Meghan Markle is My Black Unicorn Hero Today … and here’s why.
In my first experiences in Ireland, I didn’t perceive the issues I faced as deriving from discrimination; I didn’t want to believe a country with such a history of colonial oppression could enable and endorse such attitudes. It took a while to unpack the subtle nature and shape of the particular forms of Intersectional (gender/race) based barriers prevalent here, and as I became truly embedded locally, I began to experience antipathy somehow so much worse than the usual racism I’d encounter anywhere, having come with such hope to this country that I felt would share kinship in the realities of oppression and migration.
I expected the usual difficulties of integrating, but I was excited and embraced the enthusiasm my other half had for his homeland. His love for home and country was contagious, newlyweds with big hopes. But it became rapidly evident that there is a great divide in the treatment Ireland gives to a white Irish male to what it imposes on a minority ethnic woman of colour.
I have learned the hard way, many times over, the tenet that ‘Ireland is for the Irish only’ has repercussions for new arrivals and that difference of any kind in this country, is very much viewed as deficit. It is a rhetoric that, quite sadly, echoes something of the same nostalgic & corrosive patriotism that drives the British eugenic desire for an England for the ‘English’ only.
‘The biggest thing that I know, is that I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair, and that’s the hardest thing to reconcile…’
Markle’s declaration that ‘No’ — she was not okay — was an acknowledgement of the underlying impacts of xenophobia, exclusion and outright racial abuse many of us would know well. The difference being celebrity makes for more publicized vitriol, revealing hidden oppressive attitudes, but making for relentless, wearisome targeting as other women of colour on social media can attest and Amnesty International’s study Dec 2018 into online abuse against women on Twitter demonstrates.
Markle and others who have the courage to comment and call out these racially based issues for the attacks they are, and discuss the impact of such, are to be admired — it is no easy thing. The fact that our ‘silence will not protect us’ (Audre Lorde, author of ‘Black Unicorn’) does not make the task of speaking up easier knowing the additional and inevitable backlash — ranging from disbelief, dismissal of our realities to further ostracizing and abuse. Position provides no shield either, nor high achievement and integrity of character (as was seen in the treatment of Adam Goodes in Australia) or the recent racial attacks on prominent academics, Dr Ebun Joseph and Snr Lecturer Amanullah De Sondy, for discussing intercultural realities in Ireland.
My own experiences of direct and indirect intersectional discrimination, denoted in subtle social denigration and segregation, non-subtle declarations that migrants were not welcome here & consistent dehumanisation in encounters with government led systems, especially while undergoing IVF, brought me to the same point where it seemed sensible to simply disengage and re-calibrate; Markle style.
Ireland, though always home for my husband, I now expect very little from, viewing this locale instead as a place where I halt, and from where I do my wandering — whether that is through reading, writing or literally on the road to some new experience. The best part about travelling being you don’t have room to carry too many things — like the ignorance of others.
My kindred respect for Meghan comes from this space; understanding the energy required in navigating the narrowminded (though the scale she experiences it at is mindboggling); and the knowledge of the resolution required to simply carve your own path.
Fascinated to see how they travel onwards, even as the premise for their decision seems further vindicated in the vitriol that follows. Still, as Maya Angelou put it;
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
- MAYA ANGELOU
Originally published at https://shivarjoyce.wordpress.com on January 9, 2020.
