I cannot believe that in all the years I’ve been journaling online, I’ve never once gave a St. Patrick’s Day rant. I went back and looked - even through my old online journal.
I’m sure I’ve wanted to rant, but didn’t know where to start.
What set me off this year was hearing a movie review on National Public Radio (NPR) for The Wind That Shakes The Barley. I became instantly obsessed with this movie and found the trailer for it.
For eighteen years, I’ve been reading off and on about the plight of Ireland and its fight for independence. Eighteen years is not a long time to be knowledgeable about this, but remember:
- I’m an American, and Americans don’t even know their own history
- I was raised in a Christian Fundamentalist Bubble so this counts double against the first point
- Most Americans don’t seem to get formal education about the world outside of their own town til they go to college - IF they go to college (and it’s there that I learned about Ireland’s fight for independence, among other things)
Now, I was raised to be very proud of my Irish heritage (This heritage is a fallacy, as I’ll discuss later). It started with my ma’s side of the family. They are named McBee. All our lives, my ma and I were told that her ma’s gramma was Scottish, and her grampa was Irish. And we were told that on her dad’s side, they’re Irish.
This proud family heritage led the family to be over the top for St. Patrick’s Day every year, to show off our pride.
There’s only one problem with that picture (the second fallacy in my family pride): My ma’s family is staunchly Baptist - an offshoot of Protestantism.
St. Patrick was Catholic.
American Baptists/Protestants hate Catholics, often citing that the Pope is Satan.
But I had no idea of this when I was a kid. All I knew was we wore green on St. Patrick’s Day and I showed off my pretty Irish red hair.
All this pride and continuous oral family history from a young age led me to be very interested in genealogy. I began asking my dad about his side of the family, and learned that his family is a mix of Scottish, German and Finnish. And I get my red hair from my dad (so here’s a third family history fallacy - my Irish red hair is likely more Scottish if dad, who is Scottish, has red hair, right?)
Based on all this nationality talk, I was raised from childhood to recite my nationalities as “Irish, Scottish, German, Finnish¹ and American Indian”.
…Wait.
American Indian???
Oh yeah. Forgot to tell you about that. My ma’s side of the family absolutely insists that we’re also of Cherokee Indian descent. They often pin grampa’s mother as half Cherokee. I was taught to say I was a sixteenth Cherokee, and that my high cheekbones were obvious evidence that I’m Indian.
There’s only one problem with that. It’s never been proven that great-gramma was Native American, and the family REFUSES to talk about it, because, and I quote my grampa, “Indians are heathens. They don’t believe in God.” Grampa was very prejudiced. He hated anyone who wasn’t white and God fearin’.
His kids would lament for years that because of their dad’s prejudice, they were denied full scholarship to college. I was told that if one can prove Native American ancestry down to an eighth percent, one can go to college for free.
But again, it’s never been proven that there’s any Native American blood in our family.
But that never stopped my mom from sitting me for portraits with my hair in braids while she fawned over how Indian I looked (despite the fact I’m pale white with red hair…it’s the cheekbones, you see…)
By now you see a great many fallacies come forth. I didn’t really start to put all this together until college, and once I did, I became enraged at how ignorant my family is. My family is the very stereotype of Southern ignorance.
Speaking of Southern ignorance - here is where I break the cycle:
I had moved to California in 1997 and was working for a company processing ambulance reports. One day, an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT - ambulance person) came in to make small-talk with us as we processed the reports. She had beautiful red hair, skin paler than mine, and was right off the boat from Ireland. I swooned over her accent, and at one point remarked that I am also of Irish descent.
She scoffed at me, and declared that Americans have NO claim to Irish ancestry whatsoever. Further, she ranted on about how St. Patrick’s Day is not celebrated in Ireland, and that it’s considered laughable to the true Irish.
This left me at first embarrassed, and then with perspective.
I went home and began researching my family genealogy again with verve. Several months earlier, after talking to my mom about the family history, she’d suggested I speak to her cousin, who had been researching our family history for over 20 years at that point. I got in touch with him and he sent me printouts of lists of names. This was in April, two months before my hasty move to California with my boyfriend, who’d been hired over the phone for a dotcom job (ahh, the boom days of the dotcom industry…)
The information was quite overwhelming - the printout is six pages long, name after name, in something like eight-point font. Then the move happened. I didn’t examine the genealogical data closely until well after the move, when I’d had the run-in with the angry Irish chick just off the boat, who declared I was not Irish at all.
I checked my genealogy so that I could prove myself right in her eyes. This however was the needed wakeup call that I got - that perspective I was telling you about; when I went back through the family data, I discovered that my ma’s side of the family have been in the United States since before 1730.
Wow. That’s over two and a half centuries (And as my boyfriend points out, that’s before the United States was born).
I pondered this.
Two and a half centuries.
The woman at work was right. I’m not Irish. This was just the first fallacy in a series that I unwittingly revealed.
“Well”, I wondered, “if I’m not Irish, what the hell am I, then?”
Thanks to that woman, I called into question all that I’d been taught as a child regarding my nationalities and heritage.
Remember what I said earlier about Americans not knowing their own history?
Shouldn’t it have been obvious, given what region my family is from in the U.S., that I’m not only American, but Appalachian?
It wasn’t obvious, though. Social conditioning based upon ignorance made me really truly believe I was “Irish, Scottish, German, Finnish and American Indian”.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Americans operate to this day - they can’t see what’s right in front of their faces because they’re brought up with romantic lies and deceit about everything from their own historical and genealogical background to religion to politics to what the rest of the world looks like and how it operates.
How they got that way is another rant for another time, and I don’t know if I’ll ever crack that mystery.
When I had my conscious realisation that I’m not Irish, but in fact just plain ‘ol American - and Appalachian at that - I told my ma and her family. They didn’t want to hear no such thing, however. It didn’t matter that their roots had been in this country for over two centuries. They declared with pride that we’re still Irish and Scottish, but for some reason, mostly Irish, because of the surname McBee (the first fallacy, to be revealed).
It was sometime between 1997 and 1998 that I started studying the meaning of the colors of the flag of the Republic of Ireland, and found out that Green is for Catholics (hence St. Patrick’s Day in the U.S. being all about the colour green), Orange is for Protestants, and White is for the hope of peace between the two religions/cultures.
So. Green is for Catholics. My family is Protestant in origin. They celebrate St. Patrick’s Day - a Catholic Saint’s day. They do this because they are ignorant to historical fact. They are led on by social misnomer, and they refuse to change their long-standing customs when fact is presented.
I spent years trying to figure out the origins of this McBee family, and never got out of Appalachia. In fact, I found names dating even farther back than the 1730’s. I found names dating back to about 1675 - still inside a land before it was claimed as the United States. That puts my supposedly Irish family at over three centuries old in the U.S. - living in the Appalachian mountain region.
We are NOT Irish-descended. We are Appalachian-descended. There IS no motherland or fatherland at this point. Three hundred years removes one’s right to historical nationality or land claim in Ireland in my book.
And then, in July 2004, I found something VERY interesting, relating to the first fallacy of my family (saying that we’re Irish).
“The McBee Family came from Scotland, many by way of Ireland. They are part of the Clan McBean which is a sept (or division) of the McBain Clan. It is probable that the name originated from the personal appearance of the members of the group, as Ban or Bain means “fair”. This name is found in several areas of Scotland and Ireland, but originally the MacBeans are said to have come from Lochabar as part of the entourage of the heiress of the Clan Chattena of Northern Europe. They settled in Eastern Invernessshire in Scotland.
The principal family of the time was the McBeans family of Kinchyle. For photos of the area go to Kinchyle of the Dores on the internet at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/scotland/kinchyle_of_dores.htm . Journalist Bob McBee stated that it is possible that the whole of the clan immigrated to Northern Ireland and then to North America. The belief is that while crossing the Atlantic the MacBeans changed their name to MacBee later dropping the “a” and placing the “c” hence the name McBee.” - McBee Family - Scots Irish Sept of the McBain Clan.
The website goes on further to say “The following is a tradition that has been passed down through the families. William McBee left Maryland and settled in Halifax County, Virginia. His wife’s name was Susannah Vadry. They had four sons and three daughters; Samuel, Vardry, James, Mathias, Elizabeth, Joannah, and Mary. At the time the McBees were Quakers, but they renounced the faith at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.”²
Quakers are basically Protestants/Fundamentalists.
I wrote to my mom, who did further research on the Internet, and found the following:
“The surname [McBee] first appears in Scottish records in 1547, when James McBay gave his bond to John Campbell of Glenurguhay (The Black Book of Caymouth). Callome McBee and Donald McBee in Brockland were fined in 1613 for “reset of outlawed Macgregors” (that is, concealing them), and Archibald Reoche McBee of Corsarie, Mull, was put to the horn in 1629 (in other words, he was denounced as a rebel).” - electricscotland.com.
So… waaaaay back, we’re Scottish McBees. Not Irish.
I just went back through an article written in September, 1989 by Sassy Magazine (my favourite magazine back then), titled “Blood + Poetry”, detailing the sad, war-torn lives of some Catholic and Protestant kids in Northern Ireland at that time. One thing struck me about the article, relating back to the flag colours. The author writes,
“We ramble west to a lake where Brian used to play as a kid. We’re with his same-age mate Clint English, whose face is so deeply chiseled it almost hurts. He’s a Mod, which means he wears polka dots a lot and listens to the Style Council. He says everyone instantly knows he’s Protestant because his last name is English (any name starting with a Mc or an O is surely Catholic). It reminds me: A girl yesterday told me another way everybody can tell. “Red hair is obviously Catholic. So are freckles. No question,” she said, then looked down at her long red hair and shrugged.”
So if any name starting with a Mc in Ireland is surely Catholic, why are my family Protestants?
Because they’re not Irish. They’re Scottish. But that’s waaaaaay back on my ma’s paternal side of the family (McBee) that we’re Scottish. That’s centuries back. So we’re not even Scottish. We’re Appalachian.
My ma’s maternal side of the family is named Hughes, and it’s said that they’re Irish. Well, I’ve not even really begun to research that, yet. But I suspect that the Hughes family in Appalachia is as old as the McBee family. I.e., I’m still not Irish.
I’m Appalachian.
So there’s no need to go longing for Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day - on many levels as described above. There’s no need to get retarded and wear green and get drunk in Americanised versions of “Irish pubs”.
I remain however deeply sympathetic to Ireland’s fight for independence. I don’t know why. But I do know I will go see The Wind That Shakes The Barley, and I know I’ll cry my eyes out.
Show me a movie about Jews and Poles fighting for life against the Nazis and I’ll cry my eyes out, too. And I’m hugely sympathetic towards the Jews and Poles.
Show me a movie about Israel vs. Palestine and I’ll cry my eyes out, too, and be sympathetic towards the Palestinians since 1947.
Then there’s Tutsi vs. Hutu in Rwanda, and Haiti vs. Spain and France and the U.S… and Serbia vs. Yugoslavia and China vs. Tibet and N. Korea vs. S. Korea, and Darfur vs. the rest of Sudan, and Mogadishu vs. Somalia and Ethiopia, Sunnis vs. Baathists in Iraq… and on and on.
It’s the human injustice that does me in. It’s the lack of comprehension as to why people would spend centuries or millennia killing each other over religion or culture - or both.
They cite their reasons but it still makes no sense. Why does it have to resort to violence? Why?
And people wonder why I’m so pessimistic as to human existance. I’m doing my part to have the human race die out by not breeding to continue the sick attrocities of humanity. At least I can say I’ve done my part to end human existence when I die and take all my unfertilised eggs with me.
And that’s why I don’t like St. Patrick’s Day. :p
¹ I found out in 2004 that I’m not German or Finnish, either. My dad’s paternal grandmother wasn’t Finnish - she was Polish. And she married a Polish man. And during the time they were growing up in Poland, it was under German annex. So they spoke both German and Polish. They emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800’s.
That makes my grandpa 100% Polish, and my dad 50% Polish, and me 25% Polish. My dad’s maternal grandparents were 100% Scottish. They emigrated to Canada in the late 1800’s and had my grandma there. Then they emigrated to the U.S.. Even though they had emigrated to Canada and their daughter had Canadian birth right, she was still 100% Scottish.
This makes my dad 50% Polish and 50% Scottish. I’m 25% of each on that side of the family.
² I have not been able to tie in these McBees to my own. The story goes that there were two lines of McBees settling in Appalachia around the same time, so this may not be my line, or it may be another distant branch. But what if both lines McBees were Scottish Quakers? It makes much more sense to me, historically speaking, that the McBees are Protestant Quakers rather than Irish Catholics, given my own family history.
