This is how my daughter sees the world…. but for how long?

I came across this picture of my daughter Elise over the weekend. It’s her holding hands and skipping along on a very bright sunny day with one of her best friends (apparently her only best friend now is just her almost 5month old sister)! Elise is 3, or almost 4 as she loves to tell everyone. The thought of my daughters being picked on, insulted, or excluded for nothing other than their slightly darker skin colour is something that frequently crosses my mind, and for good reasons too.

I go back to the 16th of December 2015, a day of huge significance for my family for a lot of reasons. This was the day we went for our first scan during my wife’s pregnancy with Elise. While I will always remember the pure joy and excitement of seeing this little human, seeing and hearing the heartbeat became an overwhelming mix of emotions. The joy of holding my child for the first time, but also the fear of parenting in what can often be a very cruel world.

Myself and my wife had both decided to take the day off to enjoy some family time for our soon to be family of three. To mark this day, we decided to go for a nice brunch and spontaneously decided to pick up a small little present for our baby in Dublin’s St. Stephen’s green shopping centre. Upon entry, a man approached me and my wife to utter the following words to us “you should be ashamed of yourself holding hands with that n*****, instead of being with a proper white man”. My wife, visibly very upset went to respond to this man, but I asked her to stop and keep walking. In my mind, by responding to this man, he wins because you are acknowledging his existence and rising to the bait. A couple of years before this, on a date night in Cork with my wife (then girlfriend) in a city centre pub. I went to the bar to pick up a couple of drinks and another man approached me to utter the following words “what makes you think you can come into our country and think you’re good enough for her?”. No, this wasn’t a cave man dressed in a leopard print robe with a bone in hand! In fact quite the opposite, very well dressed and looked respectable. Again, I didn’t respond, picked up our drinks and only told Sarah about the incident weeks later as I didn’t want to ruin our night by upsetting her.

Not long after the December 2015 incident, while playing a game of football in an inter-firm corporate league in the south side of Dublin, another incident. We were in a match against a team from a very reputable Dublin firm. Two people go for a challenge, one person took offense to said challenge and his immediate response? “you f****** black monkey”. This time I showed slightly less restraint, my team-mates (i.e. work colleagues) were there to stop the situation escalating. Why did I show less restraint this time? Perhaps it’s the build up of all those years of just ‘walking away’ and maybe subconsciously I didn’t want to walk away anymore.

If any of this makes you uncomfortable, imagine being on the receiving end. Imagine walking home from school and getting jumped because you’re nothing but a “black c***” and being too ashamed to say anything to your family and friends. Imagine some of your teenage “friends” thinking a good way to teach you the Irish language is by calling yourself “a stupid black man” as Gaeilge. Imagine not being allowed to join a GAA club when all you wanted to do was ‘fit in’ as a 12 years old immigrant. Imagine being so anxious every time you had a match in the school-boy league because you didn’t know what someone might call you or do this week. Imagine you left your life behind to emigrate to a ‘better’ country full of opportunities only to be on the receiving end of these treatments, while living in a single room in a refugee accommodation with a family of five (and terribly missing your other two brothers that didn’t emigrate with you).

The issue of race is something that people often find uncomfortable for various reasons. My wife is white, and that has led to some uncomfortable moments in our lives over the last 12 years that we’ve been together. It took a number of uncomfortable moments and conversations to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t with someone of the same race as myself. As with any uncomfortable situation, education is key. We’ve learned over the last 12 years that not everyone is fully accepting of interracial relationships, certainly not immediately. Sarah bore the brunt of this at times too. We both had to develop tough skin, no pun intended!

The guy referenced in the match situation above did come back to apologise (after initially denying what he had said by the way). An important part of his apology clarified that he isn’t racist at all, and to an extent I probably believed him. But subconsciously he clearly felt superior to me, because why would race come into a put-down comment in the heat of the moment on an Astroturf pitch in Sandymount on a random Tuesday evening! I did initially consider lodging a formal complaint to his employer, but I didn’t see how this would benefit me or dissolve the situation regardless of his employer’s course of action.

I’ve always felt the need to take the moral high ground. Maybe because that’s more comfortable for me and everyone else that mightn’t feel so comfortable with an alternative course of action. It’s a safer approach and a nice comfort zone to be in. But then I think back to what someone told me not too long ago which is that your comfort zone is a great place but nothing ever grows there.

I watched the George Floyd video recently. What comfortable way is there to respond to this? Violence is never the answer and that’s something I’ve always tried to practice and will instil in my daughters. But what is the answer? I’ve seen a lot of videos and comments in recent days about coming together as a society. But what is society? Fundamentally, society is a contract that we sign as human beings amongst each other, agreeing to common rules, common practices and common ideals that are going to define us as a group. However, there are a significant proportion of people who refuse to adhere to the terms of this contract due to the race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or other fundamental “differences” that they refuse to accept, either consciously or unconsciously. 

A lot of my experiences (and these are some mild ones) and more importantly my support network of family and close friends has made me who I am today. But what about the people who experience significantly worse and more violent acts on a daily basis? What about those who don’t have the same support network? Most parents dream of giving their children a better life than they had. Or in a lot of cases, some parents also want to share some of their formative experiences with their children… but how do I share mine without clouding my daughter’s view of the world? How do I prepare her for the inevitable? I say inevitable because I’m not na?ve enough to think she’ll always have these sunny days playing with her friends who wholeheartedly love and accept her for who she is. At some point in their lives, my daughters will, not might, but will experience racial discrimination.

Recently (pre-covid) we had a family friend visit our home with their kids. Their young son, about similar age to Elise asked her why she has a different skin colour to her mom. This is a child with an innocent and inquisitive mind asking a question that I don’t think I was fully equipped to answer without perhaps painting a not so sunny picture of the world. Thankfully my wife was there to simply reply by stating that Elise’s skin colour, and hair is more like her dad’s and sometimes a child can look a bit more like a mom or a dad. What about other kids with similar questions but no one to ask or answer appropriately? How do we as a society proactively educate everyone about acknowledging, but more importantly accepting our fundamental differences? Saying that everyone is the same is a cop out and too comfortable a viewpoint. I recently read a statistic that stated that by the age of two and a half, children are more inclined to choose playmates based on race. So it seems we need to start educating them young.

We’re all running a race, but wouldn’t it be nice to not feel like competing with others who have a substantial head start? This is through no fault of their own in a lot of cases, but due to longstanding, fundamental flaws in this contract that we’re all trying to uphold. Sarah and myself want to raise really strong, independent women. But we don’t want the source of some of that strength to come from the need to ‘fit in’ and not feel marginalised. I think we’re at a very important inflection point as a society to realise that not being racist simply isn’t enough anymore. It’s time to stop accepting the things we cannot change and start changing the things we cannot accept, in the words of Angela Davis. I fully acknowledge that I am currently in a position of privilege, and for the first time in a long time, I feel the need to use this privilege and my platform to speak up openly about my experiences and education on this uncomfortable topic. As the great Martin Luther King Jr. once said “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.

Disclaimer: the views shared in this article are solely mine and not of my employer.