Two personal accounts from the city of LA by yoga teacher, philosopher and Heyday writer, Dearbhla Kelly, and her friend, actress Raedawn Chong. Raedawn starred in The Colour Purple, Commando and Quest for Fire.

Dearbhla kelly

Things feel better in Los Angeles today. The city-wide 6 pm curfew after four days has been lifted and the noise of helicopters and sirens has eased off. Protests are peaceful. Things feel slightly calmer. Slightly.

Fortunately, the military has not entered our cities but police brutality has been widespread. They have been caught on camera firing bullets and tear gas at protestors and deliberately ramming them with SUV’s. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested nationwide, countless others injured and protestors have died. I watched footage of a black woman’s breasts being groped by a police officer in Indianapolis. She manages to break away and the cop says ‘hit her, hit her’. She is then set upon by two other cops who beat her with batons, throw her to the ground and handcuff her arms behind her back.

For those of you reading this in Ireland, I want you to understand something: whilst black people in Ireland also suffer the scourge of racism in so many significant ways, of that there is no doubt, the fear of risk to life at the hands of the police is thankfully not omnipresent. The use of force by police is not only sanctioned here; it is encouraged by laws that make it extremely difficult to prosecute police for brutality; they rarely get disciplined and are mostly not held accountable for the violence they inflict on BIPOC. The Los Angeles Police Department’s motto is ‘To Protect and to Serve’. It’s not clear that they mean to serve all people. The systemic racism and institutionalisation of white supremacy here is undeniable.

I also want you to understand that white Irish people like me benefit from white supremacy, my white skin and freckles protect me in all kinds of ways.

In the fourteen years I’ve lived in Los Angeles I’ve probably been pulled over for speeding about four or five times. Sure, I’ve gotten tickets but that’s it. I’ve never been asked to get out of the car, or been searched or handcuffed. Ask any black person about their experience of ‘driving while black’ and they will surely tell you a different story. Once my (white) husband and I were driving home from a restaurant with my brother and sister in-law (also white) who were visiting from Dublin. My husband was driving and I was in the passenger seat. We got pulled over and the officer explained that the car’s licence plate was expired and asked to see my husband’s driving licence, which was also expired. The officer accepted my husband’s explanation about why his paperwork wasn’t fully current and asked if anyone else in the car had a California licence. I replied that I did and he said he would watch us switch drivers and we were free to leave. This is white privilege. BIPOC don’t get afforded this kind of leeway in this country. Black people have been shot during routine traffic stops. In fact, black people dying at the hands of the police is commonplace, it’s just part of how things are in America.

Irish people can be blind to our privilege due to our own history of being systematically oppressed by the British, in the whole country pre-independence, and as Catholics in Northern Ireland before and during the Troubles. I know that not all Irish people have white skin but I am writing from the perspective of a white-skinned Irish person who does benefit from my whiteness. I’m also aware that Irish people faced discrimination in both Britain and the USA when they emigrated in search of better lives.

But those days are behind us now. In America we enjoy all the trappings of privilege. Our white skin means that we are treated as part of the establishment. We never have to worry about ‘driving while Irish’ or being refused a mortgage or a bank loan simply because of the colour of our skin. Whether people hear our accents or not, they see us as non-threatening. And if, like me, we have a short temper, it goes under the label of ‘fiery Irish’ as opposed to ‘angry black woman’.

white privilege

And it is exactly because of our ancestral history of oppression and injustice at the hands of the British that we have a moral responsibility to look at our privilege, at how we can and do benefit from the colour of our skin. We must stand with BIPOC and play our part in the dismantling of structures that perpetuate injustice. We Irish have given much in American society. But we have also taken much. It’s time to acknowledge our privilege and how we have benefited from a system that has enslaved black people, exploited them, looted their culture and systematically and deliberately excluded them from a place at the table. We should be better than this.

I know many Irish and Irish-American people are involved in the movement for racial justice but many don’t even register their privilege. Yes, our people were oppressed by the British and also faced systematic discrimination in Britain and the USA but the Irish are no longer considered second class citizens and fully enjoy access to the halls of privilege and power. Just look at the list of names of Trump’s henchmen – Flynn, Mulvaney, Ryan, Pence, Bannon, Conway. Not to mention Justice Kavanaugh. These men are part of a system designed to maintain the status quo, and in America that means they are committed to white supremacy. Ugly isn’t it? Doesn’t really sit well with our self-image as having special status because we too know what is to be oppressed.

It’s easy for we Irish to capitalise on our ethnicity. Sure, doesn’t everyone love the Irish, aren’t we great craic! Our Irishness does give us unearned advantages, those advantages are at the expense of others and in America this means we enjoy white privilege. To be clear, living in the US for almost nineteen years now I have experienced countless assumptions about me because I’m Irish. Remarks about being ‘fiery’ or ‘wow, Irish people also use the term ‘partner’ to describe their significant other – who knew!’. I’m sorry to say that, still, many Americans also seem to think that Ireland is a land of leprechauns and colleens dancing at the crossroads; they simply don’t grasp how globalised Ireland is and how much Irish people are plugged in to the rest of the world and cultural trends.

And then there’s the comments about my consumption or non-consumption of alcohol and how that must be some intrinsic aspect of my Irishness. Once as I was about to start teaching a 6:30 am yoga class an Irish-American student asked me if I’d had a shot of whiskey to prepare for teaching. I know he was trying to connect with me but I found it insulting. But none of this is racism. Sure, there are cultural stereotypes but they don’t in anyway detract from my privilege and my ability to live the life I want in this country while being safe, afforded the same treatment in front of the law and free from active discrimination. Here are just some of the ways that, as a white person, I have privilege here:

I can go into a store alone and not be followed or harassed by a security guard.
I am confident that if I get pulled over by a cop it’s not because of the colour of my skin.
I can expect to be treated with respect by officials and those in charge.
I can easily buy postcards, greeting cards and dolls and children’s toys with people who look like me

Let me give you another example of a direct experience I had of privilege. Around eighteen months ago I was re-entering the US from overseas. I had my Global Entry card which allowed me to fast track through immigration (this is a card available to permanent residents and citizens). When I got to the immigration agent at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and showed him my Global Entry pass he was unsure about whether he needed to check my passport and Green Card also. He wasn’t particularly polite to me and after a couple of minutes told me to go to the end of the line and wait to be seen by another agent. I knew that I had done nothing wrong and had all the correct documents so I refused. I just stood there and said no, absolutely confident that the law was on my side and I would be protected. Another agent called me over and sorted things out and I was free to go. Do you think a BIPOC would have done this with the same self-assuredness? Hell no. Not only that, as I walked through the airport to collect my baggage, I saw another immigration officer who was clearly of higher rank. I stopped him and made a complaint about the first agent, who was being an asshole. Again, do you think I would have done this if I did not have white skin? This is privilege.

I think many of us took quite some time to see our privilege because we don’t identify as racist and don’t think less of people because of their skin colour. But it’s not enough to not be racist. Over time I came to see that, despite the fact that my forebears had no part in the oppression of African Americans and the systematisation of racial inequity and injustice, I enjoy and benefit from white privilege simply because I am white. It doesn’t matter that I’m not from here. I live here and I am part of a system that gives some people advantage and disadvantages many others.

Anyone with a moral compass should be moved by this realisation. But for we Irish who carry the ancestral memory of oppression and discrimination in our own land this realisation demands action. Becoming an anti-racist is a good start and this requires doing something beyond talking. It’s not always going to be comfortable, we have to lean in and take a stand for justice and fairness. Right now in America things have reached a tipping point and there can be no equivocating. It’s important to be on the right side of history but it’s even more important to be actionable now. Privilege brings obligation and now that I’ve fully seen mine, I’m not sitting on the sidelines.
…

Raedawn Chong

What this period means to me and why it is so ripe with emotions of fear, but also hope…

America will never live up to its greatness until it takes a chapter from the Germans and owns up to its racism both against African Americans and Indigenous peoples. Reparations will help and it is coming. America will never recover until it grows up and faces the myth and changes the dialogue. Without Black folks, there would be no America or its wealth. It was built on our ancestor’s backs. We have not been allowed to share in it. I believe white supremacy exists to cloud this fact. Try as they might to alter the narrative, it cannot change history.

Being a woman who is mixed race, economically blessed, semi-retired, and middle-aged my perspective is coloured by all the above. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined America’s unravelling on a scale this epic. Given 400 years of black oppression and torture, it is a long-overdue moment.

With the pandemic before yet another black person’s death at the hands of white cops. It's a riot here. Literally. So, to add fear of death by virus we compound the very real fear of death by racism. What a year, what a country, what a world…

I know this is a global issue: race and class disparity. I know Modi in India is targeting Muslims. I know the Gaza occupation, the incessant war on Palestine is relentless. The genocide in Yemen. Syria’s never-ending war, the Uighur and Tibetan clash occupations and detentions from China. The conflicts on the African Continent, the world is on fire. This is to name a few, there is more, always more laces of disruption and violence.

Fear is a virus and it has infected us for centuries, today it the driving force in society at large. I know as a woman of age and racial diversity and as an artist whose job it is to communicate. So, I am communicating within all of this. AND it is a LOT to hold. I cannot sit here as I write and say I am in charge or see a bright future but I can be hopeful this contrast, this trauma, now can usher us into an exciting potential where we, as a culture, can find more humane “hacks” to upgrade our experiences, both as human beings and as a species.

Hope

For hope, I look to Tamera in southern Portugal as a living example of the future. A project that is based in matriarchy and knowledge upholding the sacred. Healing and reconnecting to the matrix that is sacred. Living with nature and nurturing her back to connection and health. Facing our trauma around sexuality and relationships first within ourselves, and in our immediate familial relationships, and encompassing our greater communities.

Otherwise we are looking to extinction. It is not impossible to imagine being wiped out by (climate disruption, pestilence, war) to the tune of a few hundred million. Bang! We’re off planet Earth. It is going to happen, and it may not be a bad thing. I do think our desires, our out of control consumption both of stuff and oil is at the root of this misery. In a cultural sense, the base insensitivity to life and caring and humanity allows us to 400 years later experience Jim Crow like deaths like George Floyd’s.

We have so much rebuilding and changing to do within our immediate systems We must face where we were lazy and allowed our government to destroy all that we are and dominate in a militaristic way. In America, the military gets the lion share of our tax dollars. The money we could spend on fixing infrastructure and other social ills...

This bleeds into our relationships with each other and with ourselves. We are out of shape, lonely, miserable, depressed. It is a thing. I am, by nature, a disruptor. Being born biracial or “other”, set me up to rebel against everything. I will speak up even if it to my personal detriment. At my age what are you really going to do to me?

Hollywood has already proven it is a frat-boy culture; as racist, sexist and ageist than any other industry. See Oscars. I often ask why? Why is life so challenging?

The challenge

I believe it is because we are here to learn and improve and become wiser. We are in a school of sorts, and we are up to the task. I don’t want to be a bigot against bigotry because that is a slippery slope. I do want us to realise that there is room on planet Earth for all of us. We can be awake or woke, loving and thoughtful or the opposite. We can segregate or integrate. There is plenty of physical space to try this experiment of one race or thought group/pattern. We do not have to spread it globally like fascism to make it right. So, this is where I am as a human being, how can I be better? How can I be a better lover, be kinder, smarter, more unified and wholesome?

I can see where I am racist within my own life. I can find where I withhold my best from life. I can question my out- of- control consumption. I can recycle. I can feel my feelings and give accordingly to groups who are on the front lines fighting for my freedoms.

Here is what I know; if I do not become the person, I want you to be, then I have no right demanding it in my president. Still, this is the macro of my life. The micro is, I can always be better. I can always find where I can be more HUMAN. KIND. LOVING. This crisis of the disruption of our normal makes me realise we have no time. The time is NOW. Get to it GIRL, I am in.

Dearbhla Kelly & Raedawn Chong writing from Los Angeles, June 2020.