You Don’t Get to Be Racist and Irish - Imelda May
https://www.unicef.ie/app/uploads/2020/07/Imelda-May-Poem.pdf
You don’t get to be racist and Irish. You don’t get to be proud of your heritage, plights and fights for freedom while kneeling on the neck of another.
You’re not entitled to sing songs of heroes and martyrs, mothers and fathers who cried as they starved in a famine.
Or of brave-hearted,
soft-spoken.
poets and artists.
lined up in a yard,
blindfolded and bound
waiting for Godot,
and point-blank to sound.
We emigrated.
We immigrated.
We took refuge.
So we cannot refuse.
when it’s our time
to return the favour.
Land stolen.
Spirits broken.
Bodies crushed and swollen
unholy tokens of Christ nailed to a tree
that you hang around your neck
like a noose of the free.
Our colour pasty,
our accents thick,
hands like shovels
from mortar and bricklaying
foundation of cities
you now stand upon.
Our suffering seeps
from every stone
your opportunities arise from.
Standing on the shoulders
of our forefathers and foremothers
who bore your mother’s mother.
Our music is for the righteous.
Our joys have been earned
well deserved, and serve
to remind us to remember.
More Blacks.
More Dogs.
More Irish.
Still labelled
leprechauns, Micks, Paddys,
louts.
We’re shouting to tell you:
our land, our laws
are progressively out there.
We’re in a chrysalis,
emerging into a new
and more beautiful era.
40 Shades Better.
Unanimous in our rainbow vote,
we’ve found our stereotypical pot of gold
and my God, it’s good.
So join us.
Because you don’t get to be racist and Irish.
some things never change
lace curtains always talk down to shanty
Since racism moved from biology to sociology and no one can agree on what it is anymore, I find little point in bringing it up or discussing it anymore. The word has lost all meaning it once had.
It’s literally always been sociology. The Irish weren’t hated because they weren’t white, they very clearly are white by any reasonable metric.
Racism never had a meaning other than hatred of the other. They find new excuses but the fact remains that looking paler or seasoning differently do not make anyone less of a person. Whether it is “dna” or “culture”, it is a farce.
