Easpa Géag

danceswithfaeriesunderthemooon:

need this on my blog again because of reasons.

Not strictly Irish, but always worth repeating.

uppercut:

iamnotaghost:

thisiswhiteprivilege:

White privilege is being the #1 consumers of welfare, food stamps, general government aid, and illegal drugs, but STILL blaming POC for all of those things as well as incarcerating them at an exponentially higher rate.

I feel like ‘this is white privelege’ comments like these ignore the class, cultural and socio-political contexts of pretty much everything ever, as well as the contextuality of race in and of itself.

And it’s completely Amerocentric. 

White privilege is getting to derail a conversation on race by insisting that class is the most important intersection. When in reality, race is the biggest deciding factor in your class, and the biggest hindrance to your social mobility.

I’ll agree, a lot of tumblr can be pretty Amerocentric, but the general overview holds up most places.

Lets look at Britain, a place with a decent mixture of colours and creeds, and also one I’m personally familiar with. It also runs on different concepts of race and class. Whiteness isn’t homogenised, like it is America, and there are far more distinctions in the British Class system. Kate Middleton is considered common, but Fergie’s still posh.

My first job in London was in a bar, which just so happened to be owned by a really rich bloke from D4. So there was me, a Middle Class lass from the Pale, a rough as fuck handyman from Ballyfermot, and a grand auld Cark bai on the bar. Didn’t matter a jot to the English, we were all just seen as Irish. Regardless of how class worked between us in our day to day interactions, we were all on the same plane to outsiders. Class didn’t matter.

And yes, the British media is far more vocal about its hatred of the Working Class than they are in America. But if you’ll notice, it wasn’t chavs who were rioting last year, it was Black communities. Brixton, Hackney, Tottenham and Dalston are all poor areas, but they’re specifically poor Black areas. Shoreditch is just as poor, but also predominantly Asian, and saw comparatively little action.

Yes, the dynamics are different between Caribbean and African communities over here, and there are differences between how immigrants and children of immigrants in those communities are perceived. And these all interact with each other to varying degrees. But at the end of the day, the riots were sparked by the Police harassing Black people, irregardless of culture, ethnicity or accent. The overarching factor is race, not class or culture.

Even if we go to a comparatively white washed country as Ireland, class still doesn’t play as big a role as you’re trying to make out. The entire reason for the IRA split in 1969 was because of the Old IRAs refusal to protect Catholic communities, opting instead to try and unite the Working Class as a whole, despite Catholic communities facing the brunt of police, job and housing discrimination.