premature death on the voyage from Ireland.  He came from the west coast of Ireland, a part of the Emerald Isle where Gaelic remained the everyday language and thus he struggled to learn English on his arrival here.  He faced discrimination from without for his brough and scorn from within the family for his disdain for the Catholic Church.  He set out westward from his arrival point in Boston, unsure of his destination, but with a goal of becoming a landowner on the American frontier, doing his best as a young man in a new country.  “He was approaching his twenty-seventh birthday and while, fundamentally, his character had remained unchanged, he was no longer [a] troubled, apprehensive youth. . .  He had met a great many people – some villains but most of them decent, kind and charitable so that gradually the bitterness faded to be replaced by the contentment of labor and a certain innate sagacity warning him when he was being used badly.” (excerpt from my grandfather’s book)

What I took from reading the story of my wandering great-great-grandfather explains elements of my temperament that I wish to strengthen and cultivate.  Civility, a willingness to go it alone while not refusing the help of others, sagacity and adaptability, these are elements of character that I’d like to think I possess and when I look down the line of my father, my father’s father and so on, I see these traits there as well.

What I did not find in this retelling of George’s life was much anti-Irish sentiment by the dominant culture.  Although definitive examples of cultural expressions of 19th century anti-Irish discrimination survive to the modern day (see illustration), historians have reported that the prevalence of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in turn of the century America have been exaggerated.  Discrimination against the Irish immigrants to the US existed, but has become mythical in it’s importance, perhaps to satisfy some other need in the generations that came afterwards.

I would state that a modern American gets a sense of satisfaction knowing that one’s ancestors were discriminated against, provided, of course, that one is not the current subject of discrimination.  It makes the struggle that the previous generations overcame that much more powerful, which makes us, by extension, the tempered products of a hotter, more hardening fire.  One might theorize that the phenomenon of “White Guilt” towards people of color is diminished in Americans of Irish ancestry because we can point to a time when our people too were oppressed and kept down by “The Man.”

I am an example of how a person can strengthen a personal myth and make it a “discrimination badge” to wear proudly like a Purple Heart of wounded ethnicity.  Note that my last name (MacKenna) is different than his (McKenna).  Stuart McKenna had aspirations of becoming a writer as a young man.  In 1920’s America, because of discrimination against the Irish, having such an Irish surname would have been a real detriment if you were a new author trying to sell books.  “Everyone knew the Irish were a bunch of drunks or policemen or both,” my father told me when relating this tale.  My grandfather changed the “Mc” in his last name to the more Scottish-sounding “Mac” as more than just a nom d’plume; he had it changed legally.  My father was then born with this altered name and I inherited it from him.  Grandpa Stuart never did become a famous writer, although he did, for a time, make a living writing technical manuals. Eventually, he changed his last name back to McKenna, but the name lives on with some of his descendants.

For me, this fabricated last name held a lot of meaning and gave me a connection to a grandfather I never knew.  At one point, I too had aspirations of becoming a writer.  In some ways, I still do.  “MacKenna” gave me a sense of ethnic identity as it represents a legacy of discrimination. In truth, I am only 1/16th Irish, but my story gave me a sort of ethnic ammunition to hold up in our increasingly pluralistic society and say, “See!  My ancestors were downtrodden too!  My very name proves it!” This sentiment had been made stronger by my assumption that Stuart McKenna did not want to be mistakenly thought of as a drunken Irishman.  Learning that he actually was a “drunk” puts an entirely different spin on how I think of this story of my name and my connection to this man.

What is it to be a modern, white, Diffused American?  One thing that I have learned as a seek to become more culturally competent is that we tend to pick and choose elements of our cultural heritage that feel right by serving some personal purpose by fitting into and strengthening our individual narratives.  There is nothing wrong with that, per se, but often times, when the truth of our heritage becomes apparent and it does not fit into the mythology we create for ourselves, it can come as big surprise and a personal shock.

As I was composing this personal reflection, our president, Barack Obama, made news by visiting the small, Irish village from whence one of his ancestors came.  I may only be a little bit more Irish than Obama himself, but I can appreciate how he took the time to make that journey and can imagine it was somewhat satisfying to look around and think, “okay, some of my people came from HERE,” which is difficult for any non-Native American Indian person to do.  What he subjectively got out of that visit, besides impressing the locals with his ability to down a respectable pint of Guinness and some excellent photo opportunities, I cannot say.  If I had similar opportunity to visit the small, fishing village on Tralee Bay on Ireland’s west coast where George McKenna was born in 1852, I would relish it.

For the Americans reading this, are you a “Diffused American”?

What are you?

Do you ever feel compelled to go visit that part of the world whence your ancestors came?