Irish White Privilege......Yeah

Let me spell this out for you.

The State should have no part in deciding who should feel shame/privilege or whatever the ideologues of the day decide what is sinful. The last time we allowed that, tens of thousands of young boys were abused in classrooms all over this country, those abusers were protected by the State, Political class and media.

If you want to beat the notion of privilege into your kids, off with you, leave everyone else's kid alone.

No, it’s not about treating people badly but it’s more than rich that someone from a country that is far more racist than Ireland cries that Ireland is racist.

We are not a colonial power we were colonised. Eight hundred years of occupation, a famine, one third of our population dead one third forced to emigrate to America where they were given nothing and had to work for everything. I grew up in the eighties, we were poor. I went to college and worked to pay for it. I got a job and paid for everything myself. I won’t have someone else’s guilt pressed on me.

Yeah but you're doing that thing that people like to do on stuff like this where you say "listen to what some of the ones are saying" — and you'll point us to some activist who thinks white people should be taxed higher as penance for slavery in the US or some guff like that. Yes, there are people who have an overly zealous view of privilege — but then again there are people who are zealous racists too, right? The fact that either side on the more hardline ends of the spectrum exists does not mean there isn't a space in between where beneficial reason can be found.

Also, why should telling a child they are privileged in a certain way make them feel ashamed? Who is implying it? Some activist? A journalist at the Guardian? Some Trinity blogger? The reality is that the none of those people tend to ever actually be reflective of wider society — a society where I can recognise (for example) that growing up heterosexual came with conscious and subconscious privilege that my gay peers didn't have without any feeling of being ashamed that I'm straight.

Most Irish teachers — knowing a lot of them myself as both the son of a teacher and the partner of a teacher — are not radical activists. They tend to be normal quiet people who aren't on some ideological crusade. The discussion on privilege isn't defined by the loudmouths just because you possibly have only tended to listen to the loudmouths.

Yes.

Healthcare while far from perfect it ranks 23/167 in the world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1376359/health-and-health-system-ranking-of-countries-worldwide/

There is no real poverty in Ireland. For real poverty have a look at the image I posted. Housing problems can be solved, and they will be.

Seriously? Those kids are bare feet in the dirt, and that's in a classroom, not out on a field. Our kinds get free hot meals in school now, what are you on about? Even the worst prefab classroom in Ireland is heaven compared to what those kids are getting. And that's even before we think about what happens in those places, famine wars and genocides. We and our kids are incredibly privileged to be living in Ireland.

I mean, by that logic, most members of the British royal family are less privileged than many people who grew up in a sink housing estate, as long as they had parents that loved them.

There's really not a lot of point in me trying to explain what nonsense that is, if you can't see it already.

Shame/Sin/Privilege, it's all the same, it's a religion. Who the f##k are you to tell a small little child that isn't yours that they are privileged because of the colour of their skin and should somehow repent, because that is the real purpose of preaching this nonsense to kids, to make them repent, to make them acquiesce. Kids who would have been pals will be divided by this garbage.

Let the parents handle the teaching of life's nuances to their child. Bigots have no business in a child's classroom.

So what are you proposing as a personal attonement for the circumstances these less well off kids? A 2 hour fast and a large financial transfer to your favourite charities? Or maybe going on Boards and displaying your compassion for those poor foreign kids from your comfortable abode is enough to assuage this guilt.

Repent? For what?

Acquiesce? To what?

I mean, you're the guy talking about "listen to what some people say" and yet here you are giving me this God awful "who the f**k are you" stuff and talking about bigots in classrooms. If I'm being honest, sounds like you're more influenced by the radical left view than I am!

Why would teaching a child to understand the different lived experience of their classmates somehow make them enemies?

Exactly the whole privilege issue is pure nonsense and as said before imported here from the States and has no place or relevance in this country.

Ehh, why should they do that?

Not having said anything about guilt, I have nothing to say about that, but my main reason for opposing it is that in an Irish context it is a complete nonsense, and harmful to societal cohesion.

That may be justifiable in the United States' context, where laws and much of society - including the northern states albeit to a lesser extent meant the whole system was designed to prevent black people from succeeding in society. Red-lining was a reality in Chicago for example:

But the racism that exists/existed in Ireland was simply a variant of the racism white people encounter in Asia and in some parts of Africa. Not acceptable, but nothing like what "white privilege" meant in America.

And the claim that the Irish in Ireland are favoured by dint of their skin colour - well, to a Northern Ireland nationalist who was born before the troubles began, that's really quite a stretch of the imagination. The children of wealthy African families studying in the UK or Ireland were far more privileged than any of us were.

And who knows how many of them came from families who made their money through the slave trade? It wasn't white people (and it certainly wasn't my ancestors!) who went into the forests in Africa to capture slaves for the slave trade. WTF do Africans get a pass on that? Because of their skin colour??

How about you answer the question, you said there are radical activists in the Teaching sector, we have had radical activists in the past in Irish classrooms, what if the figure was 5% or 10% of the teaching profession were radical activists, do you not think children should be protected from them?

Well who is anyone to tell anyone anything? I don't see why your logic of believing that nobody else has a valid right to opinion on education cannot just as easily be turned on you. Ultimately I can just as easily say, who are you to dismiss the lived experience of those (including children) who see others benefit from privileges that they don't? And even at that, the curriculum doesn't just talk about privilege on the basis of ethnicity, but also other types of privilege — the point being that its a multi-dimensional concept wherein a person can benefit from certain types of privilege while also not benefiting from others. A black male benefits from male privilege, an able bodied Indian female benefits from able-bodied privilege, a wealthy person in a wheelchair can benefit from class privilege.

So it's not about telling children that they are just privileged and that's that — it's about acknowledging the privileges they have and also exploring those that they don't. It's not shame or guilt at all — it's the recognition that different people encounter different obstacles in life on the basis of certain characteristics and circumstances. It's the antithesis of division.

As for the teachers thing, I'm not entertaining this. If you want to push an idea that the existence of teachers with more radical views than others (bearing in mind, that also applies to teachers whose views are on the Right) is widespread enough to be considered a pressing urgent risk to our society then by all means you go ahead and compile the evidence to show it and start another thread.

I'm not forcing a "belief system" on anyone any more so than children being taught about and encouraged to show kindness, decency, manners, respect, tolerance, caring for others, gratitude etc or any other social skill or good personality trait is the imposition of a belief system. We expect schools to teach and encourage these things. Understanding privilege is part of the very same thing.

And privilege isn't about telling children they are privileged, it's also about helping them to understand the ways in which they might lack it. That's a powerful thing. A lot of people who grew up gay in this country might have had a better time of life if schools acknowledged and encouraged students to understand the social and familial obstacles that young gay people faced versus young straight people. Having grown up, and now having heard many of the sad stories of gay friends — I certainly think I would have benefited from better understanding the obstacles and challenges they faced that I didn't because I wasn't gay.

But yeah, I guess I'm a big scary Leftie who wants to tell white kids they should be ashamed of who they are and immediately seek penance.

We are talking about skin colour privilege here, not the privilege of the tiny minority of kids who go to the most expensive private schools in the country….you may have missed the title of the thread.

Do you think so we should remind black kids that they are privileged to be here in Ireland and they should be grateful for that privilege and they should be reminded of that all the time in every school in the country?

You think it is disgusting to separate kids on the basis of their skin colour to tell them and remind them of their privilege, yet you also, simultaneously think that kids on the basis of their skin colour should be separated and reminded of their privilege.

Ya, you can't be taken seriously.

If this country treated people as equal, you'd be right. But you know as well as I do that this country treats people very differently depending on their skin colour.

So it's your belief that Ireland is systematically racist?

Ever spoken to someone who has travelled around Africa? You'd experience the same, do you think Africans are inherently racist?