“When I walk into a room, I recognise that some people in this room may not have experienced anyone like me before.”
Amanda Adé has been living in Ireland for most her life.
Ireland is her home and yet she, like countless people of colour in this country, has still experienced many accounts of racism.
“I’ve lived in Ireland the good part of the last twenty years, this is the only place I know as home,” she tells Her.
“Here it’s not like America. Ireland is not fundamentally a racist country, Ireland is not built on that. So the types of racism that exist here are really different.”
Amanda was one of thousands who marched in Dublin city centre for an anti-racist Ireland earlier this week.
The 22 year old says she was blown away by the amount of people who came out to support the cause.
“Seeing the different types of people there,” she says. “So many people came out to support and stood together for the same cause.
“It gave me a picture of what the future Ireland could look like.”
After Monday’s protest, Amanda shared a video on Instagram explaining racism in Ireland. Since being uploaded, it has already hit over five hundred thousand views.
“The video was just in reaction to a lot of people around me,” Amanda says. “I was blown away by everyone’s reactions to it, I was just saying what I felt in that moment.”
Amanda thought it was important to answer some of her friends questions about racism and discrimination in Ireland.
“They had questions and I was just trying to explain it for anyone on my friends list who might be feeling the same thing,” she says.
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“For a lot of people, they don’t even realise that what they’re saying or doing might be translating as racist,” Amanda says.
In her video, she says that when you enter a room as a black person: “You’re already walking in at a disadvantage.
“Considering there’s only been mass emigration into Ireland over the last 20 or so years, it’s still relatively new to a lot of people. Especially the older generation, they wouldn’t have as much experience of a diverse Ireland as we have now.
“So when I walk into a room I recognise that some people in this room may not have experienced anyone like me before. I do have to represent my race in a way, because a lot of people might have had limited contact with black people.”
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Amanda says that as a black person “… it carries anywhere I go, into any room I go into, so I’m always trying to show people: ‘Hey we’re not that bad!'”
As for the upcoming protests scheduled for this weekend, Amanda says that she’s “not sure there’s a need at the moment. I’m trying to advise people to be wise about certain decisions now.”
And despite the intensity and busyness of the past few weeks, she says that she is “hopeful for the future, really!”
“We’ve had our moment and now it’s time to push people to be educated.”
