ADDRESSING a public meeting on the subject of the Great Hunger in Derry a couple of years ago, I shared a platform with among others, the Senegalese poet in exile, Amhed Sheikh Gueye. Amhed is a black man, and most of his comments that evening were to do with racism.
I was the one to broach the subject, arguing that the Famine was fundamentally a consequence of racism, i.e. that the main reason Irish people were allowed to starve was that they were not perceived by the British establishment as full human beings.
Amhed's argument took a slightly different course, concentrating on the racism he had encountered in Ireland since arriving here a couple of days before. He had met with a great deal of racism in Derry, from adults and children. When challenged about it, people would say things like: "Oh, we don't get many black people here". He didn't accept that. "We have known one another," he said, "for 400 years".
He was surprised and disturbed. He had imagined a people like the Irish, who had suffered a similar kind of history to black people, would have more enlightenment and empathy. But then again, he observed, he might have been more prepared had he considered for a moment the extent of racist sentiment displayed by members of the Irish communities in America and other places.
The initial reaction was a mildly shocked silence. But then a consensus began to emerge from the floor that what Amhed had said was nothing less than the truth. Various contributors.
I bore witness to the level of racism exhibited by Irish people - not just towards black people, but also the travelling community in their own country.
Some speakers also referred to the racist tendencies of Irish people abroad. A number of people expressed puzzlement as to why such high levels of racism exist here, particularly in a place like Derry, which might be said to epitomise the marginal, disadvantaged ghetto.
WHAT is the truth about Ireland and racism? The Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mr Mervyn Taylor, speaking at the official opening of the European Year Against Racism at Dublin Castle last week, said that Irish people could no longer ignore the fact that racism exists here, "particularly in relation to the travelling community".
He went on: "It appears that prejudice against minority nationalities and religions lies deep within out psyche".
There is a view that the only reason we do not have a highly visible problem with racism in Ireland is that we have such a low proportion of black or coloured people to be prejudiced about. But there is another side, too, to be found in North American surveys which contradict the standard notion of the Irish emigrant as a font of prejudice willing to jump on anyone perceived as being lower than himself. Surveys in Canada some years ago, for example, indicated that the level of racism among Irish immigrants was the lowest for any ethnic group in the country.
As with so many things, we may be looking at the question the wrong way up. We like to think of racism as a mark of backwardness. My own belief is that, on the contrary, racism is a mark of our "civilisation".
I have frequently quoted from Frantz Fanon's astute observations on the nature of colonialism. The first object of the coloniser, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "is to plant deep in the minds of the native population the idea that before the advent of colonialism their history was one which was dominated by barbarism".
Once the native population begins to believe this, it is well on the way to becoming racist - firstly against itself It believes that its history is one of undiluted barbarism, and that only the route to civilisation offered by the coloniser will save the native people from their natural impulses. The people, perceiving the necessity for change, resolve to dissipate their sense of inferiority by becoming indistinguishable from their conquerors.
This is the beginning of racism. From then onwards, the colonised people begin to seek out other races and peoples to whom they can feel superior, and proceed to treat such people as the master has treated them.
Not to do so is to deny one's identity, and the only way to escape from this reality is to go to a place where that identity can be placed beyond controversy or dispute. Colonialism begins with the coloniser seeking to fill the gaping hole in his own identity by creating whole races of people to whom he can feel superior. They, in turn, pass the virus downwards. And soon, the whole world is reduced to a pecking order, with everyone scrambling for the highest possible position.
RACISM is not, as many people seem to believe, the expression of superiority over another. On the contrary, it is the expression of a deep sense of inferiority. It is a virus spread by fear and self hatred. In the movie Mississippi Burning, a dyed in the wool racist played by Gene Hackman explains how his yokel papa handed his racist philosophy on to him. "If you can't be bettern a nigger," his papa used to say, "who can you be bettern?"
This is the essence of racism. It is an attempt to pass on the deep seated sense of self loathing that has been visited upon you.
This is why it is anything but surprising that Irish people are capable of racism. In one sense, racism does not sit well with the nature of Irish people, but in another it is part of what we are. It is against our nature, yes, but our history, in which we have been both hare and hound, has persuaded us to betray that nature in the interests of civilisation.
One of the characteristics of a racist society is a high degree of cultural segregation. There is no Irish class system in the sense that we understand this from British society, but what we have is a hierarchy based on power of a less visible kind. The church, education system and small town cultural make up have operated effectively to create a pecking order just as imprisoning as that on the other side of the Irish Sea.
And this, allied to the closed nature of the society in terms of accessibility to outsiders, has directed much of our cultural energy inwards at ourselves. The most visible symptoms of the racist impulse in Irish society are not even regarded as such - but what other explanation could there be for the persistent and vicious attacks on the Irish language, on particular forms of expression or behaviour, on certain public figures with specific origins and characteristics, than a deep and abiding hatred of those aspects of ourselves which are unapologetically Irish?
When we talk of "modernisation", which we do all the time, we mean the journey away from a savage image of ourselves. And because this is in essence racist, it should not surprise us that it nurtures a latent and explosive resentment which erupts at the first sighting of a possible scapegoat. It just goes to show how civilised we have become.