[Urban Cragou]

Originally Posted by Cherie

yes I am Irish


what the hell is all that supposed to mean?

Okay we will have whites only nights to protect ourselves from the black gaze, dont complain now

Irish people have historically had their struggles and you’re more than welcome to set up Irish-exclusive spaces for a night (of course) but so have black people. So have Jews. So have all sorts of marginalised groups across the world. It’s not everyone outside of a particular demographic who’ll understand the extent of their struggles and need for a certain degree of solidarity in cohesion (there’s a difference between having a theoretical knowledge of something and actually experiencing it yourself) but that doesn’t invalidate every individual group’s right for communal protection like that. You can turn around and say that Somali women’s support groups shouldn’t be a thing but at the end of the day unless you’re a domestically abused refugee from Mogadishu you’re only going to be theorising from the outside looking in, not knowing how it really feels. “But I want to eat bariis too” is neither here nor there. Go to a Somali restaurant, then. What are you looking for in a support-group set up specifically for Somali women other than a space to extend reverse-inclusivity and not let them have a place just for them? What are you scared they might do or say left to themselves?

We’re at the point where we love to pretend that racial history counts for nothing and it might as well have been white people who were enslaved in spades and raped for 400 solid years, hunted by KKK equivalents and still subject to a lot of racism (covert and overt) to this day but that’s not how it is. Racial history’s there in print and there’s no changing that but it can be acknowledged and used for solidarity-marking points to at least a certain extent. Maybe you do belong to a historically marginalised group (and I 100% respect Irish history and what they’ve had to experience) but that’s different. If you’re white Irish and treated differently or discriminated against, it ain’t because of the colour of your skin specifically. That’s just a rock-hard fact.

People can set out to do whatever they want for one night so long as it’s not directly hurting anyone else. I’m not the one who’s gonna complain. I respect Irish history, gypsy history, Jewish history and yada-yada but I also respect black history. And I detest misplaced colour-blindness. You see colour and it doesn’t count for nothing. Especially not to the people directly impacted. So let’s just not even try to make this about white people.