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I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear
Дата публикации: 16-08-2026 05:00:00
Growing up in Waterford, I naively believed Ireland might sidestep the entrenched divisions of its near neighbours
Основное содержимое страницы с новостью.
Being black and Irish at the turn of the millennium came with the minor local celebrity of being a perpetual novelty. Depending on who had released a single or appeared on EastEnders that week, you were routinely reassigned a new identity: Beyoncé, Rihanna, Chris Rock or Yolande Trueman.
Lagging the compulsory three paces behind my older sister and her new friends, I’d watch the estate’s freckled-faced boys slouch against primly painted garden walls. They wore tracksuits three sizes too large, their hair slicked with a dark wetness you couldn’t definitively assign to Brylcreem, sweat, or a mix of both.
Impatient for a danger they were never going to encounter, they would spend their afternoons rehearsing the N-word, and all its variations, picked up from pirated 50 Cent CDs and rewatches of 8 Mile in a confident, clunky cadence no Waterford accent was ever equipped to hold.
Watching this scenario had the gruesome fascination of a newborn fawn trying to walk on ice – an absurdity that reached its most logical conclusion a few years later when 50 Cent arrived to play at the Waterford Regional Sports Centre.
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You simply couldn’t look away.
My parents swapped the brutalist concrete of post-reunification Germany for the riverbanks of Co Tipperary shortly before my brother Nils was born. We were a family operating in German, French, Lingala, and heavily accented English. Whether moved by politeness or unvarnished nosiness – sure, isn’t that all the same currency in Ireland anyway? – a steady stream of neighbours came, and with them, preloved Moses baskets, baby clothes and toys; happily trading old nursery furniture for the satisfaction of untangling our story.
We arrived in the giddy heights of the Celtic Tiger, bypassing the usual diaspora routes of London and Paris. My father pushed further west, eager to build in a nation intoxicated by its own sudden wealth. We eventually settled into Waterford’s quietude.
Progress in “our becoming Irish” journey was regularly documented by Joe Evans, a Waterford News & Star photographer-turned-family-friend, who materialised for exam results, graduations, baptisms, and the occasional underage GAA trophy presentation. He would practice his rusty schoolboy French with us, and in return, we would supply him with an endless stream of multicultural front-page human interest. Unearthing that archive, however, would require wading through every adventurous spelling of Anaïs and Lukaku attempted before English keyboards, French punctuation, and autocorrect had come to a workable agreement.
Immigrant life proceeded through a dense, informal network of school, church, neighbours, and whoever could give us a lift. My primary school principal became my older sister’s godmother; her daughter, my fourth-class teacher. Pat, our neighbour up the hill, became my godfather and later travelled to Congo with my dad to meet the grandparents I never got to know.
[ ‘Where are you really from?’: Growing up black in IrelandOpens in new window ]
My mother slipped easily into the religious rituals that shadow every nation evangelised by Rome. Having survived a boarding school run by Belgian nuns in Congo, she arrived with the unshakeable Catholic guilt required for Irish life. We moved through Communions, Confirmations, and parish-hall funeral teas.
Still, nothing pricked childhood pride quite like hearing adults address my parents in the patient, over-enunciated English reserved for toddlers and sun-hatted tourists holding paper maps. When my mother launched into her French rendering of the Lord’s Prayer, I recoiled at her refusal to blend in. I was terrified that my friends and their parents would view her as disruptive, a fear driven by my own desperate, clawing urge to belong.
Staying as close as possible to whiteness felt like the only available collateral for safety. Anything signalling explicit otherness carried the absurd weight of representing every black person in the country, whether Nigerian, Ghanaian, or Congolese. Racism felt episodic and containable, something that could be sealed inside single awkward encounters.
I naively believed that as continental grocers, Halal butchers, and late-night takeaway menus altered provincial high streets, Ireland might sidestep the entrenched institutional divisions of its near neighbours.
Then you pack your life into suitcases and move to England, where you find yourself black in an entirely different register – marked by a heavy, institutional capital B and the endless task of explaining what “black Irish” actually means. You also eventually gain the vocabulary to parse systemic racism, sexism, and every other structural framework you were once too sheltered to name.
For the first time, the absurdities of your Irish childhood feel comfortably contained: a distinct chapter resting safely in the past. But then the videos start appearing on your screen.
With venom so plentiful and easily accessible online, context is easily lost
— Anaïs Lukaku
Physical distance offers no shelter from the algorithm, and in the wake of high-profile tragedies, false online rumours ignite instant flashpoints. It does not matter that the suspect is not who the internet claims he is: the web flattens facts into immediate fuel for an anti-immigrant anger that had been simmering just below the surface.
This was now the modern manifestation of the Hillview boys, the Ballybeg boys, the Belfast boys, the Ballymena boys, the Citywest boys. Only these are no longer soft-faced teenagers stumbling over lyrics. Hardened and weathered, their faces are now tight with malice as they spit those same slurs down into phone lenses, and this time, there is no innocent posturing to cushion the impact.
Seeing those videos felt like years of progress unravelling at once, pulling you straight back into the parish pew as the suffocating pressure returns. You are left carrying the weight of every foreign face in Ireland, once again forced to justify why you get to exist – here, now.
For the first time in my life, the embarrassment of childhood gave way to outright dread.
I was scared.
On my screen, I watched grainy footage of men moving through the terraces off Sandy Row in Belfast with the methodical pace of census enumerators. They checked houses against address lists circulated on Telegram channels, driving 27 people from ethnic minority backgrounds into homelessness within 48 hours.
There was a night of violence in Belfast following a knife attack that left one man critically injured. Video: Reuters/Enda O'Dowd/Andrew McNairI tried clinging to the comforting fiction that government officials would step in with a real solution. But as they said everything and did nothing, it became clear that this crisis was always in the making.
Despite our historical head start, we were tumbling toward the exact same pointed destination.
Operating under two separate legal systems and governments, the island has found itself dragged into a racial argument whose vocabulary was manufactured elsewhere.
As slogans imported from Britain’s far right – “invasion,” “two-tier policing,” “indigenous rights,” and “white replacement” – took hold, I realised I had confused a history of being oppressed with an immunity from learning how oppression worked. It was a comforting equation that Ireland’s record with women, children, and Travellers should have made impossible years ago.
When state infrastructure collapses, when housing becomes an impossible dream, and healthcare waiting lists stretch into years, a combustible vacuum is created. The state presents scarcity in public and administers suffering in private, leaving citizens to study one another across the gap.
[ A visual timeline of how foreign agitators helped spark racist riots in BelfastOpens in new window ]
With venom so plentiful and easily accessible online, context is easily lost. An asylum seeker spends years inside a hotel room that a neighbour will never enter. The neighbour spends years on a housing list, only to one day see somebody else handed keys, but not the preceding years of waiting. The person in the hotel sees the protest outside, oblivious to the rent increases, the overcrowded house, or the healthcare waiting list that drove the anger. Both are forced to examine the visible relief of others while their need goes unmet.
When a stranger holds your eye across a train carriage or a city bus, the glance gets filtered through an exhausting mental calculus that ranges from the benign to the unhinged. They might like your coat, or perhaps they spent their morning reading Telegram channels about migrant invaders, and view your presence as part of a co-ordinated takeover. I miss when a Rihanna comparison was the likeliest explanation.
In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, social media feeds began delivering posts formatted in corporate shades of brown. These graphics offered instructions on how to capitalise the letter B, catalogued microaggressions, and condensed centuries of US racial politics into 10 swipeable slides. It felt easy at first to treat those posts as a distant American phenomenon.
That distance collapsed completely on Henry Street last May when Yves Sakila died after being restrained on the pavement by security guards following an alleged shoplifting incident.
The crowd gathering at a distance, mobile phones held aloft, formed a scene that belonged to a foreign news bulletin, but unfolded outside a Dublin department store on an ordinary afternoon. It felt like watching the final pieces of a complex puzzle click into place after years of collective assembly, laying out the full picture in broad daylight.
[ Family of Yves Sakila seeks outside pathologist and criticises Garda inquiryOpens in new window ]
There was an immediate impulse across the country to reject the comparison, to insist that Ireland remained immune to that specific inheritance of violence. Yet the video permitted no detachment.
There he was, Congolese, dying on Henry Street; and there I was, Congolese, watching the loop repeat across my screen.
Perhaps I had needed Ireland to remain innocent because it protected something in me. Those comments I heard in my childhood were provincial, produced by children repeating words they barely understood, not adults who understood well enough to publicise the target of their rage’s home address.
It allowed me to believe that the intimacy of Irish life would eventually correct itself – that living beside somebody, teaching their children, attending their funerals, and borrowing their lawnmower would make political hatred impossible through sheer familiarity.
Embarrassment left room for innocence, but fear had now removed that option.
Yet a reliance on imported racist frameworks offers its own kind of distortion. American racial categories emerged from a distinct history of chattel slavery, legal segregation and militarised policing. They cannot simply be lifted across the Atlantic and placed over Waterford, Ballymena, Belfast or Dublin without losing vital local context.
For black Irish people, these competing narratives feel deeply claustrophobic, where one approaches us as interchangeable members of a global victim population and the other declares us foreign regardless of where we were born, how we speak, or how completely Ireland has formed us.
Black Ireland is barely one generation old; the entire black population of Northern Ireland could fit inside Windsor Park with rows to spare. Yet foreign agitators, like Tommy Robinson, now deliver sweeping verdicts on towns they would struggle to pinpoint on a map.
Meanwhile, young Irish people are reclaiming cultural identity on radically different terms, through Claddagh rings, tattoos, the Fleadh; revitalised by a generation that sees no contradiction between ancient heritage and contemporary black Irish life.
I still want to believe that ours is an island of firsts, discovering in real time how to expand what it means to be Irish.
My mother now lies buried on a hillside in Tramore, overlooking a bay that has witnessed human movement along this coast for centuries. Down along the seafront, former Victorian holiday hotels now serve as accommodation centres.
Standing there now, the town feels like an anchor. It holds the memory of those who were forced to leave alongside the reality of those who have just arrived, bound by the universal gamble of searching for a safe place.
[ ‘At what point is it okay for a black person to be Irish?’Opens in new window ]
Is Ireland racist? In the ways that any nation buckling under systemic neglect and neglected infrastructure can be, yes.
But rendering a final judgment on a relationship that is barely one generation deep feels like a premature surrender.
Anaïs Lukaku is a writer, journalist and creative.
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