Black Irish: A Response to Frederick Douglass in Ireland
Note: This piece is part of a series of blogs commissioned by the Unsilencing Black Voices team, Sandrine Ndahiro and Catherine Osikoya, in which writers respond to Douglass’s visit to Ireland.
Lauren Preston
Frederick Douglass was born a slave, the son of his mother who was also a slave and very likely fathered without consent by his mother’s owner. His difficult early life started in a small county in Maryland. Like Douglass, I am American, Black, and I was born in the same small state. Like Douglass, I moved to Ireland and found myself treated differently to how I was accustomed in my homeland.
I have come to love Ireland since first arriving in 2013 and then returning again in 2017. Growing up in America, I was aware of the “otherness” my skin communicated far before I was truly conscious of why. Black was something I was unsure of being. I wanted to be proud, but the glances of suspicion, distaste, and at times outright hatred frightened me. As a mixed-race girl, I felt even more “other”—I did not look like my cousins or most of my friends or even fully like either of my parents. My identity became synonymous with a deep fear of inviting the wrong kind of attention. The cards seemed stacked against me without having decided to play.
Literature made me fall in love with Europe. When I was a child, escaping in pages, I yearned for characters that looked like me but settled happily instead for the characters that felt like me. First in Shakespeare, then Austen, then Joyce. The love affair with Literature only grew as I did. I eventually felt called to Ireland and the lyricism of the written word from Irish authors. At twenty-two I moved to Dublin. I still remember the first time I walked Dame Street and got a coffee, my face cooled by crisp Autumn air so different from the still-balmy wind that I had left behind in Maryland. In Dublin my “otherness” was harmless—more tied to my nationality than my ethnicity. The media obsession with America protected me. I had only to speak with my blended southern accent and suddenly I was greeted with kind smiles. I cried when I left Dublin, a year later almost to the day. I was moving home to finish my bachelor’s degree, but it felt instead like I was leaving home behind.
I would not move back to Ireland until 2017, this time to Limerick. In Limerick I found dear friends and a Munster man I love with my whole heart, but I also found my rose-tinted glasses removed. Ireland was still the haven I loved, but there was a new guarded gaze in the eyes of her people I noticed wherever I walked. I became afraid to take the bus, conscious of the stares and laughter and mumbled insults that only seemed to happen when I took public transport alone. A sweet cashier at Boots complimented my nails and then, upon scanning a bottle of shampoo, laughed and looked up at me before saying, “I didn’t know Black people could use shampoo!” An Irish ex-boyfriend got in to an argument with me outside of 101 and shouted, “This is why no one wants to date Black women!” A white, Irish friend of my housemate said the n-word as casually as if she were saying her own name. I watched a group of college girls run out of a cab laughing and scream back at the driver to go back to his own country. My boyfriend once took me to a nearby clearing for a picnic during the summer and we were approached by children who refused to believe we were a couple. In fact, whenever we walk down the street, hands clasped, his lovely pale fingers around my honey-brown ones, people stare. Not merely a glance of awareness, but a curiosity so engrossing as to be unaware of their unblinking eyes until I meet them with my own.
Douglass was not met with outright hatred in Ireland, and I find it sad that this should have struck him as remarkable. Likewise, I am pained by my own taught cynicism that wonders how he would have fared had he lived in Ireland longer, or if he had married a white Irish woman, or how their hypothetical mixed-race children would have been treated. Would those children be called half-caste, a term implying inferiority in only two syllables, or would they be allowed to be Irish?
Frederick Douglass was born a slave. He was so accustomed to inhumane treatment by his own country that when he came to Ireland basic human dignity was a pleasant surprise. This is not enough, for anyone, anymore. According to the official records given by the OSCE Hate Crime Reporting, there were 251 reported hate crimes in Ireland in 2019. That number is down from the 368 reported in 2018, just a year after I moved back to my home away from home. I can only speak towards my own experiences and I have privileges not afforded to many—I am an American, I am financially secure, I am a registered student, I have Irish national friends and loved ones to support me, I am a woman and therefore deemed less threatening by some. I will always love Ireland, as I too will always love America. These sentiments are not to disparage patriotism or incite blame. Progress has been made in great strides since Frederick Douglass was alive, in many ways, in many countries. Yet humanity still has progress to make in acknowledging where we all fall short in treating others with the same human dignity we would expect for ourselves.
Works Cited
ODIHR Hate Crime Reporting. https://hatecrime.osce.org/ireland