Erica Cody: 'But I can’t be racist, I have a black friend!'

Regular readers – I know you might have turned to this page and expected to see my face on the masthead. But when I sat down to write my column this week, there was only one issue I could think about – the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matters protests. What is happening in the States right now is shocking for many of us, although our shock is, in and of itself, a privilege too.

Black people have never had the luxury of being shocked by racism as it’s been their lived experience since the day they were born. But it would be a mistake for us in Ireland to condemn what’s happening in America without taking a good, hard look at ourselves. A study undertaken by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2018 showed that Ireland ranked as the 2nd worst in the EU for racial violence against black people, with 51% of black people in Ireland saying they have been harassed in the form of verbal, physical, or online threats.