Below is a letter I would have submitted to AP/RN (SF's old paper) in the past, but AP (their new one) doesn’t publish letters so I’m doing it here and also on a politics discussion board here (UPDATE 10/17/23 That discussion forum seems to be dead). It is addressed to SF but I would love to see everyone else also take part in the discussion. The web-site for Friends of SF in the US is here. A few very relevant posts are here. And one more where I talk about the bigger picture of SF and America is here.
Although I infrequently express some criticism of SF, I am mostly a supporter and since 1997 I have occasionally had a small to moderate degree of success supporting SF and/or the nationalist community in general. For example in 1999 I was fairly involved with bringing Rita O’Hare to speak on the CU-Boulder campus.
I have a suggestion about your work in America. On one hand, I am partly motivated to support republicanism because I’m Irish-American. However I know or know of a LOT of Americans who aren’t Irish and have done a fair amount or a lot to support SF and/or the nationalist community in general (for example, Bill Fletcher Jr. who has held senior positions in the labor movement and is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum; or, the well-known professor, Angela Davis). With that in mind, I was disappointed to see that on the “About Us” page of the Friends of SF USA site, you refer only to Irish-America and the links page only links to SF or Irish-American groups. Because of this and some other similar things about your allies here in America I’m concerned it will deter at least some, probably most and maybe all, interested people of color from getting involved in one way or another (i.e. joining Irish Northern Aid) or even from just educating themselves about the conflict and the Peace Process. This focus I believe unintentionally denies the contributions made by people of color in the past and present and implies that in the present and future Irish-American contributions are more important than those of people of color.
I do know that in Ireland SF is INCREDIBLY anti-racist and that you and your American supporters have occasionally done things to reach out to people of color here, but on that you need to do more, or at least use more inclusive language.
Besides being the right thing to do, it will help in some other important ways:
1) With a good response from people of color, this may have an impact on racism among Irish-Americans. It might also work like that with nationalists and republicans in Ireland.
2) Greater diversity in, for example, INA will also probably attract more white allies, further affecting Irish-American racism.
3) There will be more supporters of SF and/or the nationalist community in general.
Although I believe that I’ve covered a fair amount of this subject, I’d be interested in discussing these issues further.
Sincerely,
Tom Shelley
Boulder, Colorado USA
P.S. I have a true story about this. In the late 1990s I was circulating a petition addressed to the US Government about the former Volunteers facing extradition or deportation. I took it one day to an anti-prisons protest and at one point went up to two men, one white, one black. I told them what the petition was about and the white guy said “I’m Irish-American, but I don’t support the IRA” and declined to sign it. The black guy said “I’ll sign it.”
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
About My Blog
My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)
(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)
(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)
(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))
(If you're really cool and link to my blog from your site/blog, let me know) (if you contact me, use the word "blog" in the subject line so I'll know it's not spam)
Friday, July 18, 2014
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