Happy St. Patrick's Day 2022: It's time for Irish Catholic Americans to be honest about our racist and anti-Black history.
The point of remembering this shadow side of Irish Catholic American history is not to blame and shame but to learn and grow. Plus, if we remember the ugly we can also reclaim the beautiful white Irish American Catholic souls who defied conventions of anti-Blackness: the parishioners who refused to sign racial covenants, the white college students who insisted that Black lives matter before that became a mantra, my housing developer grandfather who paid into the family’s Black housekeeper’s Social Security even though he was not legally required to. Some relatives lived in a city parish that records of the American Catholic Historical Society indicate was built on land bequeathed to the church by an Irish-born slave owner who had two enslaved people baptized while living there, while others kept their heads down in a rural parish less than 15 miles from the Mason-Dixon Line, while Black refugees of slavery were secreted by on the Underground Railroad. Some lived in predominantly Irish parishes that organized to keep Black families out, and some attended predominantly Irish Catholic colleges — like my current employer, La Salle — that were slow in letting Black students in. On St. Patrick’s Day 1950, in a new suburban parish in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, my mom and her “Irish twin” brother performed in a minstrel show. To start, on St. Patrick’s Day we could let go of feeling defensive or guilty about the racism in our Irish American Catholic history and simply tell the truth about it. Minstrel shows in Catholic parish halls allowed families like mine to stay tethered to a key part of our cultural identity as Irish American Catholics, especially in new suburban landscapes.