{"id":39616,"date":"2011-05-29T13:48:56","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T17:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/39616\/personal-cultural-reflection\/"},"modified":"2011-05-29T13:48:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T17:48:56","slug":"personal-cultural-reflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/39616\/personal-cultural-reflection\/","title":{"rendered":"A Personal Cultural Reflection"},"content":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSome psychologists and students of human behavior say that today\u2019s preoccupation with genealogy is less a matter of ego and personal vanity than it is for answers to searching questions.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

– Stuart McKenna
\nPort Washington, Wisconsin
\n1978<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"The quote above comes from The McKennas of County Kerry and The Western World – A Genealogical Biography<\/span>, written by Stuart, my paternal grandfather.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nGiven 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s question of \u201cWho Am I?\u201d, what insight could examining this diffusion of nationalities, each somewhat different from one another,\u00a0 possibly offer me?\u00a0 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\u2019s German, 5\/16th\u2019s Polish and 1\/16th Irish, does that mean my individual heritage is influenced along those same proportions?\u00a0 Am I going to need a calculator to figure out who I am and where I come from?\u00a0 Such is the challenge facing a Diffused American. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nOne question that Americans of European descent will ask each other nowadays is \u201cWhat are you?\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 This is commonly understood to be a request for the breakdown in percentages, quarters, eights and sixteenths of one\u2019s ancestry, and is generally not a preclusion to discriminatory attitudes nor done in order to put the other into some hierarchy of ethnicities.\u00a0 It is probably a unique question in the history of the world.\u00a0 Where, when and amongst whom would this question ever have been asked? I would argue that ancestry amongst modern \u201cDiffused Americans\u201d<\/em> 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. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nDespite my inability to point to a single country, religion or ethnicity as being \u201cwhere I\u2019m from\u201d, I do not doubt that the mores, values and circumstances of generations past have influenced who I am and how I see the world.\u00a0 It may be subtle, but it exists.\u00a0 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 \u201cnon-race\u201d of whiteness.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So what did these long dead, German, Irish and Polish individuals who make up my great-great-grandparents have in common?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Therein I find the common threads that I can weave together to begin the tapestry of my individual cultural heritage.\u00a0 My ancestors\u2019 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.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nMy grandfather\u2019s 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.\u00a0 George McKenna lost his sister to a premature death on the voyage from Ireland.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He faced discrimination from without for his brough and scorn from within the family for his disdain for the Catholic Church.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u201cHe was approaching his twenty-seventh birthday and while, fundamentally, his character had remained unchanged, he was no longer [a] troubled, apprehensive youth. . .\u00a0 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.\u201d (excerpt from my grandfather’s book)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>
\nWhat I took from reading the story of my wandering great-great-grandfather explains elements of my temperament that I wish to strengthen and cultivate.\u00a0 Civility, a willingness to go it alone while not refusing the help of others, sagacity and adaptability, these are elements of character that I\u2019d like to think I possess and when I look down the line of my father, my father\u2019s father and so on, I see these traits there as well. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nWhat I did not find in this retelling of George\u2019s life was much \"\"anti-Irish sentiment by the dominant culture.\u00a0 Although definitive examples of cultural expressions of 19th century anti-Irish discrimination survive to the modern day (see illustration), historians have reported<\/a> that the prevalence of \u201cNo Irish Need Apply\u201d signs in turn of the century America have been exaggerated.\u00a0 Discrimination against the Irish immigrants to the US existed, but has become mythical in it\u2019s importance, perhaps to satisfy some other need in the generations that came afterwards. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nI would state that a modern American gets a sense of satisfaction knowing that one\u2019s ancestors were discriminated against, provided, of course, that one is not the current subject of discrimination.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One might theorize that the phenomenon of \u201cWhite Guilt\u201d 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 \u201cThe Man.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nI am an example of how a person can strengthen a personal myth and make it a \u201cdiscrimination badge\u201d to wear proudly like a Purple Heart of wounded ethnicity.\u00a0 Note that my last name (MacKenna) is different than his (McKenna).\u00a0 Stuart McKenna had aspirations of becoming a writer as a young man.\u00a0 In 1920\u2019s 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.\u00a0 \u201cEveryone knew the Irish were a bunch of drunks or policemen or both,<\/em>\u201d my father told me when relating this tale.\u00a0 My grandfather changed the \u201cMc\u201d in his last name to the more Scottish-sounding \u201cMac\u201d as more than just a nom d\u2019plume; he had it changed legally.\u00a0 My father was then born with this altered name and I inherited it from him.\u00a0 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. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nFor me, this fabricated last name held a lot of meaning and gave me a connection to a grandfather I never knew.\u00a0 At one point, I too had aspirations of becoming a writer.\u00a0 In some ways, I still do.\u00a0 \u201cMacKenna\u201d 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, \u201cSee!\u00a0 My ancestors were downtrodden too!\u00a0 My very name proves it!\u201d <\/em> This sentiment had been made stronger by my assumption that Stuart McKenna did not want to be mistakenly thought of as a drunken Irishman.\u00a0 Learning that he actually was a \u201cdrunk\u201d puts an entirely different spin on how I think of this story of my name and my connection to this man. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nWhat is it to be a modern, white, Diffused American?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\n\"\"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.\u00a0 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, \u201cokay, some of my people came from HERE,\u201d which is difficult for any non-Native American Indian person to do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If I had similar opportunity to visit the small, fishing village on Tralee Bay on Ireland\u2019s west coast where George McKenna was born in 1852, I would relish it.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

For the Americans reading this, are you a “Diffused American”?<\/p>\n

What are you?<\/p>\n

Do you ever feel compelled to go visit that part of the world whence your ancestors came?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\tGiven 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\u2019s question of \u201cWho Am I?\u201d, 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\u2019s German, 5\/16th\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,25],"tags":[126,302,1047,3520,81,252,3521],"class_list":["post-39616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-people","category-world","tag-culture","tag-discrimination","tag-immigration","tag-ireland","tag-joko","tag-obama","tag-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}