In July 2023, I traveled to Dublin with a group of students enrolled in my course, The Black and Green Atlantic, as part of NYU Gallatin’s Study Abroad program. The course explores the longstanding and complex relationship between the Irish and African diasporas. People of Irish and African descent have lived in close proximity for four centuries—a result of transatlantic migration, forced and otherwise, to, especially, North America and the Caribbean. In the last two decades, Ireland has become a site of that encounter. The booming “Celtic Tiger” economy of the 1990s has transformed an emigrant society into an immigrant one, as migrants from around the world have relocated—or returned—there, including a growing population of people of African descent. Amidst these changes, the country is grappling with new questions about what it means to be Irish, be it by way of birth, passport, ancestry, or culture.
I’ve commented elsewhere about my personal interest in Ireland and its emerging and vocal Black Irish generation. As a Black and Irish American, native to Boston and raised in its metropolitan area in the age of busing, I experienced an American version of Irishness that was not capacious enough to include those of us also of African descent. Indeed, fully consistent with American racial logic at the time, anyone with “black blood”—even one drop—could not be “white” which, by the time of my childhood, Irish Americans had long since become. The pervasiveness of the “one drop” ideology and its ruthless enforcement in American life so effectively denied interracial mixing that many people who descend from both Irish and African ancestors are not aware of it. To see a younger generation of black people in Ireland claiming their Irishness augured something important about the possibilities of remaking not just relations between Irish and black people, but those categories themselves.
I see my role as a university professor who teaches about concepts of race in different societies as offering my (mostly American) students tools to dislodge their certainties about what race is and what it means. To do this, we study “race”—the concept and its effects—comparatively and historically, and in relation to other group categories—be they “ethnic”, “nationalist”, “religious” or “caste”— that likewise organize systems of stratification. Doing so makes it easier for students to see race as a form and tool of power, rather than a natural fact, and racial inequality as inextricably related to class inequality. My hope is that in studying how in different times and places, racial categories and their significance in organizing social, political, and economic life change (sometimes even for the better), my students will also see that the same is possible in their own time and place.
Given its complex history as a post-colonial society, forged in successful if partial (depending on one’s point of view) rebellion against British rule, and now undergoing rapid economic and ethnic change, contemporary Ireland is an ideal site to do this work. The Irish are engaging some of the most pressing issues of our time: What is required to create a multiethnic democracy? Can belonging that doesn’t depend on sameness be made real? How do societies manage the ordeal of integration?
To prepare my students, we read about the causes and effects of Irish and African transatlantic migration and what grew out of their encounters. We study the Great Hunger and the slave trade; new American cultural forms like tap dance, blues, and country music; and violent conflict (the draft riots, busing) as well. If relations between blacks and Irish in the US (or at least the stories told about them) center around conflict, however, the historiography of the encounter between African Americans and the Irish in Ireland accents their collaboration—one that is increasingly commemorated in Irish public life. While standing beneath his enormous bronze likeness at the head of O’Connell Street, we discussed how Daniel O’Connell’s successful advocacy for Catholic civil rights, and attempts to get Irish Americans to oppose slavery, served as inspiration to Frederick Douglass, whose anti-slavery campaigning in Ireland expressed and fostered affinities between black and Irish people. While learning of James Connolly’s role in the Easter Rising, we heard as well about Marcus Garvey’s collaboration with Irish revolutionaries. On a trip to Belfast, Queen’s University professor Peter McLoughlin described the ways that Catholic civil rights activists in Northern Ireland borrowed heavily from the philosophy and strategies of MLK, SNCC, and the Black Panthers.
Learning about these transatlantic acts of collaboration and solidarity between blacks in the Americas and Irish people in Ireland was revelatory to my students—a positive counter to Irish Americans’ largely indifferent or hostile response to African Americans’ calls for racial justice in the US. Given their history of colonialism, and generations of experience as immigrants elsewhere, many Irish liken support for oppressed peoples wherever they are as part of what it means to be Irish—a stance reflected in official government positions taken against the apartheid regime in South Africa and Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and in stark contrast to other Western governments. But would that sense of affinity remain when black people and other migrants move from distance to proximity in contemporary Irish society?
In many ways, Dublin looks and feels like any other Western secular cosmopolitan city, a fact several of the students commented on with some chagrin (“There are so many Americans!”). Like the NYC they had departed from, one sees and hears people from around the world and the signs of a certain kind of prosperity are everywhere—the tourists and the consumerism, the expensive restaurants, and even more expensive housing. Indeed, as Ireland has become wealthier overall, it has also become more unequal. Our program assistant, a recent college graduate, told us that the high cost and limited availability of housing in Ireland was so bad that most of her friends still lived at home with their parents and students commute multiple hours to go to university, some dropping out as a result. Amidst the H&Ms and Prada are the chain stores selling Irishness in the form of mass-produced wool Aran sweaters, tweed caps, clan heraldry-stamped mugs, keychains (and much, much more). I searched in vain for rosary beads –a gift for my mother—in the shops near Grafton St. only to find them days later in the museum gift shop—a sign of the times if ever there was one.
As in other globalizing societies, Irish institutions have adopted now-familiar modes of dealing with their growing multiculturalism. Talk of “diversity”, “inclusion” and “anti-racist” practice pervades public discourse. Academic institutions are taking account of their legacies of participation in slavery and colonialism. Trinity College, on whose campus we were staying, had just initiated plans to de-name its Berkeley library due to its namesake’s ties to both.
Cultural institutions like EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum are developing new initiatives exploring a broader vision of Irishness. Ads for their #This Is Not Us exhibit enveloped Dublin buses, depicting uncanny images of pugnacious redheaded leprechaun-men –what AI searches produce when asked what an Irishman looks like. The exhibit itself seemed intended to critique these stereotypes on both moral and factual grounds, part of a larger effort to reimagine the nation as more than just white.
Yet the institutional embrace of multicultural shibboleths hides some sobering realities. Leon Diop, an up-and-coming community organizer and co-founder of the advocacy organization Black and Irish, told us of a worrying degree of discrimination experienced by Black Irish people and the racial harassment their group receives from “far-right” agitators for calling attention to it. Dr. Toluwani Akaehomen of the Africa Solidarity Centre told us of the particular hardships African asylum seekers face under Ireland’s Direct Provision program. The program requires migrants to stay in government–contracted detention centers in which they are “directly provided” for—a euphemism that means they cannot work, travel, or even cook for themselves until they are declared eligible to remain—a process that in some cases lasts for years and has lasting negative impacts on their families. Not long before we arrived, an anti-immigration protest in Dublin—unusual in Ireland—sparked a (much larger) counter-protest in support of immigrant rights.
If many of the issues facing Ireland’s black population are inseparable from their status as migrants, however, Prof. Phil Mullen of Trinity College reminded us that neither racial problems nor black Irish people are “new” in Ireland. She shared her work on the widespread institutionalization of mixed-race children in Irish industrial schools, part of a broader pattern of removal of those deemed undesirable in post-revolutionary Irish society. Born of white women and African men, these children were considered unassimilable, unadoptable, and excluded from full participation in Irish society. To refer to blacks as “new Irish”, Professor Mullen says, unwittingly continues the erasure of black people’s long presence in Ireland, the collective memory of which has been denied, forgotten, or never established among most Irish. That erasure makes possible the equation of Irishness with whiteness and fuels fantasies of Irish ethnic purity. Raised herself in such an institution, Phil and others have formed the Association of Mixed Race Irish, part of a broader campaign seeking to bring attention to and seek redress for that history. Their advocacy, including testimony at the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, has resulted in a formal state apology from the Irish government but as yet, no reparation for that harm.
It’s often said of late that Western societies are in the midst of a “racial reckoning” – an accounting of histories of racial domination and their legacy in the present—in the service of creating a more just society, and perhaps achieving a kind of reconciliation. Our trip coincided with the 25th anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement, that monumental political achievement that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Walking the neighborhoods of Shankill Road and Falls Road, hearing stories of the ethnic discrimination, hatred, and violence between people living steps from each other, was a potent reminder of the value in remembering, so as not to repeat, the mistakes of the past. Yet questions remain. What can states do to redress the racial injustices of the past? How should the tension around immigration to Ireland be addressed and what might it have to do with the increasing insecurity many Irish feel in an economy that benefits the few over the many? How does a society recover from ethnic violence?
These are the kinds of questions I hope my students are still asking themselves. In the months since we’ve returned, they have only become more urgent. The resolution we witnessed introduced in the Seanad protesting Israeli expansion of settlements in the West Bank as a violation of UN and human rights law takes on new meaning in the face of a now full-scale war in the region. The Association of Mixed Race Irish has been disappointed in its call for reparations for the racial abuse its members experienced in Irish institutions, prompting its director, Conrad Bryan to tweet “Ireland fights for the human rights of people in places like South Africa and Palestine. But when it comes to people at home who suffered in Irish institutions we fall short.” And just last week on the very same street where my students and I talked about the solidarity between Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass, a riot broke out, the likes of which Dublin has not seen in decades.
There is much work to do.