Blinded By Colour: The Irish Case for Transcending Race

Unwarranted race-consciousness does not fix our social problems

Race

BLINDED BY COLOUR: THE IRISH CASE FOR TRANSCENDING RACE

Unwarranted race-consciousness does not fix our social problems

Eric Ehigie

You are a foreign national who has just arrived on Irish shores, and the first person that has the pleasure of interacting with you is my fortunate self. We do not know much about each other, so we begin with the customary pleasantries. You tell me about yourself, your background, the nation that you’ve travelled from – and when it is time for me to take the conversational pulpit, I begin by telling you that I am a black, Irish individual. I imagine you might be curious about the Irish aspect of my identity – where I grew up in Ireland, Irish culture and Ireland’s history, Irish cuisine (though the brevity of my contributions on this last matter may disappoint you).

But what about my initial identifier? That I am “black.” Apart from possibly asking me how this feature of my identity has impacted my experience in Ireland, there isn’t much you can inquire into about my “blackness.” After all, there are many millions of so-called “black” people across the world – black Americans, black West Africans, black Caribbeans, including individuals ranging from Barack Obama to the small entrepreneur working in a street market in Ghana. What could my identifying as black possibly tell you about me?

What if, in contrast, I told you that I was Nigerian Irish? Then, I imagine, you would have far more to sink your teeth into when trying to understand me as a person. As with my Irish identity, you can ask me about substantive elements of the Nigerian tradition - the various ethnicities and languages represented in Nigeria, Nigerian fashion and style, Nigerian afrobeats, etcetera. Whereas my race merely explains my pigmentation and suggests experiences that I might incur as a result of it, my cultural identifier, Nigerian, a far more substantive marker, gives you a deeper understanding of who I am and an insight into some of the attributes that play a greater role in defining me.

We live at a time when racial identifiers are ascribed too much value. This is a strange but in some ways understandable paradox. Race, as currently understood, is an extremely young (in light of our nearly 300,000 year history as Homo sapiens) and nebulous concept that we humans have created and used for the most pernicious of purposes. Be it as a justifier for chattel slavery, to bolster a false sense of superiority amongst some groups and inferiority between others, to economically marginalise social classes, or to impose nonsensical divisions based on brittle reasoning, the history of race clearly demonstrates that it has not served us well, and when taken for what it means in the modern day, in practical terms, in the majority of contexts, i.e., the colour of one’s skin, it is exposed as being a highly questionable method of acquiring information about people.

Why, then, do we resort to racial heuristics to understand one another, instead of more substantive variables, such as a person’s culture-rich ethnicity, their socioeconomic status, or best of all, the vast landscape of their individual identity?

I believe I can provide a workable answer to this question by sharing a bit about my story. I was raised by my Nigerian-Irish immigrant mother who steeped my brother and me in the philosophy of Pan-Africanism and Black Liberation ideologies. After a day at primary school, my mother would sit us down and have us listen to pre-Mecca Malcolm X speeches, and orations from leaders such as Marcus Garvey, who taught the need for black people to unify in the face of white oppression and achieve racial self-determination. I believe what attracted my mother to these ideas was her negative experiences of prejudice and discrimination here in Ireland as a black woman, especially during the process of social integration. Once you are socially marginalised and made to feel lesser than because of an unchangeable characteristic that you hold, anyone – especially those with the razor-sharp intellect and piercing oratorical ability of Garvey and Malcolm X – that dares to validate your beauty and worth, not despite of, but because of that characteristic, will appeal to you.

This, I believe, is what happened with my mum. The downside, however, of feelings of worth that are predicated exclusively on an unchangeable characteristic, especially when that characteristic exists in direct opposition to some characteristic of another group in the society, is that, at worst, it can give rise to feelings of supremacy based on that characteristic. At best, it assumes that your value is determined by an element of your identity that is unchangeable and that you had no role in acquiring – your worth essentially becomes an accident of birth.

To many, all of this might seem like a non-issue, as the race-conscious thinking I have described comes as a direct response to hateful behaviors inspired by race-conscious thinking on the part of members of the majority group. However one might try to contextualise the race-conscious reasoning adopted in response to racism, the question that remains is this: Is it right for us to allow race to be so weighty a factor that it influences our judgements about the worth of ourselves and others?

I would respond by stating that, surely, a more ideal social strategy would be for us to embrace the injunction of Martin Luther King Jr. and judge people on the quality of their character – an attribute that everyone has the ability to shape and improve, no matter their background – rather than the pigmentation of their skin. What’s the difference between unnecessary race-consciousness and an exclusive consciousness of the merits of a person’s character? In a world defined by the former, not only can so-called racial self-empowerment in reaction to racism exist, but so can racism! In contrast, in a world defined by the latter, neither form of racialised thinking can find an abode. This, I submit, is a net positive.

This line of thinking is often met with the response that it is impossible to achieve the realisation of such a strategy until we arrive at a place where the initial racial animus, emanating from the ‘initiator’ or majority group, is eradicated from society. Until it is, any race-neutral attempt to address issues relating to bigotry in our society is a distraction from, rather than a remedy to, the problem. I have thought about this issue incessantly for the past year, and still, I cannot help but return to King, a man who preached and led, in the face of a degree of racism that I, as a black man in today’s age, am too privileged to grasp conceptually let alone experientially, and asserted that a radical belief in the dictum that we are all one in the eyes of God is what we as a social species should aspire towards.

The challenge facing us today is not how quickly we yield to our base, human instinct to huddle into tribes – especially ones that are, in many contexts, conceptually useless such as one’s race – but whether we can muster the spiritual fortitude to rise to the challenge of transcending these instincts in search of a more meaningful path to social progress.

It is not a matter of radically overhauling our social modus operandi overnight, but it is instead about holding out a transcendent ideal, an ethic, for us to strive towards.

This is a difficult ask, for sure. Even I, as an advocate of this position, struggle with conforming to this 'transcendental' ethic and often unwittingly behave in opposition to it, due to my very human tribal inclinations, philosophical predisposition, and my own blatant experiences with racism. In fact, I have found that although I live out this 'race-neutral' ethic in most, if not all, of my interactions with people, I nonetheless at times commit myself to its inverse – a more racially charged style of discourse, that does not altogether sit right with what I feel is ideal.

And yet the struggle upwards towards a standard, not merely its perfect actualization, is the very reason for upholding a standard in the first place.

As someone who endorses this universalist message, I do not believe that we must abandon racial categorisation in settings where it is useful, such as when addressing the underlying commonality of a cluster of people’s experience of racism, nor must we resign ourselves to the assertions of the proverbial “Karen” – the “I don’t see race” fallacy. No. The universalist ideal does mean, however, that we should scrupulously ask ourselves how useful a tool race is for capturing the specificities of a given situation or predicament. When looking at, say, inequality in society, the race of an individual may explain to us their likelihood of experiencing some kind of social marginalisation, but it is not always the most fitting mechanism to gauge disadvantage. The suited up “white” man from Wall Street, it is completely fair to assume, enjoys more societal privileges than the working class young “black” male raised by a single mother in an urban neighbourhood. But if we limit ourselves to race as the ultimate proxy of understanding inequality, we disallow ourselves the recognition that someone like Blue Ivy Carter, the 12-year-old daughter of “black” billionaire couple Jay-Z (Sean Carter) and Beyoncé Knowles, is structurally benefited in ways far exceeding a “white” man on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Thus, analysis in terms of “race” confines us to a low-resolution measurement of reality. The question is always: Does race serve us here, or does it deflect from a more precise social understanding?

The conversation is a multi-faceted one. We live in a post-colonial age, where only a few generations ago, ancestors of mine were treated prejudicially in the most egregious of ways on the basis of their “race.” This treatment extended from colonial Africa eastwards to Arab lands, northwards to Europe, and westwards to the Caribbean and the Americas. The biggest error I see in Western intellectuals' attempts to critique undue fixation on race is their juxtaposition of racial discourse against so-called Western values emerging from the Enlightenment  –  “reason,” “logic,” “fair treatment,” and so on. This critique of race often fails to appreciate the fact that the West is no longer a homogenous social space in which one cultural voice prevails.

Whereas, once upon a time, the general view of King Leopold II of Belgium, who is on record for allegedly killing up to 10 million Congolese people, was one of general indifference; now, due to the descendants of those colonised by figures such as King Leopold being an important part of the Western framework, the tone of discourse around the crimes of colonisation and racial subjugation has inevitably changed. And for the better. Furthermore, many of the Enlightenment values that we claim to cherish here in the West were not extended to certain groups of people because of how they were racially classified – the revolutionary statement that "all men are created equal" enshrined in the United States' Declaration of Independence makes Thomas Jefferson a political radical for stating it, but a hypocrite for owning slaves on the basis of the belief that black people were not “created equal.”

Rather than seeing this moment, in which race has arguably become a factor of redundant utility in many (but certainly not all) circumstances, as existing in opposition to the Western tradition, it should be perceived as being part of the natural development of said tradition. When the figurative children of those who have faced oppression are allowed to have their say, the first utterances we should expect are those outlining the wrongs inflicted upon their forefathers – even if this means clinging in sometimes excessively tight ways to the racial attributes of those who did the wronging and of those who were subject to it, not simply to understand the past but to guide, however imperfectly or even erroneously, strides into the future.

The excesses of each era, as Hegel would assert, are rectified by the reaction of the next, and I submit that both the racial excesses of the past and any (over-)corrections following thereafter are unique properties of the Western tradition.

So, the question becomes: Where do we go from here? There are many efforts being made to “reckon” with racial histories and pave a course forward in the West. It strikes me that people have opted to support either one of two paths. One, “anti-racism,” has grabbed the attention of popular culture. It strongly leans into race as a mechanism of social understanding and an indispensable tool to address social injustice, despite its own recognition of the hurt that racial classification has caused in the past and still causes our communities, and the descriptive limitations baked into racial identifiers. To put it crudely, antiracism is a kind of masochistic obsession with an ex-lover that has proven time and again to fail us in terms of what it offers, but that we still yearn for due to our familiarity with what it brings.

The other path is one of fervent resistance and pushback against viewing individuals in terms of race, and a rejection of the academic theories promoted by anti-racists to dismantle racial malpractice, on the grounds that they insist too strongly on race. The problem with this path is its over-intellectualisation of racial matters and its failure to appreciate the strongly emotional component incumbent in people's attachment to race. My mother, for example, wasn't prone to spouting messages about “black nationalism” due to a belief in or understanding of anti-racist theory, but instead because of her very real experiences with wanton racial discrimination and her feeling of dissatisfaction with how the recent history of the relationship between the Western World and Africa has played out.

In nations across the West, the difficulty of managing this issue of racial perception has led to intractable political debate and hopelessness on the question of how we can achieve common ground despite our differences. I hope that here in Ireland we can be brave enough to appreciate the nuance between the lines, prevent ourselves from being swept up by the ideological zeal demonstrated on both extremes in the debate, and adopt social approaches that truly serve our communities, whilst side-lining the ones that do not. At this time, what this means to me is that we should invoke racial identifiers only where they serve us while we focus on finding evidence-based ways, rooted in universalist principles, to foster a society where people’s differences are not an encumbrance on their experience and opportunities. Getting this right will no doubt involve a consensual effort across communal divides – but without the courage to transcend race, we will condemn ourselves to a fate of limited social connection and unfit-for-purpose solutions. Though much of the West seems to have stagnated in this struggle, I hold out hope that we can still learn from the mistakes made elsewhere, and opt for the more meaningful path.

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Eric Ehigie is a Nigerian Irish Law graduate, currently studying at the University of Galway to become a lawyer. He regularly writes on sociopolitical matters for his blog on Medium (where an earlier version of the current essay appeared) and creates socially-conscious and law-related content for his YouTube channel. Eric engages in advocacy work to address inequality in working class communities (especially involving young boys) and to open up the political fora – particularly in terms of mainstream political discourse – to hitherto politically underrepresented communities. Named as one of BBC 1Xtra’s Black History Month Future Figures, Eric aims to use his legal insights and social commentary to propose evidence-based methods that will assist Ireland in embracing its newfound cultural heterogeneity and in achieving social cohesion in the face of identitarian differences, without the ideological capture seen overseas. Follow Eric on Twitter/X and Instagram.