Evil White Woman
I’m the fourth of five kids in my family, the only girl. When at nine-weeks old, the third of us, my brother Conor, contracted meningitis, enduring traumatic brain injuries that caused significant cognitive and physical disabilities, my parents decided to have another baby who would meet all the developmental milestones at all the right times. That’s me, and that’s an important thing to know about me. I was raised to excel and to look after my brother. As I got older and more able to contribute to taking care of him, I was expected to do so — no matter how inconvenient or gross.
As his sister, I can say he’s gross. My little brother Neil and I refuse to ride in our Mom’s van because the smell of Conor’s dry, stale drool literally makes us gag. Probably the most traumatic event of my childhood started with a siblings’ row over who would feed Conor his soft eggy sandwich for lunch. Let me tell you about the skin on his face and hands slimed with drool as he chews up, then spits out, a bite of whatever is the cheapest wheat bread at Aldi, slathered in some off-brand margarine, barely cradling a luke-warm, slippery scrambled egg. When he spit it out, Mom taught us, we were to just put it back in. THAT CHEWED UP BITE IS A GROSS THING TO HANDLE. (Reader, you might be thinking I’m kind of a jerk right now, that I’m not the one who had to eat the soft and wet sandwich. I should be grateful that my quality of life is not nearly as limited as Conor’s. You wouldn’t be wrong. I am flawed. When it comes down to it, I will feed him the sandwich, but I if I’m being honest, I would rather one of my other brothers do it. And I will always go out of my way to avoid having to be the one to change his diaper, especially his shitty diaper.)
He’s also obnoxious. The captions stay on in our house because Conor screams over whatever you’re watching. In 2000, I was in eighth grade. (Stop for a moment to imagine: butterfly clips, glittery logo baby tee, bell bottom Mudd jeans from Kohl’s.) I have a vivid mental snapshot of an epiphany I had at Taco Bell, the one in the Value City Parking lot, with Conor, my mom, and Neil one summer afternoon. Mom told Neil and I to find a table while she got in line to order. Neil slumped over his Gameboy in the first booth, and I sat across from him in silence, Conor screaming in his stroller at my side. We call it his axe-murderer scream. (We have names for a lot of his noises.) At 33, I’m proud of my 13-year-old self because I can remember sitting there thinking that the scene was both absurd and mundane, and I was surprisingly unbothered. Yes, this is my obnoxious brother.
On the other hand, don’t you say he’s gross or obnoxious. One time in fourth grade a bully told me I was “retarded, just like [my] brother” — and who knew I could be so vengeful? I made sure that kid got in as much trouble for it as possible — not just for bullying me, but more importantly to me, for using that word, retarded. The principal (whom — in a fun twist — the parish accountant, my dad, discovered embezzling funds) made the bully write the Act of Contrition and the Our Father thirty times each. Worse, the bully’s poor mother apologized to my mother in the parking lot at dismissal for weeks afterward, so I know he suffered. For my first act of non-vindictive advocacy, I collected signatures from my 10th grade classmates on a petition to close a state-run institution for people with developmental disabilities on account of multiple neglect and abuse cases going back years.
You have to know Conor to know me, and you have to know two more things: I’m white and Irish. I grew up in the collar suburbs of Chicago, just past the edge of the city limit. In high school, the parts of Chicago we touched were the parts largely populated by white, Irish-Catholic Chicago police officers and firefighters — the farthest out they could live while still technically living in Chicago, a requirement for all city employees. During the 2016 presidential election, our neighborhood, my parents and Conor still live there, was the only precinct in Chicago that went red. I didn’t know that I was white, let alone that I was racist, until I went to college. My community imprinted patriarchal white supremacist values and norms deeply into me — even though I never quite fit in. Examples of things valued by real Southsiders, which is what we call ourselves: getting hammered and #bluelivesmatter… Examples of things uncool: open affection, people who take racist jokes “so serious.” It’s also worth reiterating that the particular brand of patriarchal white supremacy we got was Catholic school’s, where primarily, I learned not to have sex because sex is bad and shameful. I also learned to diagram sentences (admittedly, loved that), and I spent a lot of time escaping through the pages of whatever book I was reading. On the white, Irish-Catholic Southside, when someone asks you where you’re from, you answer with the name of the Catholic parish your family attends. For example, I grew up in St. Albert the Great, but in middle school my family moved to Most Holy Redeemer.
I never thought of myself as white before college (God bless forever my GWS250 professor); I did grow up feeling proud to be Irish Irish, which I always had a sense was preferable to being Irish-American. My parents — my dad, an Irish-American from the Southside, my mom, an Irish woman from Dublin — met one summer in San Antonio, Texas. Dad moved to Dublin while Mom finished her Master’s at Trinity, and they married and had Michael, Johnny, and Conor before moving back to the States and settling down on the Southside for good. As I said, I didn’t really ever fit in on the Southside, but in a community where most kids’ connections to Ireland are several generations back, kids with Irish parents do enjoy a few automatic cool points.
Immigration made Irish-Americans white, but Irish Irish people have historically been the oppressed, not the oppressors. Leading up to the American Civil War, Irish nationalists publicly shamed and disowned Irish-Americans who were not abolitionists. Frederick Douglass attended an international abolitionist conference in Ireland and was reportedly greatly moved by the warmth of Irish people. Now, globalization has made the Irish white. But their whiteness is new while their ways are hellllllla old. Like all oppressed people across time and space, the Irish tap from deep vats of cultural wealth — intergenerational living, whimsical storytelling, lots of drunk sing-alongs, hilarity, fresh and hot rage at the colonizer. I was raised to think British accents are disgusting.
The Irish are truly magical in their capacity to be sad, and they tend toward solidarity with the downtrodden anywhere. The Chocktaw tribe in America sent money to Ireland during the Great Famine; during this Covid-19 pandemic, the Irish have sent millions of dollars back to the Choctaw nation. There’s a gash in the mantlepiece in the drawing room of my Aunty Mary’s hundreds-year-old house in Dunmore. It’s from the time a British soldier threw a bomb in the window because he knew they were holding a secret IRA meeting inside. Growing up, we spent every other Christmas or summer in Ireland (and our Nana came to us, vice versa). We have a dozen or so cousins there similar in age range to us. My cousin Laura taught me to swear one summer we spent running around Howth. My cousin Sinéad and I busked for change in Pamplona, Spain, late one night during the World Cup — both silly drunk, she playing a bodhran, and me Irish dancing on the side of the crowded, ancient city street. After my beloved Uncle Jarlath’s sudden, premature death, the days of wake and funeral were some of my life’s heaviest but clearest. Many times, my Irishness has been like a lifeline out of my whiteness — not because it relieves any of my culpability in complacency with white supremacy but because it’s made it easier for me to recognize whiteness’ toxicity.
My last boyfriend broke my heart when he moved across the country and dumped me over the phone because, essentially, he no longer wanted to deal with my whiteness. For months, his voice has carried on in my head, pointing out and censoring my “evil white woman” (his words) thoughts and ways.
Last week, I realized that I didn’t have to keep the big, ugly, perpetually gunky recycling bin he’d insisted we get for the tiny-ass kitchen when he moved into my apartment last spring. I put it outside the back door and have returned to my earlier habit of using a paper grocery bag to collect the week’s recyclables. A break-through. I don’t have to do things the way he said I do. Maybe I’m not evil either.
