Ciara O’Connor
If only we put as much effort into being anti-racist as we do into saying the problem doesn’t exist, writes Ciara O’Connor
The white Irish insist that we aren’t racist
WE’RE not racist in Ireland. We don’t have racism here: the Americans are racist, probably, and the English are racist, obviously: but we don’t have racism in Ireland.
Ireland ranks second worst in the EU for racial violence against black people.
There’s the racist Irish Americans, of course, but we’re not like them. They’re so embarrassing, they’re the real racists. We don’t have racist-racism here.
51pc of black people in Ireland said they have been harassed, verbally or physically, or threatened online.
“No dogs, no blacks, no Irish,” see — we’re all in this together! Black people and Irish people (by which I mean, obviously, white Irish people, Irish-Irish) because we were oppressed too!
Dr Ebun Joseph, lecturer on race, migration, social policy at UCD, has produced research showing that skin colour and foreign sounding names is a major determinant of employment success.
“In Ireland here,” she said last week, “I can tell you, many of us people of colour are beating our chests, and like George Floyd we are crying, ‘we can’t breathe’… In the labour market, we can’t breathe.” She says, “you may not be physically killing us, but emotionally you are damaging us.”
It’s awful what’s happening to black people in the US, but it’s nothing to do with black people in Ireland. Prove it.
How many times will we ask Emma Dabiri to retell and relive her upbringing, the racism that meant she left home as a teenager, the trauma of being black in white Ireland? What will it take for us to believe her, or any of the other black Irish people who say over and over again: racism is here and we’re living it.
But we don’t have racism here. We’ll say it, over and over and over again: some of us will simply stop at, ‘‘it’s not really a ‘thing’’’ others will go further, all the way into the ‘‘Irish slaves’’. Our colonial history, if you don’t think about it too much, or preferably at all, seems to have the country convinced that we’re somehow insulated against oppressing others: white Ireland has persuaded ourselves of a kind of exceptionalism when it comes to race and racism. And didn’t we vote for a brown Taoiseach? Cead mile failte! Aren’t we a welcoming people!
It’s in this indifference, or disbelief, or self-righteousness, that racism in Ireland thrives.
Sahar Ali, a Sudanese-Irish poet/comedian, posted a ‘‘message to Irish teachers’’ on her
Instagram a few days ago. She had been spending hours and hours every day sharing, amplifying, and speaking honestly, sometimes funnily, sometimes angrily, about race.
Her video to teachers looked specifically at the responsibility of teachers to be actively anti-racist in schools, and the racism embedded in the education system and curriculum — a pernicious racism that is, by its nature, all but invisible to white people. She did the Irish education system as a black girl and she knows.
But we don’t believe her either. There’s no racism in Ireland: “you’re coming off as thick and stupid,” one white teacher told her, saying that the curriculum is “littered” (“littered”, reader) with “anti-racism objectives.” Sahar was told what black Irish people are told whenever they speak up, “It does you no favours and is only promoting division and hatred”.
There’s no racism in Ireland. We don’t believe black Irish people about racism in Ireland. And if there is racism in Ireland, saying it only makes it worse. We white people know: there’s no racism in Ireland.
The teacher exemplifies the baffled Irish attitude to racism: we don’t use the N-word, and we don’t (generally) hunt you down in the streets — what more do you want?
“I must say though you should be grateful as the Irish education system and its teachers is clearly responsible for your sassy and confident attitude! You clearly didn’t suffer any racial abuse that knocked that!! Well done Ireland.”
Well done Ireland. We don’t have racism in Ireland because our black girls do not always cower and cringe. We don’t have racism in Ireland because one of them had the balls to put herself on the internet, and self-identify as funny! The notions! Well done Ireland for not knocking the humanity out of this black woman — though, the implication is that perhaps she could have done with it. Violence is never far from the surface.
And she isn’t a special case, this teacher. If you’re honest with yourself, you hear echoes of it all the time. You might even find yourself thinking the same sort of thing occasionally.
You’re here: isn’t that enough?
What black people have been telling us louder than ever this past week is that racism doesn’t always look like white pride marches and police brutality. It covers the whole spectrum from a surprised compliment to a black person on ‘‘speaking so eloquently!’’ to KKK lynchings.
It’s a difficult thing for white people to hear. And a lot of us don’t want to hear it and will continue to stubbornly close our ears to lived experience. But Sahar has spent a lifetime communicating, in one way or another, with white Irish people about race — and it shows. She seems to know how to talk so we’ll listen, without getting too defensive and switching off. Sahar may be being nice about it — but perhaps that’s the only way we’ll hear her out. And we must.
Sahar is patient and angry: people distance themselves from all this stuff as if they’re not a part of it — like, we’re not those kind of white people, I’m the good kind of white person! As if we haven’t all, all of us (including people of colour and black people) been conditioned to believe certain things about certain communities.
“Here’s the kicker, like: even me, I’ve been conditioned to believe negative stereotypes about my own people. Me. As a black woman, I have to actively unteach myself this stuff. So when you tell me you don’t have that in you, you’re lying. You’re lying to yourself, you’re lying to me, you’re lying to everyone. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.
“This is how society makes all of us: we’re all [here, a trademark silly voice, cushioning the blow for fragile white Irish egos watching] a little bit racist.”
We shouldn’t need our black people to tell us and teach us about the ways in which we hurt them. We certainly shouldn’t need them to make it nice and comfortable or funny or non-confrontational for us — and yet when women like Sahar do it, at the very least we suspect they are exaggerating; or we don’t believe them; or we argue. We call them thick and we gaslight them. We think we know more about black people and the labour market in Ireland, than black academics who specialise in the labour market in Ireland.
When will we put as much effort into being anti-racist as we do into saying, over and over: there’s no racism in Ireland?
‘We shouldn’t need our black people to tell us the ways we hurt them’
Find Sahar’s comedy and activism on Instagram at @sahar_casm