This Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s important to remember that my culture is not your costume; it’s my costume.
Before you put on your SHENANIGANS shirt and plastic shot-glass necklace, ask yourself: Are you mindful of their cultural roots? Are you honoring my ancestors who invented them decades ago in Charlestown, Massachusetts?
Everywhere I look, there’s a reductive caricature of Irish culture, and it’s a blatant rip-off of the reductive caricature of Irish culture that my people forged over so many Celtics seasons.
I hear the bagpipes in songs where they obviously don’t belong, a tradition of ours that dates back to the late twentieth-century music of the Dropkick Murphys. I see friends sharing leprechaun imagery when I know they don’t even have a red-headed (though admittedly half-Ashkenazi) cousin who they force into a little green suit every March.
