Emma Dabiri

Changes with Annie Macmanus

Annie Macmanus

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Changes, it is Annie McManus. Hi, it lads, I hope you're all doing
0:12.6	well. I'm recording this on a Monday evening actually and I've just come out of swimming
0:18.2	with my kids and normally in the last few months we've come out and it's just so dismal
0:23.9	and dark and freezing and everyone's got wet hair and they're knackered and it's just
0:28.1	suffice but tonight it was bright and we walked home and it just felt so lovely. The seasons
0:35.6	are changing. We're right into March now and one thing that always happens in March that
0:41.5	is significant for me is St Patrick's Day. Now St Patrick's Day can be full of caricatures
0:48.0	and overblown cliches of Ireland and Irish people but when you're part of the Irish diaspora
0:54.2	I personally anyway do love a little celebration of Irishness on Patrick's Day. I always go to
0:59.6	the pub and have a Guinness and put on music and that kind of thing and it always just makes me
1:04.1	think about my own relationship to Ireland and how that's changed over the years. So I wanted
1:09.8	to have a bit of an Irish episode this week and my guest today is a hugely admired and successful
1:16.1	Irish author and academic. Her name is Emma Dabry and she has two books written. Her first
1:21.9	is called Don't Touch My Hair. It was a bestseller in the UK and Ireland and it touches on the history
1:26.9	and continuing significance of hair in understanding black experience. Her second book released last year
1:33.0	is called What White People Can Do Next from Allyship to Coalition. It became one of the central texts
1:40.1	to the whole Black Lives Matter movement. Emma is also a lecturer, a broadcaster, a kind of all-around
1:45.4	powerhouse of a woman and there's a lot of biographical parallels between our two lives.
1:51.5	So both Emma and I grew up in Dublin around the same time and both of us ended up moving over
1:56.4	to London and starting our families over here away from our home country. But on top of those
2:01.8	parallels there's a very key way in which our experiences differ and this is something that Emma
2:07.3	has written about a lot. That is Emma's experience of blackness in the overwhelmingly white context
	...

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