{"id":59295,"date":"2019-11-30T23:17:48","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T23:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59295"},"modified":"2019-11-30T23:18:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T23:18:01","slug":"growing-up-irish-and-black-it-was-the-attention-my-hair-provoked-it-wasnt-good-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59295","title":{"rendered":"Growing up Irish and Black: ‘It was the attention my hair provoked – it wasn’t good attention’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up Irish and Black: ‘It was the attention my hair provoked – it wasn’t good attention’<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

TheJournal.ie<\/a>
\n2019-06-09<\/p>\n

Aoife Barry<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"image001\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Emma Dabiri<\/a> speaks to us about her first book, <\/em>Don\u2019t Touch My Hair<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first rhymes I heard was: \u201cEeny meeeny miny moe. Catch a nigger by da toe.\u201d Who, or what in the hell was \u201cnigger\u201d, I wondered? I soon learned\u2026 Irishness is synonymous with whiteness, it seemed. Whiteness is \u201cpure\u201d and doesn\u2019t extend to brown girls, even those who can trace their Irish ancestry back to the 10th century.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Emma Dabiri<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

GROWING UP IN Ireland<\/a>, Emma Dabiri\u2019s skin and hair were a topic of discussion for strangers. In the mostly white Ireland of the 1980s, a girl like Dabiri (whose father is Nigerian and mother is Irish) with brown skin was a subject of interest \u2013 and people didn\u2019t care whether it might bother her to have her appearance so openly scrutinised.<\/p>\n

Dabiri now lives in London<\/a>, where she is a lecturer in African Studies at SOAS University of London, as well as a PHd student. Inspired by her own changing relationship with her appearance, she has written a book, Don\u2019t Touch My Hair<\/em><\/a>, which interrogates the topic of hair and its relationship with not just the individual, but with society, culture and African history.<\/p>\n

While the book begins with the story of Dabiri\u2019s childhood, it moves into a space where she discusses everything from how people treat the offspring of Kim Kardashian<\/a> and Beyonc\u00e9<\/a> to the cultural significance of the cornrow<\/a>. It\u2019s a fascinating must-read that reflects not just the changes that have taken place in Irish society, but the changes that still must take place.<\/p>\n

The book shows that while today\u2019s Ireland may be more multicultural than the Ireland Dabiri grew up in, that does not mean society treats people of different skin colours \u2013 or hair textures \u2013 the same…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emma Dabiri speaks to us about her first book, “Don\u2019t Touch My Hair.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,395,28,8,10],"tags":[30546,13842,246,18240],"class_list":["post-59295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-europe","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-aoife-barry","tag-emma-dabiri","tag-ireland","tag-thejournal-ie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59295"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59297,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59295\/revisions\/59297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}