White Privilege on Parade: The trouble with St. Patrick's Day

Thanks to COVID-19, Cleveland’s 2021 St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled for the second straight year. First held in 1842, the parade’s incredible staying power is a testament to its popularity. St. Patrick’s Day in Cleveland has always been a celebration of Irish survival in the face of adversity.

My mother comes from an Irish-American family. Her great-grandparents emigrated to the West Side of Cleveland in the 1880s. My great-great-grandmother ran a saloon near the Irish enclave of Whiskey Island; the building is still operational as Carney’s bar today. I’ve never missed a St. Patrick’s Day parade. I love it -- but it also makes me uneasy.

For years, I was unsure why. At first, I figured I felt ill at ease amid all the drunken mayhem. And “mayhem” is an apt word to describe March 17 in Cleveland. The crowds on the parade route are shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s so loud that you will go to bed that night with your ears ringing. It’s a day when all those mundane rules we’re expected to follow go out the window: People jaywalk by the dozens. People pass out in public. The parking garages reek of urine. Fights break out, especially among the throngs of young people carrying open water bottles full of vodka on the street. People moon cops and blow plastic horns in their faces, and everyone laughs -- including the cops. Did someone say “disorderly conduct?” You could open a copy of the Ohio Revised Code, stand at a window, and circle the laws as they’re being broken, one by one. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so it’s expected.

And that is exactly why St. Patrick’s Day has always bothered me a little. Yes, the parade attracts revelers of all colors. But this holiday is still associated with middle-class Irish Catholics who “made it” out of their grandparents’ neighborhoods. Therefore, the widespread, casual, shameless lawbreaking is all in good fun.

During this time of Black Lives Matter protests, it’s become almost cliché to ask: “What if Black people did this?”

What if Black people in Cleveland had a big public celebration in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- and it looked exactly like the scene I described? Would the local business community support it? Would the police put up with it?

The disparity is hard to ignore. Cleveland is the city where, in 2014, a Cleveland police officer killed Tamir Rice. The officer was responding to a call about a black man waving a gun in a public park. It turned out Tamir Rice was 12 years old and the “gun” was a toy. But no matter; the police weren’t taking any chances.

Tamir Rice was shot on sight. The (mostly) white lawbreakers marauding through the streets on St. Patrick’s Day get the benefit of the doubt. That guy who started a bar fight after going a little too hard at kegs n’ eggs? He’s “just drunk” and “not usually like that.” Party on! The underage Catholic schoolboys committing casual misdemeanors are “just kids.”

Clean-cut white kids can get a little feisty with the cops, and the most they can expect is a stern verbal reprimand. It’s rare they end up in handcuffs -- or, God forbid, with a gun in their face. A few people might get cited for public intoxication, but for the most part, they make it home in one piece. The day ends without a foolish young person getting shot by the police -- and there would be massive public backlash if one of them did.

And that’s a good thing. The police won’t make the parade safer by getting trigger-happy with the drunken fools. I don’t want to see headlines like, “Brendan O’Connor, 17, shot after assaulting officer, resisting arrest,” above an article that emphasizes Brendan carried a fake ID, was skipping school for the day, and had way too many brews.

I just don’t want to see those headlines about “Black youth” anymore, either. Tamir Rice was “just a kid,” too.