Emma Dabiri
from Changes with Annie Macmanus
For the vast majority of the Irish Diaspora, St Patrick's Day offers a regularly scheduled opportunity to get in touch with all of those warm, fuzzy notions of Ireland and home. But what if your relationship to home is a little bit more complicated? Emma Dabiri is the best-selling author of Don't Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next – two monumentally important discussions about race that have offered vital nuance and context at a time where more and more people have become engaged with identity politics. She also happens to be Irish! In fact, there are plenty of parallels between her life and Annie's. She grew up in Dublin, walking the very same streets at the very same time. Then, like Annie, she moved to London and started a new life, and a family, away from Ireland. But unlike Annie, her nostalgia for Ireland will always be tempered by her memories of growing up black in the overwhelmingly white context of Dublin in the '80s and '90s. It's led her to have a more delicate, and less rose-tinted, understanding of Ireland than many of her compatriots – but it's also imbued her with a strong sense of potentiality for Ireland's future. This is an honest conversation about Ireland's past, but it's also an optimistic look at that future, and the ways in which a country that, until recently, has had little experience of diversity – might be able to start with a blank slate, and avoid some of the pitfalls that have dogged nations with long, tangled histories of systemic racism. But more broadly, it's a conversation about home,
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