I, Liam the Leprechaun, will not stand for this treachery any longer! On the 17th of March, after 37 years of being overlooked and undervalued, I’ll be making St. Patrick’s Day into the celebration it deserves.
Typically, what do we do for St. Patrick’s Day? With the sole exception of donning green clothing, we’ve grown used to a complete lack of any meaningful celebrations. Furthermore, I believe that the downplaying of the sole Irish holiday widely incorporated into American culture is a direct form of leprechaun erasure and a strand of anti-Irish sentiment that can be traced all the way back to the Great Potato Famine of the nineteenth century!
Ask any American what they think of Irish culture, and their answer will consist of stereotypes around potatoes, the Irish Jig, or pots of gold. Therefore, the culturally significant holiday celebrating leprechauns has been bastardized into a caricature of little redheaded men dancing under rainbows. St. Patrick’s Day has become a glorified excuse to go barhopping, while overlooking the already-marginalized American leprechaun population that has contributed so much to our culture.
Despite the fact that the leprechaun diaspora has thrived in the Bay Area since the early 1920s, I am the sole representative of the leprechaun community at the School.To combat our marginalized status at the School, I’ve taken it upon myself to bring visibility to our diverse and vibrant culture. So far, I’ve lowered the price of potato chips in the cafe, lobbied for a wider array of green whiteboard markers in all classrooms, and I’m looking to start the Redhead Affinity Group (RAG), which will begin meeting during Wednesday office hours at the end of the month.
However, St. Patrick’s Day is still thought of by most as a holiday marked mainly by pub crawls and a couple of measly shamrocks in elementary school classrooms. There’s only so much I can do as one leprechaun, so I’m enlisting the help of other leprechauns from across the Bay to turn every St. Patrick’s Day into a jubilant celebration of leprechaun culture where all Americans can finally appreciate this group that has been ignored and stereotyped for so long.