Irish-American is not a fake identity

Get out the Shamrock shakes and corned beef. People who grew up in Ireland will be able to enjoy this time of year, as Americans dress in kilts and drink green beer in freezing temperatures. It isn't a fake identity.

Get out the Shamrock shakes and corned beef. People who grew up in Ireland will be able to enjoy this time of year, as Americans dress in kilts and drink green beer in freezing temperatures. It is not a fake identity. And it has less to do than wanting to be from Ireland.

In the middle of the 19th century, large Irish communities grew in the US as east coast businesses sought cheap labour to work in the nation's rapidly industrializing railways, factories and buildings. While Ireland's peasantry was being destroyed by malnutrition in the 1840s due to disease and malnutrition, northern and central US cities were becoming major centres of global economic growth.

Millions of migrants fled the fastest-growing country in the world during the remaining years of the 19th century. Since then, the Irish label has been shared by people from Ireland and a large diaspora. For every person living on the island, five Americans and five others claim Irish ancestry.

In the 19th and early 20th century, Irish Catholic institutions provided education and healthcare in separate settings to the Protestant white American main. In the years following the US Civil War, the Irish-American working class gained political power by gaining access to the Democratic Party. This community established connections with police, labour unions, and municipal government that still exist in many US cities today.

Many Irish immigrants' descendants experienced the upward mobility of the majority of the American white working class in the middle of the 20th century. The Irish moniker was associated with middle-class status as well as suburbanization, white flight, moderate conservatism, and other issues in the latter decades of the 20th Century.

Different Americans have different views on recent history, even though the nation was formed from relatively recent colonial violence. People can use ethnic and other subcultural labels to describe how their forefathers made this society.

The ideology of white supremacy undoubtedly shaped the social position of Irish immigrants in America, but whiteness is only one explanation for the current cultural outlook of Americans of European descent.

The 200 million-plus white Americans are divided according to geography, politics, and economics, as well as a host of cultural markers. Specific white American identifiers such as Irish-American help to clarify how subgroups know where they came from. Urban Irish Americans have a different relationship to place, work, and identity than those who come from Appalachian or German-American farming backgrounds.

Listening to the stories of the various subgroups (ethnic, racial and geographic, classed, and gendered) that make up the US can help you understand the fractured history of the United States. One important part of this story is the history of the Irish branch that settled on the Atlantic side.