Following high profile criticism of a recent incident involving its armed members, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has made the unprecedented move in installing 20-year-old Cultural Studies student, Grainne NiMollycoddle, as the new commander-in-chief of the Garda Armed Support Unit.
Although completely inexperienced in armed tactical engagement and negotiation, Commissioner Harris assures the public that Ms. NiMollycoddle’s extensive background in Cultural Studies will prove a vital weapon in the war on crime.
“Well after the fatality of a person of colour during an engagement with our members, I carefully reviewed the situation and came to the quick conclusion that the years of weapons and negotiation training implemented by our specialist unit simply wasn’t adequate. “
“What we needed was somebody who knew better than anyone what experiencing the daily double bind of being black and Irish was. Of course, my first port of call was a predominantly white, middle-class college degree programme lecturing in Cultural Studies.”
“Forget making split-second decisions in life-threatening scenarios, give me a student with a B plus average in the post-colonial history of Africa any day. I have no doubt Grainne would ultimately have taken a far more measured and informed approach on that fateful day.”
“The competition for the position was indeed intense, with all candidates level on white guilt points difference. As a tie-breaker, I asked the final shortlist of competitors to watch 12 Years A Slave and Grainne wailed and punched the ground the most. This passion, coupled with her incredibly well informed tweeting on racial issues, landed her the role.”
I caught up with Grainne later that day in her local Starbucks®, where she was drinking coffee beans picked by an eight-year-old Guatemalan. She was busy conversing to her new team on a Chinese sweatshop produced Apple Macbook Pro®. Her jumper, stitched together with the tears of Bangladeshi garment slaves, read “Repeal the Eighth.”
I put to her that posing on social media as a white saviour is an entirely self-serving exercise, which also infantilises and offends the ethnic minorities she purports to support. I added that if an ethnic group wanted the assistance of the white community then I’m sure she would be the first freedom fighter they would call.
“No, the oppressed couldn’t possibly do it on their own: Beyonce, The Kardashians and Drake told me on Twitter® to take up arms in the oppression of my bruthas and sistas and I will do that to my last dying breath, they cannot silence my people. Being Irish, I have experienced similar oppression, I was called a Paddy once when I was on my J1 visa in San Diego.”
I challenged Grainne, that intraracial and interracial interactions often present a myriad of complex results, demanding a much more nuanced analysis and debate than the reductive tribalism evidenced online.
“You are either with me or against me, anybody that disagrees with me is clearly a fascist, racist, misogynist, rapist and every other “ist” in the dictionary. Fortunately, I live in a simple world…I was gonna say black and white but that’s racist… of binary opinions, shit I just offended all my gender-fluid buddies there too, sorry!”
I asked Grainne if she shared as much empathy with the up to 1 million Uyghur Muslims in detention camps in China?
“Who are they like? Do they have an Instagram page? Is it on Netflix? From my armchair here last Summer, I was at the frontline of the Black Lives Matter protests 4000 miles away, but now that we have our very own police killing I can easily recycle all those tweets with a different hashtag.”
“To be honest, I actually don’t care that much about it at all, I’ve fuck all else to do, I’d usually be out me mates getting sloshed in town. Fingers crossed we will have solved systemic racism by the time the pubs reopen for a pint of the black…I mean dark stuff.”
