Race is a green issue – St Patrick’s Day

05 Feb, 2014

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By Greg Williams

The mysteries of race and identity are always complicated and as we head to St Patrick’s Day , it is worth reminding yourself that the Irish in London and the UK are all around, even when they are not wearing red hair. (Red hair, of course, is almost unknown in Brazil – but that’s another story.)

This is an example of the powerful melting-pot pressures at work in modern UK society, something that might interest Brazilians who are themselves often named as products of a post-racial democracy.

Clearly – apart from the red hair and accent – Irish people do not have the superficial markers of racial or ethnic origin that, say, people from the Caribbean have. But there is strong evidence that where once the Irish went, now other immigrant groups are following.

It is hard now to go to a family event in the UK that features more than 20 people without finding some relative who is Irish and it is increasingly the case that other ethnic groups are being mixed in thoroughly so that most of us now have closer and closer connections to people whose skin or facial markers are non-northern European.

Of course the phenomenon is strongest in London and major cities but those Brazilians who have arrived in the last 15 years might be surprised to learn that even in the 1960s,  signs on windows advertising rooms to rent in some areas had the words ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ – a totemic phrase which became the title of Uber-Punk ‘Johnny Rotten’s’ very angry book.

Beneath all this change is the sense that the old systems of meaning under which people found it easy to be corralled into one national or racial or ethnic group are weakening in many contexts. Many more of us have a chameleon identity that can be altered and adapted according to circumstance. At a push we can even change our Facebook profile.

Brazilians, I may suggest, are well used to this sort of shifting environment. They make ideal Irish people (or Caribbeans, or whatever). All they need is the red wig and the stripey green shirt – and of course the most black and white drink of them all – Guinness.