Irish and Black Solidarity - Unpublished excerpts from What White People Can Do Next

Hi everyone, 

WWPCDN is way over the original word count, and even so, I had to lose lots of text as earlier drafts were way way way over! But I'd love to share some of that material with you here. 

 Ok first up we have this lil section on Irish and black points of solidarity, which I love.

Do let me know your thoughts ! 

It's not about shirking the reality of the past but neither is it about remaining mired in it either. This history and its legacy needs to be acknowledged so that we can move on. While the British have an inability to reckon with their past -and the ramifications of this are huge- because of their role in everything from inventing whiteness to colonizing the world, yet they are hardly unique in reimagining the past. Some Irish people have often been quick to point out that ‘the Irish were slaves too’ (which they were never, they were indentured labourers. The Irish were never slaves repeat x 3), yet would be entirely silent about the enthusiasm with which the Irish signed up to the project of whiteness and ‘white supremacy’, and the virulent anti-blackness that existed in Irish-American communities. Generally when I was growing up Irish oppression was not referenced to foster solidarity, rather it was a tool to silence people like myself trying to make sense of the racism we were being subject to in Ireland. 

Yet inspiring examples of solidarity exist, and it is those we should encourage more. The relationship between the black American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass and Irish freedom fighter Daniel O’ Connell or the correspondence between WEB Du Bois and Roger Casement, Marcus Garvey’s outspokenness on Irish oppression, and the influence of WB Yeats writing’ on the Harlem Renaissance as well as on post colonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, whose seminal Things Fall Apart (detailing the destruction of the Igbo world due to British colonialism) takes its title from Yeats poem The Second Coming, and we can’t forget the way the African American Civil Rights movement influenced Northern Ireland, nor indeed the radical anti-racism of a figure like Dublin legend, the bard Luke Kelly.