Reading/writing the "Other" - a rant

All right, I was going to leave this alone. Then I was just going to write a rant that I wasn't going to post. I figured I missed most of the fun, but what do you know, it's still going. Now, I figure I can't say anything dumber than what a few others have come up. I am crunched for time though, so I will not be opening it to comments because I don't have much time for responses. Don't take it personally. I may change my mind later. Just not today.
This is what it is, namely the product of some thought on my part. Make of it what you will or nothing at all as you like.

I read a lot of nineteenth century lit by women. Some of it is fascinating and worthwhile and some is interesting solely for its herstorical value. In any case, I've been stuck in a bad part of the forest for a few weeks now, namely fiction with Irish characters both minor and major.

Now I'm of Irish descent, Irish Catholic from the south of Ireland to be precise. Obviously not 100% as is clear from the last name but brought up culturally Irish American in good old NYC. What this means is that growing up in the bosum of my extended family, the following were venerated: the Virgin Mary, the Pope and Sinn Fein. Not necessarily in that order. You had at least one crucifix and one rosary, if not more, somewhere in your house/apartment and some odd little kitschy St. Patrick's souvenir. And a few souvenirs from your trip to Ireland, which you made at some point, generally on your honeymoon. Your children went to schools with names like Our Lady of Angels or Our Lady of Perpetual Help. They graduated and went to Fordham or St. John's if you had the money.

I dodged the bullet of Catholic school, but spent enough time in the overall environment that it's all I can do not to genuflect in church. It doesn't matter that I don't believe it - it's in the blood. Is this a good thing? Depends on who you ask.

Back to the 19th century lit. Irish characters tend to come in one of two flavors: 1. filthy migrant laborers with weird names who'll stab you in a drunken haze soon as look at you or 2) superstitious comical peasants who'll dance you a little jig while pulling tatting out of their ears and introducing you to the family leprechaun. In general, most of nonpsycho killer fiction is written with a kind of good-natured contempt. Every now and then someone comes up with a relatively positive character, but they're usually Irish themselves.

Virulent hatred also crops up from time to time. Louisa May Alcott wrote a novel called Work, rediscovered and released a few years back.In it, she follows the travails of a nineteenth century white woman who has to work at a variety of jobs to earn her keep. She forges alliances with a recently freed African American woman and various working class women of different backgrounds. Wow, you think, good progressive reading. With one little exception, at least if you're reading as someone with Irish ancestry: the Irish are the bottom of the barrel, absolute pure social evil who should probably be expunged or at least sanitized. She manages to work this in repeatedly, regardless of ostensible plot.

Now like most of the others of my kind, I grew up with Little Women. I wanted to be Jo March or a modern equivalent, probably without the overly fatherly and controlling hubby, but one can ignore that at 13 or so. In theory, Alcott was one of the (mostly) good guys/gals. Or so I thought until I read Work.

Here she is, friggin' Jo March herself hating on my people. This was a woman who would have had personal experience with Irish immigrants driven off their land by the Potato Famine who were then greeted in the U.S. and Britain with "No Irish Need Apply" signs. Honestly, I'll never read her the same way again. I'll always be watching for the hate on in all of her fiction going forward. When I bother to read it.

Should she have known better? I'd have to go with yes. She managed to work out a lot of other progressive concepts that were ahead of her time; I think she could've added one more to the list.
What could she have done better? I dunno, maybe put some more thought into her work and dismantling her prejudices,even made an effort to see the Irish as people and learned something about them. Or if she couldn't manage that, at least opted not to use her fiction as a way to promote stereotypes and bigotry. Now there's a thought.

Am I seeing this through the lens of my personal experience as a 21st century woman of Irish descent? You betcha. Do I think that this experience of reading my own people as "Other" gives me carte blanche to ignore it when I write about a person from a culture different from my own and do it badly, then get called out for stereotyping? I hope not. How about we go with "Not on purpose" on that one?

Or the flip side of it: Do I think I should not write about anything except characters of Irish descent from NYC because it's just too 'hard' to make an effort to learn about people different from myself? Or because it's just so scary when 1 or 2 people from group X I might have written about get annoyed with me about something I've written? Apart from speaking sternly to me, what are they going to do? Give me writer's block?

Sounds kind of silly when I put it that way, doesn't it? "I'm taking my toys and going home" is not an acceptable response, though it's certainly the most privileged one."I'm much smarter than you are" is also pretty much guaranteed to kick off a completely justified shitstorm. This also goes for "You're mean so I won't listen to you!"

How about "You've given me a lot to think about. Let me take a look at what I'm doing and see what's going on here." You may come to different conclusions or you may learn something. Either way, is it really going to kill you?