...with whom my mother identified much more keenly than she did with our English ancestors.

And as Irish Americans continue to identify with the story the sign represents, it's made them a continued ally for immigrants — both Irish and not — straight through to the 21st century.

We all have mythologies; they live in us and we in them. I'm always interested in "the truth," but which truth? A mythology isn't necessarily a lie, but as we live in our myths like a fish in water that doesn't know what water is, self-awareness is helpful.

As remembered stories go, it's not a bad one, especially if it encourages earlier immigrants to ally with the struggles of newer immigrants in a helpful way...

He was a Boston Irishman of immigrants. However, he was also the sort who would spin a tale to impress a granddaughter and exaggerate how rough it he had it.

The biggest difference is that the Irish and other Europeans could assimilate much more easily than people with African or Asian origins. It's almost impossible to tell somebody's European country of origin. A Russian woman told me once that I was the doppelganger of a friend of hers back home in Moscow. How can you look at someone and say for sure that he or she is Scandanavian or Italian?

People from more distant areas don't have that advantage. One glance and many people automatically peg them as "others" and treat them as such. There may have been a few isolated cases of "No Irish Need Apply" signs, but Japanese internment camps and hundreds of years of slavery are real.

It's sad that people make snap judgments based on a quick glance. We must expand our circle of people we call "our own" because they are.