With JD Vance of all people likely soon to be vice-president (perhaps he still won’t be, God and voters willing, but my hopes in that regard are tentative, at best) I’ve been thinking a lot about Scotch Irish identity, given that he claims it.
I know that the notion of Scotch Irishness (as it exists in the Upland South, as distinct from the construct of Ulster Scots identity in Ireland) has been highly politicized and problematized in the United States for a long time now – with many on the right professing a literal belief in the Scotch Irish origin myth of universal descent from war-like, happily poor, joyously servile Ulster Scots immigrants, and celebrating that identity as such; and, conversely, with many on the left accepting that characterization more or less at face value, and arguing for the necessity of the abolition of Scotch Irish identity as a result.
For people like me – who embrace leftism, but who have a familial or community-acquired affinity for Scotch Irish identity, and who would rather de-problematize it than discard it – this puts us in the awkward situation of feeling constantly assailed from all sides: compelled to defend the construct of Scotch Irishness from those who, like Vance, would make it the preserve of fascists, on the one hand; and from those who, like many of Vance’s detractors, accept his description of Scotch Irishness as valid despite the revulsion it engenders among them and who thus urge its erasure, on the other.
I thought that, as a counterpoint to Vance and company’s fascistic iteration of Scotch Irishness, I would share my own understanding of the identity, in the form of a handy FAQ attempting to resolve what I feel are some of the most prevalent misunderstandings about the term and those of us who use it to describe ourselves.
1) Are the Scotch Irish the same as the Ulster Scots?
No. While many people in the US who identify as Scotch Irish do claim literal or symbolic descent from Ulster Scots immigrants to America, the Ulster Scots are just one among many immigrant and indigenous cultural groups that have contributed to the Scotch Irish ethnocultural identity over the centuries of its formation. The Ulster Scots themselves claim literal or symbolic descent from people from Lowland Scotland and Northern England who invaded and settled Northern Ireland at the behest of King James I of England (King James VI of Scotland) in the early 1600s. As such, the homeland claimed by most people who identify as Ulster Scots is Ulster. By contrast, the homeland claimed by most people who identify as Scotch Irish is the Upland South (Southern Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Upper South – the region of the Upland South that stretches between Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks).
2) Are the Scotch Irish white?
No. Scotch Irishness as it exists in the modern Upland South is a cultural construct – not a racial one. Anyone who belongs to a family or community of Scotch Irish people can be Scotch Irish if they choose to identify as such, irrespective of their skin color or ancestry. Furthermore, anyone of any race or ethnic group who aspires to become Scotch Irish can do so by becoming a member of a Scotch Irish family or community. As far as its relationship with whiteness, Scotch Irishness has been defined by some people as a subcategory of whiteness, but such people aren’t necessarily Scotch Irish themselves, and tend to be more interested in the promotion of whiteness than in the promotion of Scotch Irishness.
3) Are the Scotch Irish racist, antisemitic, and/or sectarian?
No – or at least, if any of them happen to be bigoted as individuals, then their bigotry isn’t a consequence of their Scotch Irishness. Right-wing conceptualizations of Scotch Irish identity tend to define it as being pro-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic, locating these features as originating in Ulster Scots identity, and thus presenting them as influencing Scotch Irish identity through cultural heredity. However, affinities for whiteness and Protestantism (to the violent exclusion of Judaism and Catholicism) aren’t necessarily inherent even to Ulster Scots identity, and, in any case (as earlier stated) Ulster Scottishness is not synonymous with Scotch Irishness.
4) Are the Scotch Irish inherently violent, and naturally subservient to empire?
No. No ethnocultural group in the entire world is inherently violent, subservient, or imperialistic. Some people on the political right use the Scotch Irish origin myth (that is, the narrative that the Scotch Irish came, in some sense, to the Upland South from Lowland Scotland via Ulster as colonists first of the Indigenous Irish and then of Indigenous Americans) to portray them as mindless, bloodthirsty hordes, and thus justify their exploitation by the military industrial apparatus of the British and American imperial projects. However, as with almost all myths, the meaning of the Scotch Irish origin story lies almost solely in its interpretation, and the possible interpretations to which it lends itself are various. The same story could as easily be framed as a cautionary tale about what can happen to a people who become alienated from their cultural roots: that the marginalization of Gaelic culture that produced the cultural disjuncture between the Scottish Highlands and the Scottish Lowlands (and thus, the Scottish Lowlanders), was the ultimate cause of the widespread recruitment of Lowlanders in the colonization of Ulster, and, by extension, of the Ulster Scots’ participation in the colonization of North America. Within this framing of the myth, the negative traits popularly ascribed to the Scotch Irish, allegedly as a result of their partial descent from UIster Scots, are simply the result of the intergenerational traumas they sustained when the forces of Anglophone hegemony alienated their ancestors from Gaelic culture, and that – by reconnecting them to Gaelic culture – both their own psychological and social wounds and any harms that they themselves have inflicted on others can gradually be healed. This leftist framing of the Scotch Irish mythos is very dear to me, and serves as a mythopoeic justification for my ongoing efforts to revitalize the Scottish Gaelic language in Kentucky and Tennessee.
5) Isn’t it a misnomer, though, to call the Scotch Irish by that name, when (apart from their origin story, which is acknowledged as being mostly mythical) they have no concrete connection to Scotland or Ireland?
Arguably, yes. It is strange to call a people ‘Scotch Irish’ who are not, in any literal sense, either Scottish or Irish, especially when the term ‘Scotch’ is generally no longer applied to Scottish people, but instead reserved to certain household goods like foodstuffs, whiskies, and tape. As far as alternatives, I personally recommend the moniker ‘Tramontane’ – a word derived from the Latin ‘trans montania’ (that is, ‘across the mountains’) and which once referred to mountain-dwelling people in the Hiberno-Britannic Archipelago, particularly Scottish Highlanders. Even so, ‘Scotch Irish’ is how Scotch Irish people have referred to themselves since the mid-1800s, and their self-identification as such ought to carry at least some weight in determining how other people should refer to them.
6) If you respect Scotch Irish identity as valid, why don’t you afford similar respect to ‘white’ identity, or ‘American’ identity (in the sense of belonging to the American nation-state)?
Racial identities – at least according to the modern sensibility of race as a genetic or phenotypical category – are categorically invalid. Scientifically speaking, there is no such thing as race, and, sociologically speaking, race serves no beneficial purpose to society, or to individuals within society. Our world would be better for all people if there were no such thing as the modern conception of race. Similarly – at least from my perspective as an anarchist – nation-state identities (including Americanness) are categorically invalid. Our world would be better for all people if there were no such things as states – or, by extension, state-based nationalisms. However, ethnocultural identity – that is, cultural nationhood – is fundamentally different than state-based nationhood. Long before there were nation-states, or colour-based races, there were distinct peoples whose shared cultural practices and self-conceptions united them with one another and distinguished them from other peoples. I would argue that the formation of such cultural groups is a fundamental aspect of the human experience; that belonging to such groups is one of the chief means by which human beings discover existential purpose and the emotional wellbeing that accompanies it; and that the willful destruction of any such group constitutes the crime of ethnocide – a crime against humanity. Because I look on the Scotch Irish as constituting one such group, I feel that any effort to secure their continued existence is of great benefit to humanity, and that any effort to thwart their continued existence is, conversely, to humanity’s collective detriment. I do not hold this to be equally true of any racial or nation-state based identity.
7) What would you say to people who insist that Scotch Irishness is just a regional variation on white-supremacist colonial imperialism, whether they approve of that idea (like JD Vance) or disapprove of it (like those of his detractors who condemn Scotch Irishness)?
To self-identifying Scotch Irish people who believe literally in – and who look admiringly on – the idea of their ancestors as being solely white Protestant mercenaries who came to Ulster and then Appalachia as eager land thieves and willing cannon fodder, I would ask what they find comforting about that image. Wouldn’t they rather look on their people as liberators than oppressors? Wouldn’t they rather see themselves as being the stewards of the lands they live on, instead of the conquerors and despoilers of those lands? Wouldn’t they rather acknowledge the many ancestral cultural groups that made them the people they are today, instead of pretending to an ancestral ‘purity’ that never existed?
To people who don’t identify as Scotch Irish, but who opine that the Scotch Irish have no right to continue as a people because of the prevalence of right-wing interpretations of their collective identity, I would ask why they feel entitled to deny any people’s existential rights. If there are self-identifying Scotch Irish people who want to seek solidarity with the oppressed, rather than the oppressor, wouldn’t it be better to embrace them in that capacity than to to make the ultimatum that they must either give up who they are or align themselves with the far right? As I see it, the answer is clear.
8 ) What would you say to people who identify as Scotch Irish, and who – at the current moment – feel pressure both from right-wingers seeking to coopt that identity, and from progressives who advocate its destruction on account of that cooption?
To those who identify both as Scotch Irish and leftist, I urge you simply to take heart, and be yourselves. Thus far, no Scotch Irish persons are being physically threatened for being Scotch Irish. Unless and until the threat of physical annihilation is raised, the only way we can be made to forfeit our identity is if we voluntarily abandon it. So long as we refuse to do that, there can be no end to Scotch Irishness. You know who and what you are, and no one else can decide for you what or who that is. To survive, you have only to remain steadfast in your activism: every good deed you do, every person you help, and every act of resistance against injustice in which you participate will stand as proof to all witnesses – be they friend, foe, or impartial observer – that Scotch Irishness is not the preserve of extreme conservatism, nor its adherents the mere pawns of empire. We can and will show the world who we are, and, should they refuse to believe the evidence of their senses, then we can at least be satisfied in our own self-knowledge, and in the certainty that we have done all that we ought.
SPLANG! Gàidhlig ann an Ceanndachaidh | SPLANG! Scottish Gaelic in Kentucky 