For a long time, I have been writing a book titled The Melanin and the Mist. It is an exploration of racial trauma, systemic oppression, and the heavy, suffocating fog that settles over minoritised bodies navigating a world never built for them. But recently, whilst working on a chapter dedicated to racial trauma and its ultimate, most devastating symptom—suicidal ideation—the boundary between the researcher and the subject completely dissolved.

Let us be entirely candid, because politeness will not save us: racism eats away at you.

It is not just a series of unpleasant social interactions or institutional hurdles. It is a chronic, biological stressor that erodes your nervous system, compromises your physical health, and exhausts your psychological endurance. It places an intolerable weight upon your chest until, eventually, the fog becomes so thick that you find yourself standing at the absolute edge, staring into the dark, wondering how to escape.

I know that edge intimately. And when people ask me what keeps me anchored to this earth when the structural abuse feels too heavy to carry, my answer is immediate, raw, and uncomplicated: I stay alive for my kids.

Random flowers from my kids this morning

The Power of the Intersection

When we talk about these heavy realities, we are incredibly fortunate to have the vital framework of intersectionality, pioneered by the brilliant Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw gave us the indispensable language to understand that our marginalised identities do not exist in isolation; they collide, overlap, and create distinct, compounding structures of exclusion. For Black women, intersectionality is an absolute lifeline of clarity. It is the map that finally validates the crossfires we navigate every single day, proving that our unique exhaustion is real, structural, and deeply rooted.

But knowing the map exists means we must look honestly at just how dangerous the traffic at that intersection has become. When the system begins to deliberately run us down, the intersection itself becomes a site of real-world collapse.

Look at Meghan Markle. During her 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, she openly confessed that the relentless onslaught of British media abuse and the cold isolation within the royal family led her to a point where she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

Look more recently at the tragic, public unraveling of Jason Arday. For years, elite institutions like Cambridge eagerly elevated him as a historic icon of racial progress, capitalising on his remarkable biography whilst offering no genuine structural safety nets. When scrutiny hit a boiling point, the institutional collapse was swift and unforgiving.

Racism as Narcissistic Abuse

To understand why these environments collapse around us so violently, we must use our intersectional lens to look at the psychological pathology of white supremacy. We must call it what it truly is: systemic narcissistic abuse.

The majority of white society operates out of a collective, narcissistic pathology. It is defined by an absolute deficit of empathy, an unshakeable sense of entitlement, and a grandiose, unearned sense of self. It is highly antagonistic. And just like an abusive partner in a domestic setting, this system does not merely exploit you—it erodes your very sense of self. It fractures your grasp on reality. It gaslights you until you doubt your own sanity, systematically dismantling who you are until you are consumed by an overwhelming, suffocating sense of hopelessness and helplessness.

When you are trapped in a narcissistic romantic relationship, outsiders detached from the daily horror will casually ask: “Why don’t you just leave?” or “How did you let it get that bad?” They ask because they are completely blind to the slow, microscopic, daily erosion of your humanity. Racism functions exactly the same way. It is a daily, psychological grinding down that steals your peace, your work, your sanity, and—ultimately—your will to live.

The Anatomy of the Smear Campaign

What happened to Meghan Markle and Jason Arday exposes the deadliest weapon in the narcissistic arsenal: the smear campaign. No one executes a smear campaign with more clinical, lethal precision than a white power structure that feels threatened.

These campaigns are not just executed by overt racists. They are fuelled by an army of enablers. These are the people who might not consider themselves malicious, who may even know the accusations are fabricated, but who enthusiastically participate in the public execution anyway. Why? To protect their own proximity to whiteness. To shield themselves from becoming the next target of the narcissistic system.

These smear campaigns kill. They flip reality on its head. Historically, Black people are painted as inherently violent, yet the bloody ledger of history shows that white systems have always been the true authors of mass violence. We see them pathologise "Black-on-Black crime" as if white communities do not commit crimes against one another daily. We see Black men demonised as uniquely abusive, whilst statistics consistently prove otherwise. The system commits the violence, projects its guilt onto the victim, and uses its enablers to legacy-assassinate anyone who dares to excel.

The Luxury of Distance vs. The Visceral Truth

The impact of this abuse is not uniform, because trauma interacts with our intersecting backgrounds in vastly different ways.

If you immigrate to the West as an adult, armed with a fully formed, unshakeable sense of who you are, your psychological armour is different. My mother moved here in her 30s. She arrived knowing deeply, structurally, and spiritually that she was a Kenyan Kikuyu woman. Though she carried her own traumas, the fog of Western racism could not erode the core of her identity; she already knew who she was before she ever met whiteness.

I recently met an African male scholar—highly influential, living part-time in the United States—whose perspective on race was entirely theoretical, detached, and cosmic. He spoke of racism as an abstract, distant entity rather than a daily, skin-stripping reality. It was blindingly obvious why. He was born, raised, and educated in Nigeria. He had never had his core sanity questioned by a white teacher at age five.

Furthermore, as a man, patriarchy afforded him a different displacement. Within the complex dynamics of Western racial fetishisation, Black men are frequently fantasised about by white women, creating a strange, temporary buffer that marginalised women are never granted. When a scholar chooses to frame racism as a "cosmic force" rather than naming white supremacy directly, they are buying privilege within whiteness. They are comforting the oppressor by telling white people they do not actually have to do or change anything.

But for those of us without that buffer, the trauma settles directly into our biology. It matters what community you have to buffer the blows. It matters how your family structure holds you. And it deeply matters how your brain is wired.

For a neurodivergent person, the baggage is compounded. I look at Jason Arday through the lens of autism, and my heart breaks with a profound, terrifying clarity. When you are autistic, you already experience the world with an intense, raw, extra-sensory amplification. You absorb the pain, the hypocrisy, and the double standards of the world on a visceral, electric level. When you layer the agonising, gaslighting weight of a racial smear campaign onto an autistic nervous system, the pressure becomes unendurable. I get it. I get it because I feel it in my bones every single day.

The Ledger of the Lost

Racism kills. Sometimes it kills loudly and publicly, in the horrific manners of George Floyd, George Nkencho, or Shanquella Robinson. But far more often, it kills quietly. It kills by degrees. It assassinates your identity, your culture, your well-being, and your family structures—and then has the audacity to publish reports claiming you never had a family structure to begin with.

Years ago, long before I fully grasped my own grief relationship with racism, I met a couple in rural Cork, Ireland. They had adopted a beautiful Black child. They told me, with shattered voices, that their daughter had committed suicide in her teens because the relentless, compounding isolation of rural racism was simply too cruel to survive. At the time, I was still in the denial phase of my own racial awakening; it made me deeply sad, but I could still detach.

Now, as a parent, and as a woman who has stared face-to-face with the terrifying desire to no longer exist on this earth because of this suffocating mist, that memory haunts me. It enrages me. How many of our children have we lost to the quiet, unrecorded ledger of racial suicide?

Reclaiming the Micro-Sanctuary

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality is an incredible gift because it perfectly names the mechanics of the trap. And because we understand the trap so clearly, we know exactly why we must build immediate, life-saving practices to survive it. We cannot feed our children with academic papers alone, but we can use the clarity of intersectionality to fuel our militantly practical survival:

• We build immediate sanctuaries: We stop waiting for massive, narcissistic institutions to change, heal, or validate us. They are incapable of empathy. Instead, we cultivate micro-spaces of absolute safety—a group text where we do not have to explain our pain, a fierce boundary around our peace, or a private ritual of joy.

• We practice radical resignation: Walking away from toxic environments, elite spaces, or relationships that demand our self-sabotage is not a defeat. Choosing to step out of a system that eats away at your life force is a fierce, militant act of self-preservation.

• We ground ourselves in the somatic: Racism is a physical trauma trapped in our biology. When the intellectual fog becomes too thick, we must drop into our bodies. Through deep breathing, touch, and rest, we reclaim our nervous systems from the permanent fight-or-flight cycle.

• We anchor in the micro-generational: We shrink our focus entirely. We cannot dismantle global white supremacy by Tuesday, but we can build an ironclad wall of love, safety, and fierce protection within our own homes.

To anyone reading this who is currently navigating the heavy mist: please stay. Lean into your protective factors, whatever they may be. For me, it is the laughter and the future of my children. By keeping ourselves alive, protecting our sanity, and pouring our energy into the immediate spaces we love, we are actively breaking the cycle of systemic abuse.

That is not just activism. That is the ultimate, most practical form of survival.

Thank you for reading my Substack. You can preorder The Melanin and the Mist. Link in bio or comment section. This article is a preview of an upcoming chapter on racial trauma. If this resonated with you, please consider sharing it with someone who needs to hear it today.

I was pursuing my master’s degree in America when Donald Trump was elected. Shortly after, my in-laws arrived for an uninvited six-week visit. They crowded into our tiny student accommodation, bringing with them a copy of The New York Times Magazine.

For weeks, the orange, smug face of Donald Trump stared at me from our small, second-hand coffee table. In that cramped space, the magazine felt less like reading material and more like a physical intruder. Every time I set down a mug of tea or reached for my baby’s blanket, that face was there, weaponized by my father-in-law’s intentional placement. He never actually read it; he just curated it. He left it there like a flag planted in conquered territory, knowing exactly where I stood because I had already blocked him on social media for his dehumanizing views on Black people. Yet, there Trump sat on that cheap wood, a proxy for the hostility my father-in-law was too cowardly to speak aloud. My father-in-law loves Trump, Nigel Farage, and anyone on the extreme right.

The Christmas before this visit, I had forced myself to sit my in-laws down because my husband refused to do it. Our firstborn was seven months old, and I was determined he wouldn’t grow up hearing that "Black people need White people to rule them," or that he "looked too Kenyan"—the very thing this man had said upon seeing his six-week-old grandson.

Their reactions shocked my gentle Christian soul. My father-in-law dismissed me instantly, claiming I was being "too sensitive" and arguing that I could make fun of his race and he wouldn’t care.

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Last week, I took my children to the park.

It was an ordinary afternoon. I was doing what every parent does—trying to give my kids some fresh air and a bit of joy.

Then the air changed.

The monkey noises started. Directed right at us. Then the insults. I was called a hippo. Nearby, their children moved in, took my son’s toy, and ripped it apart.

The white adults present did nothing to stop it.

I did not say a word. I did not fight back. I did not argue.

In that moment, my intellect, my business acumen, and my writing projects didn't matter. Only one thing mattered: calculating the safest, fastest route to get my children home alive and unhurt.

I chose silence because silence was our armor.

The New Cloud in the Sky

Fast forward to this morning. Another park. It was supposed to be a beautiful, sunny afternoon—the kind of rare, perfect weather where there isn't a single cloud in the sky. The playground was buzzing with life. The air was filled with the universal sounds of children playing: the pure joy, the laughter, the endless chatter, including that of my own children.

But as I looked closer at the climbing frame, a hidden ugliness came into view. Scrawled onto the bright blue plastic was a crude doodle of a monkey, accompanied by a boxed-in reference to the N-word and a violently spelled anti-Asian slur.

Just like that, a dark cloud was cast over my sky. The contrast was dizzying. All around us, the park was filled with white families and their white kids, completely wrapped in the luxury of safety, totally oblivious to the hatred written right where their children climb. My own kids didn't spot it—I made sure of that. I acted as their shield, absorbing the sight so they could keep their innocence for one more day.

I immediately called the council, and the woman on the line was deeply apologetic, promising an urgent cleanup crew. I love that I am not helpless. I love that I can take action and do something about it. But as I stood there watching the normal world carry on around me, my inner child grew profoundly sad.

R

The Myth of the "Seasonal" Riot

There is a comfortable lie that the majority-white population of Northern Ireland likes to tell itself.

They look at the anti-immigration riots that set our streets on fire, shake their heads, and call the perpetrators "thugs." They treat racism like a seasonal weather event. They think it only happens when cars are burning on the evening news.

They act like racism has a calendar.

But the cameras always leave. The news cycle moves on. The headlines fade. And the white populace goes back to believing that peace has been restored because their neighborhoods are quiet.

Meanwhile, families are still being quietly driven from their homes. Intimidation continues behind closed doors.

And Black mothers cannot even take their children to a swing set without facing visceral, dehumanizing hate.

The Invisible Tax

I experience some form of racist event at least once a week in Northern Ireland.

It is a constant, grinding, invisible tax paid just for existing in a Black body. It is the stare in the shop. The exclusion in professional circles. The "performative leftist" dates who still carry deep-seated biases. And finally, the overt hostility at the local playground.

Northern Ireland’s culture is obsessed with its history of division, but it remains utterly blind to its present systemic racism. Because the bias doesn't fit neatly into a green or blue box, society pretends it isn't there.

They call it an isolated incident. They call it bad manners.

It isn't bad manners. It is violence.

We Are Still Here

I am writing this because I refuse to let these afternoons at the park exist in a vacuum.

I chose safety in the moment, but I choose truth now.

To the white residents of Northern Ireland who think racism only happens during the riots: look closer. Look at the parks. Look at the supermarkets. Look at the everyday spaces where you feel completely safe, and realize that neighbors right beside you are operating in survival mode.

My children and I made it home safe today. We repaired what we could. I did my duty as a mother, and I did my duty as a member of this community by forcing the authorities to scrub that vitriol away.

It feels good to have reported it. It feels good to know I have a voice. But the reality is that the emotional toll doesn't vanish when the ink is wiped clean. My inner child is heavy today, and I know it will take a day or two of conscious effort to fully climb out of the emotional weight of this afternoon.

We shouldn’t have to survive a trip to the park.

Black and brown children deserve unsoiled joy at the play park and their parents deserve not to be triggered and not to be hyper vigilant!

Yesterday, I stood in the middle of Trans Pride Dublin. Surrounded by a sea of vibrant flags, chanting voices, and defiant joy, I found myself struck by a beautiful, fierce reality: the fight for liberation is entirely intersectional because oppression relies on the exact same playbook.

As the crowd marched, we didn't just chant about trans rights. The air vibrated with demands for a free Palestine, protections for immigrants, an end to systemic racism, safety for sex workers, and rights for intersex individuals. To an outsider, it might have looked like a scattered list of grievances. But as a progressive theologian, a queer black woman, and a mother, I saw it clearly for what it truly is: the same fight. It is the story of the powerful 1% scapegoating marginalized communities to maintain control, weaponizing autonomy against the vulnerable.

Standing there, my mind flooded with memories of my own journey with faith, the church, and the long, slow road to embracing my own identity as a demisexual, pansexual woman. For decades, I kept myself small and silent. I believed the lie that the Bible and God hated queer people.

But yesterday reminded me of a theological breakthrough I had three years ago—a breakthrough rooted in the profound loss of Brianna Ghey—that forever changed how I view God, gender, and our collective right to exist.

1. The Anatomy of Acceptance: From Motherhood to Selfhood

My journey toward radical inclusion didn't start in a library; it started at my breast. Ten years ago, when my first son was born, someone asked me a question meant to corner me: "What would you do if your son grew up to be gay?"

I looked down at my baby boy. He was nursing, making those soft, unforgettable, contented noises that only infants make. I burst into tears at the sheer stupidity—and cruelty—of the question. I knew instantly, with every fiber of my being, that I would love him fiercely and unconditionally. I whispered to myself, I would never cut my baby off for anybody. Not for an institution, not for a community, not even for a distorted version of God.

"I easily extended protection to my son, and prior to this,a relative shamed by my family for her same-sex relationship. But extending that same grace to myself? That was a slow burn."

When you are married to a man, raising a family, and dodging the everyday exhausting landmines of systemic racism, narcissistic family and church dynamics, and survival—you just don't have the bandwidth to process your own sexuality. You press pause on your own pansexuality because you’re busy keeping everyone else alive.

But truth isn't something you can bury forever.

2. The Genderless Divine: A Theological Breakthrough

Three years ago, a “progressive” church asked me to deliver a sermon on a heavy theme: "What does the cross mean to you?"

This invitation came shortly after the tragic murder of transgender teenager Brianna Ghey. I sat with my scriptures, weeping and wondering: What does the cross mean for trans people? If what I learned during my Master of Divinity is true—that God loves and cares for everyone—what does that look like for the trans community?

I dove back into the Hebrew and Greek texts, stripping away centuries of patriarchal bias and proof-texting. I confronted a foundational truth that mainstream religion intentionally ignores: God has no gender.

If we read the scriptures in their totality, the binary framework of God completely collapses:

• Spirit Beyond Gender: Genesis 1:27 states that humanity is created in the image of God: "male and female he created them." If the fullness of humanity—both male, female, and everything across the spectrum—reflects the Divine, then God must transcend gender entirely. Jesus explicitly confirms this in John 4:24: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." A spirit possesses no biology, no chromosomes, and no gender.

• The Feminine Divine: While patriarchy emphasizes the metaphor of "Father," the original biblical languages reveal a deeply nuanced, gender-expansive Creator. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruach (רוּחַ), which is grammatically feminine. Furthermore, the Hebrew term for God's comforting compassion, Rachamim, is derived directly from the word rechem, meaning "womb."

• The Maternal Image: Throughout scripture, God rejects rigid masculinity to adopt deeply maternal roles. In Isaiah 66:13, God comforts Israel "as a mother comforts her child." In Matthew 23:37, Jesus uses maternal imagery to describe his longing to gather his people together "as a hen gathers her brood under her wings."

When I realized that God is neither male nor female, but an expansive, beautiful Spirit, a massive revelation hit me: If God is non-binary, and we are made in God's image, then the existence of transgender people makes perfect, holy sense.

A person being born with one anatomy but embodying a different gender identity isn't a mistake; it is a reflection of a boundless Creator who refuses to be trapped in human boxes.

3. The Holy Risk of Free Will and Autonomy

That Sunday, I preached this message of a gender-transcendent, trans-affirming God. After the service, a trans person walked up to me. It was their first time in that church. With tears streaming down their face, they said, "I grew up in the church and I love God, but I’ve been transitioning and feeling like such a horrible sinner. What you said saved me."

Their tears solidified my understanding of what the cross truly symbolises: the ultimate defence of human autonomy.

"If you read the Bible properly—without picking and choosing individual verses to justify personal biases—you realise that God is radically pro-choice."

God values human free will so intensely that God risked heaven on earth just to preserve our power to choose. True faith requires consent; it cannot exist under coercion.

The political right seeks to strip away this divine gift. They want to dictate what we do with our bodies, who we love, how we express our gender, and who gets to survive.

Conversely, the core mission of the true, intersectional Left is to preserve the right of every person to live as fully human, fully autonomous, and inherently worthy.

4. The Message of the Cross

I struggle to call myself a "Christian" these days because of the harm institutional religion inflicts. I don't sit in traditional pews anymore. But as a progressive theologian wrestling on the margins, I know exactly what the message of the cross is.

The cross is not a tool for condemnation. The cross is the ultimate demonstration of a God who enters into human suffering, stands with the marginalized, and breaks the systems of empire and oppression.

When we chant for trans rights, when we scream for a free Palestine, when we stand against racism, and when we defend bodily autonomy, we are doing holy work. We are channeling that beautiful, boundless Spirit whose only desire is to fill the Earth with love and the freedom to simply be.

To anyone who has been made to feel small, sinful, or broken by the church: You are made in the exact image of a limitless God. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

Thank you for reading. This space exists entirely because of reader support.

I walked away from the traditional church, but I refuse to walk away from the marginalised, the questioning, and the seekers. I am them and they are me! If my articles or racism, Ireland, theological deep-dives, personal stories, and reflections on collective liberation resonate with you, please consider supporting this work.

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• Where do you see the intersections of faith and freedom in your own life?

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I wrote this quite a few days ago and since then I’ve cried at my GPs and at the BBC. I’m doing better today but wanted to share the raw emotions of that day and of most of last week.

I woke up ready to take on the world today. I was ready to home-school my kids, ready to clean my kitchen, and ready to just exist powerfully.

Instead, I spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon feeling completely off. I even journaled, thinking that a pen and paper would magically "fix" me. It didn’t. Eventually, I found myself walking by the sea, watching my kids climb rocks and eat ice lollies, while trying to ride out a heavy wave of exhaustion.

Then it hit me: This time last week, the riots were still happening.

If you are reading this from Northern Ireland, across the island, or anywhere else that has recently been set on fire by racial violence, and you are wondering why you suddenly feel empty, aching, or broken today—this letter is for you. What you are feeling is completely normal.

The Adrenaline Crash is Real

Last week, many of us were on a high. I was on a high because I needed to be. My survival instincts kicked in. I became hypervigilant. I wanted to be a support for my community, to be a voice for Black and Brown people on this island. When you are in the trenches of community care, your body pumps out adrenaline to keep you standing.

But adrenaline is a loan, not a gift. Eventually, the body demands payment.

On Saturday night, when my kids were away at their dads and I finally didn’t have to keep it together, I collapsed. My body literally buckled under the weight of the week. Many of us are experiencing this right now: the sudden emotional crash, the brain fog, the profound fatigue, or a strange, protective numbness.

Numbness is not a lack of caring; it is your brain’s shield against a world that became too loud and too hostile.

The Somatic Cost: Our Bodies Keep the Score

On Sunday, I forced myself to a dance class because I didn't want to be alone and I needed to move the trauma out of my muscles. I enjoyed it, but I cried through half of it. By that night, I was in excruciating pain. My arm was numb, my hand was tingling, and a blood vessel in my arm was pulsating like crazy.

I ended up in A&E until 5:00 AM. The doctors checked everything and could only find carpal tunnel syndrome—a condition I already suspected I had.

As I lay in bed afterward, crying and sleeping for hours, I remembered the truth: Our brains cannot tell the difference between physical pain and psychological pain. They use the exact same neural pathways.

The pain in my arm wasn't just physical. It was the somatic manifestation of deep, generational rejection. It was the pain of being a homeowner, of investing your life into an island, and yet never being allowed to fully feel at "home." It was the compounded grief of every Black and Brown family who has been targeted, hated, or marginalized for absolutely no reason.

When white supremacy attacks your community, your nervous system registers it as a physical assault. Your headaches, your body aches, your racing heart, and your exhaustion are real, valid medical reactions to terror.

Grief Has No Timeline

I caught myself thinking, "It’s been a week. I should be fine by now."

After all, I’ve survived this before. I dealt with racial hostility in Dublin in the early 2000s. I’ve dealt with it year after year especially the last three years. I told myself I should be able to just bounce back.

But survival does not make you immune; it makes you carry a heavier load. Every new incident triggers the unhealed and sometimes healed wounds of the past. Do you ever really heal from racial trauma when you are constantly being racially abused? Do years of therapy buffer you from new racial trauma? Does fully understanding white supremacy as narcissistic abuse stop my body from experiencing it? Absolutely not!

What I do have are tools to help me cope and the powerful knowledge that there is no timeline to our grief. We get to grieve as long as we need to. We get to honour that pain, honour that rejection, and call out the utter absurdity of having to carry the weight of white supremacy in our bodies.

A Gentle Reminder for the Days Ahead

Right now, I am keeping it together for my children. I am letting them eat their ice lollies and climb their rocks in peace, while I gently carry my own pain right alongside them.

If you are trying to force yourself to "exist powerfully" today and you just can't, please hear me: There is no rush.

• If you are exhausted, your body is doing its job processing a crisis. Rest is your resistance.

• If you are crying through ordinary moments, your body is safely shaking the trauma out. Let the tears flow.

• If you feel a sense of conditional belonging, your fear is valid. Trust takes time to rebuild.

You do not need to rush your healing to match society’s desire to move on. Honor your body. Honor your boundaries. We survived the high; now, we must gently survive the quiet because the quiet might be very short lived considering that the weather keeps getting nicer and the 12th is on its way.

"How is your body feeling this week? Let's hold space for each other in the comments."

In Kenya, people were just people to me. I hadn't had the easiest childhood, with both of my parents being absent, but I never really stood out. I got to climb trees, run around, swim in the river, laugh, play mbanya, and jump rope. I was just a girl. Not a Black girl. Just a girl. I remember meeting a friend's white and Asian classmates at a party when I was about eight years old; I had never been that close to a non-Black person before. I didn't gawk at them, yell, or try to touch their hair. They didn't look at me differently, either. They were just girls there to celebrate a friend. And so was I.

I never knew that some white people did not feel the same way about us. I’d grown up in a country where white people were and still are celebrated—oftentimes treated like gods when they visit. It took a radical shift in geography to teach me a different reality.

I was walking home from the shops in Firhouse, Dublin, clutching a small plastic bag, completely mesmerised by the soft, amber glow of the Irish evening light. It was around 7 pm, but it wasn’t dark yet. In Kenya, the sun set fast and heavy, but here, the twilight stretched out like silk. Suddenly, the peace shattered. A group of white teenagers at the fields where I had to cut through to get home pointed their fingers and started yelling the N-word at me. I had been in Ireland less than three months.

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Author's Note: I wrote this by the river yesterday. It is the raw, unedited internal reality of navigating Northern Ireland in a Black body right now.

My shoulders have turned to stone,
Carrying a grief too vast for a single spine.
The River Lagan flows past, cold and steady,
But its water holds no healing today.
The flower in my hand is just a dead weight.

Even the music has gone completely flat—
The songs that used to save me are just empty noise,
A hollow rhythm bouncing off the headphones, I can barely force my feet to move.

The exhaustion lives deep in my bones,
Coiling tight in my stomach,
Burning hot across my lower back.

Every face approaching on the pavement
Is a question that makes my breath catch:
Are you a threat?
Do you look at me and see an enemy?
Did you watch the violence this week and nod along?

I sat in a room full of them today.
A room of quiet, polite, crushing indifference.
Surrounded by a world built on scapegoating,
Steeped in an Afropessimism so heavy it chokes the air.

Except for one.
One who looked at the wreckage and did not turn away.
She sat down, and she wept with me.

And in that room, the questions scream out to the sky:
Where is the intervention?
How do I pick up and carry on when the foundation is cracked?
I need God or someone to fix this broken world.
Will they ever fix it?
Or are they just watching from a distance,
Leaving us to drown in the silence?

Maybe the answer isn't a roaring fire from heaven.
Maybe God was just the tears in that room,
Weeping with me because the world is too broken to bear alone.

But I cannot fix the world today.
I cannot carry the weight of global hatred on an aching back.

So I will shrink the horizon.
I will focus only on the next five minutes.
The next step.
The next ragged breath.

My existence right here, by this water, is enough.

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If you are a Black or Brown person living in Northern Ireland right now, I know exactly where you are. The anti-immigration riots and violent unrest sweeping across Belfast and Northern Ireland involve explicit racial hostility. Your nervous system is fried. You are carrying an invisible, exhausting weight just stepping outside your front door or even just sitting in your house. This week, the ambient terror on our streets—the masked men, the arson, the targeted vitriol—has made the simple act of existing in our own skin feel like a liability even more than usual. I have felt deeply annoyed. I have felt completely helpless and hopeless. I have cried in bed, in the shower, in the car and wherever I can without my kids noticing. It is already hard enough to navigate life as a person of colour in this place without having to watch our neighbourhoods erupt into hostility.

Let’s be entirely clear about what we are witnessing: the thugs on the streets, and those in office who empower them to act like this, are wrong. They are dangerous, narcissistic egomaniacs who thrive on trauma. They want us terrified, isolated, and small.

If you are feeling angry, detached, or unable to find words today: I see you, and you are not failing. Your body is simply doing what it was designed to do when safety is compromised. It is trying to survive.

During the last two riots I was stuck indoors and the suffocating weight was unreal. I remember the trance of doomscrolling, the mindless binge-watching, the prioritising of panic over peace. I remembered the paralyzing feeling of watching the world burn through a five-inch screen while praying no one noticed our windows.

If you are in that survival loop right now, please hear me: there is no shame in hiding away. But if we are staying inside, let’s turn our walls into a fortress of joy.

Radical Self-Preservation: Tools for the Heavy Days

When cognitive tools like writing or thinking feel like too much, we have to let our bodies find peace first. Here is how we can gently anchor our fried nervous systems and protect our peace when the outside world is too loud:

• Change Your Temperature :Water is a literal container for grief and running a long bath together with your kids is a beautiful tool for coregulation. A warm bath, a steaming shower, or a splash of cold water stimulates the vagus nerve and forces a racing heart rate to slow down.

• Ground Yourself with Heavy, Nourishing Food: Eating "yummy food" is not an indulgence—it is grounding. Kenyan food does this for me. It also reminds me that I am not an orphan in a land that seems to hate me. I belong. Even if my people are thousands of miles away and I haven’t lived with them for decades. The physical act of chewing, tasting, and digesting activates your parasympathetic nervous system, signaling to your brain that you are safe enough to eat.

• Move and Release Through Sound: Turn off the news and turn up the music. Sing loudly, dance around the kitchen, or play an instrument. Shaking your body, singing, and dancing releases trapped adrenaline that otherwise turns into internal rage.

• Move to Process (I know it is not safe for many of us to go outside). Walk around the house. Walk up and down the stairs. The forward momentum and the natural left-to-right scanning of your eyes help the brain process  trauma that it cannot yet articulate.

Protecting the Sanctuary: Making Home Safe for the Kids

Our homes need to be safe spaces for our kids always, but especially right now. When we actively regulate our own emotions, it stops us from absorbing the chaos of the streets and yelling at our children. We can transform the indoors from a cage into a sanctuary of play:

• Build Living Room Forts: Gather every blanket, duvet, and pillow you own. Build massive forts to make staying inside feel like an exciting, magical adventure rather than a forced lockdown.

• Lean into Connection Games: Play hide and seek, or simple rounds of I Spy. Dust off the board games and puzzles—we are currently locked into a fierce game of Monopoly for the last few days..

• Radical Physical Affection: Give lots of hugs and endless cuddles on the sofa. Physical touch lowers cortisol for both you and your children instantly.

The Armor of Facts: Reclaiming Our Narrative

In a climate of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and targeted misinformation across Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the wider UK, grounding yourself in the factual reality of your value is a radical act of resistance. The rhetoric on the streets is built on lies. The truth is written in data, impact, and systemic contribution.

When the world tries to frame us as a burden, we must remember the hard facts: an immigrant family of five contributes approximately £98,000 (€117,000) over just five years in taxes and visa fees alone. This does not even account for our daily spending power on food, clothes, housing, and local businesses. Non-EU families carry an immense, often invisible economic weight through high-bracket income taxes, the steep costs of visa renewals, and Critical Skills Employment Permit (CSEP) costs.

If you ever feel the creeping weight of imposter syndrome or racialised rhetoric, arm your mind with these truths:

• We are a net fiscal benefit: High-wage migrants across these islands pay effective tax rates that significantly exceed the national average.

• We fund public services: Our steep visa fees and hard-earned taxes directly subsidise the healthcare, infrastructure, and schools used by everyone.

• Our presence drives growth: Immigrant-led businesses, academics, healthcare workers, and skilled professionals are the core drivers of technical, scientific, and cultural progress. We are builders of these nations, adding immense value with every hour we work and every single pound and euro we invest. We do not owe "gratitude" for spaces we have rightfully earned and paid for twice over.

Lean Into Your Safe People

You are not alone. Do not let the hostility outside trick you into thinking you are isolated. Now is the time to intentionally connect with your safe people—the friends, family, fellow Black and Brown community members, and true allies who truly see you and hold space for you.

Hop on video calls with relatives and friends who live further away. Send a voice note to a safe friend just to say, "I am angry today." Reach out to those who ground you.

Rest and joy are not luxuries right now; they are acts of absolute defiance. We must survive this storm, and we survive it by keeping our families soft and connected when the world demands we stay rigid.

Breathe out. Drink water. Pile onto the sofa with the people you love. Let the world spin outside while you protect your peace indoors today. We are still here, and we are going to look after each other.

To those who have been Displaced

If you have been burnt out or driven out of your house, my heart breaks for you! It bleeds with you! Home is supposed to be safe! A sanctuary! No one deserves to be driven out of a home that they pay for  or any home for that matter! Cry as much as you need to. We cry with you! I am crying with you as I write this! You are not alone! Reach out to us (dm me on any platform) and we will find a way to support you!!!

We are both first-generation (well 1.5) Black African women who migrated to the United Kingdom and Ireland as kids. Me at 12, her at 16. We are both firstborn daughters. We both navigated the complex terrains of cultural displacement, and we both ultimately chose to marry white men.

But that is where our paths diverge onto completely different planets.

Today, she is Kemi Badenoch—the leader of the Conservative Party, a woman who utilizes her platform to dismantle progressive anti-racism, claim institutional bias is a myth, and lecture the public on the merits of a colourblind meritocracy.

Meanwhile, I am an activist, counsellor and an educator working for myself in Northern Ireland. I run group therapy workshops designed explicitly to heal racial trauma, and I home-educate my biracial children to protect them from the very system Kemi insists is perfectly fair.

This is the tale of two African daughters, the reality of the model minority trap, and the profound cost of selective blindness.

The Myth of the Protective Ring: Interracial Marriage and the "Model Minority"

There is a specific, quiet phenomenon that happens to certain model minorities. When you are conditioned to put your head down, out-work the prejudice, and adapt perfectly to the dominant culture, you subconsciously seek metrics of total validation and protection. For many, that path leads to intermarriage from my experience.

Kemi married a white man. I married a white man.

I wonder, sometimes, what happens behind the closed doors of her private life. I wonder if her in-laws have ever let slip the casual, devastating microaggressions or overt racism that so many Black women in interracial marriages endure. I know that pain intimately. I suffered deeply within a marriage to a family that held racial prejudice, watching the armor I thought I had built completely dissolve. I wonder if Kemi's husband stands up for her when the masks slip, or if she has to internalise the friction to keep the peace like I did .

For the model minority, marrying into the dominant culture is often sold (even if quietly and/or subconsciously) as a badge of ultimate acceptance—a psychological shield. But a shield cannot protect you from a disease that the people holding it refuse to cure. Racism is a disease of white supremacy, and until individuals actively choose to do the heavy, painful work of healing it, they carry it into their schools, their workplaces, and yes, even their marriages.

The Shattering of a Mother’s Heart: Having "The Talk"

Because of our positions, we are both raising three biracial children. But how we prepare them for the world could not be more different.

I have had "the talk" about race with my children. Not once, but multiple times. Every single time I have had to sit them down and explain how the world will read their skin, my heart has shattered into a million pieces. It is a grueling, agonizing duty. If I had truly understood the depths of Afropessimism—the reality that the global order is structurally reliant on the systematic devaluing of Blackness—before I had children, I honestly believe I would not have had them. I would have chosen to spare them this generational pain.

I look at Kemi and I wonder: Does she worry about her kids the way I worry about mine? Does her anxiety keep her up at night, or does her belief in a pure British meritocracy let her sleep soundly?

Kemi famously used a Black History Month speech to state that she is teaching her daughter that Britain is a wonderful, welcoming country. But to teach biracial children a purely colourblind narrative in an Afropessimistic world isn't protection—it is an emotional setup. When they eventually face their first systemic barrier, their first slur, or their first encounter with low expectations, they will lack the vocabulary to understand it. They will turn the blame inward, thinking the failure is entirely their own. This is what I did as a teen. I believed there was something wrong with me and with being black.

I feel a profound sadness for her children. My only hope is that they have other people in their lives—aunties, mentors, or community elders—who will quietly hand them the truth, nurture their identities, and prepare them for the world as it actually is.

Selective Criticism vs. Total Truth

Kemi Badenoch has built her entire political brand on selective criticism. She fiercely attacks anything progressive, anything equity-based, and anyone who points out institutional failure. She is quick to point out racism within leftist spaces and not on the right which is entirely absurd considering that any white person regardless of how they vote, can be racist.

True liberation requires the capacity to criticize what is wrong, whenever and wherever it is wrong. I can look at the political Left and criticize them for their patronizing, performative racism. I can look at the political Right and criticize them for their structural exclusion and weaponization of identity politics. I do not owe my loyalty to a political faction; I owe it to human dignity and truth.

Kemi's background as an elder daughter who grew up in a majority-Black Nigeria (until the age of 16) allowed her to enter the UK without the childhood trauma of being a minority in her formative years. She used that lack of trauma as a superpower to climb a white institutional ladder. But in doing so, she became a gatekeeper, invalidating the lived experiences of those who didn't have her head start. The ones born in here or who moved at a younger age.

I didn’t know I was Black until I arrived in Ireland at twelve years old and was met with the N-word on a daily basis. I tried the model minority route, but the system slowly broke that illusion. Today, my peace belongs to me. I do not cater to the white gaze. I refuse to be a “monkey” in their circus. I work on myself, I home-educate, I journal, I dance in my kitchen, and I heal racial trauma for myself and others and I speak out for all injustice. There’s no peace in being a mouth piece, a puppet and a pawn for the empire. I was there even if as a way milder version of Kemi. I would not return to it.

Kemi Badenoch may hold a title of immense institutional power, but true autonomy isn't found in begging a broken system to see you as an exception. True autonomy is building a sanctuary where you, your children, and your community, never have to apologise for their skin in the first place because there is nothing to apologise for in the first place.

This week, the pavement of Dublin’s premium shopping and tourist district became a crime scene. A 21-year-old student, music promoter, and part-time DJ named Qayyum Balogun was chased and stabbed to death in the early hours of Bank Holiday Monday. He had been attending a gig on Grafton Street and tried to escape a multi-person brawl by fleeing out a side exit. He ran for his life down an alleyway. He was hunted down, caught on Clarendon Street, and stabbed in the chest.

Before his mother in Dundalk could even process that her boy was gone, before the forensic tents were pulled down from the streets, the media and the police launched a highly specific, structurally violent playbook.

They began using the phrases. You know them if you are Black or Brown and live here.

“Rival groups.”

“Clashes between opposing factions.”

“A dispute between specific sets of youth.”

It is the oldest, most insidious dog whistle in the Western world. It is the code word for "Black-on-Black crime." And it is an absolute, gaslighting absurdity.

The Sanitation of Slaughter

When white teenagers or men get into a massive row outside a nightclub in Dublin, Belfast, or Galway, it is reported as a tragic symptom of "anti-social behaviour," "alcohol-fueled street violence," or a "failure in local policing." The public is allowed to feel a universal sense of shock. The victim is allowed to be an innocent casualty of a broken nightlife culture.

But the moment a Black boy is murdered at a rap gig, the language changes. By slapping the label of "rival groups" onto the tragedy, An Garda Síochána and local news outlets do something incredibly intentional: they de-personalise the slaughter. They frame the violence as an isolated, subcultural blood feud.

The immediate subtext fed to the white Irish public is: “Don’t worry. This isn’t random street violence that threatens your safety or your tourism. This is just them fighting among themselves.”

Look at how the media covered the injuries of a 19-year-old white female bystander who was caught in the crossfire. They were incredibly swift to explicitly state that she was "completely innocent" and "entirely unconnected to either group." By deliberately reserving the word "innocent" only for her, the unspoken inversion left in the reader's mind is that Qayyum must not have been innocent. He is stripped of his status as a victim because he was Black, because he was a DJ, and because he was in the room when a fight broke out. It ignores the factual reality that he ran away to avoid the violence.

The Shield for Institutional Failure

This dog whistle doesn't just steal empathy from a dead boy; it protects the state.

This morning on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, we had councillors standing up to declare that "Dublin city is safe" and that high-visibility policing is working. If the state admits that a 21-year-old university student can be hunted down and slaughtered like an animal in broad daylight in the absolute core of the capital's commercial district, they have to admit they have completely lost control of public safety.

By pushing the "Black-on-Black" narrative, they successfully shift the blame from a failed, under-resourced, and structurally biased system onto the Black community itself. It implies that violence is an inherent trait of our culture rather than a reality of the streets they are failing to secure.

The Trauma is Cumulative

This is the exact structural gaslighting I write about in my book. I remember being pregnant with my second child, sitting in a car with my in-laws right after a hospital appointment where staff had randomly demanded my passport while drawing my blood. On the car radio, a news anchor started talking about "Black-on-Black crime" in London, and my father-in-law looked up and said: "See? Black people are the cause of all problems."

The media feeds the monster, and the public consumes it.

Just a few weeks ago, it was Yves Sakila on Henry Street—pinned face down to the concrete by a cluster of security guards for nearly five minutes with a knee on his neck. The right-wing agitators and tabloids immediately rushed to paint him as nothing more than a "homeless addict" to justify his death sentence.

Before that, it was George Nkencho. Before that, it was Noah Donohoe.

The names change, but the erasure remains identical. When we complain about direct racism on this island, we are told we are "too sensitive," that it's "just a bit of craic," or that we are "importing American issues." They tell us racism doesn't happen here because Ireland doesn't have America's history. Yet, I lived in the American Midwest for three and a half years and was never called the N-word once. I was never subjected to monkey noises. Here in the North, not a single week goes by where my body doesn’t have to scan the environment for danger, cross the road to avoid a group of teenagers, or watch a shopkeeper clutch their purse when I stand behind them in a queue.

Stop Asking, Start Believing

The phrase “Irish people cannot be racist” is a violent, structural gaslight.

It is killing us. It is killing us slowly through the hypervigilance that fries our nervous systems and causes the physical weathering of hypertension, autoimmune illnesses, and early cellular aging. And it is killing us overtly when the system decides our lives are cheap enough to be written off as a "dispute between factions."

To the journalists, the politicians, and the white default on this island: Stop using our skin to sanitise your failures. Stop using coded language to strip our children of their innocence before they are even buried.

Ask the families left behind. Ask the Women of Colour Belfast group chat. Ask us what it feels like to live in a state of constant harm anticipation.

And then, for once, do something you haven't done: Listen. Listen and believe us.

The Belfast Islamic Centre quickly released a statement explicitly clarifying that there was absolutely no religious or Islamic element to this gathering or the brandishing of these knives. It was not a holy celebration. It was just a group of men making a reckless, tone-deaf choice.

As a Black woman living on this island, my reaction wasn’t just frustration at the political circus.

It was a deep, burning rage at the absolute, careless arrogance of those men. And it was an acute, physical reminder of a terrifying truth: Black and brown men operate with a level of gender and group privilege that Black and brown mothers on this island are routinely denied.

To walk into a public, family space in the North of Ireland in the current political climate with large blades shows a complete, staggering failure to read the room. They operated in a bubble of male group privilege. They assumed numbers gave them safety. They didn't think about how a mother pushing a pram feels seeing a blade. They didn’t calculate the delicate political tightrope of the area.

They dropped a match into a fire, completely oblivious to the fact that they will not be the ones who burn.

The people who will pay the price for their ignorance are Black and brown women. The mothers walking their children to school. The women wearing hijabs. As the Equality Commission report recently highlighted, we are already the most targeted demographic for public street harassment on this island. Those men handed local racists the exact ammunition they wanted on a silver platter. And because of their carelessness, I now feel like Hazelbank—a space I fought for years to reclaim—is no longer safe for me and my three sons. It will be swarming with white racist vigilantes, and we are locked out once again.

The Architecture of Public Survival

For a visible Black or brown woman, public existence is never casual. It is a series of precise, calculated survival strategies. I have to monitor my volume, my posture, my hair, my outfit, my kids hair and outfits my boundaries, and my children’s movements and behaviour every single second I step outside my front door. I do not have the luxury of making a mistake. I do not have the luxury of being careless.

But this double standard doesn't just exist between Black and brown men and women. It cuts deeply into the toxic intersection of race and gender when dealing with white society.

Let’s be entirely honest about how power operates here: White women are the "men" in this dynamic.

I have faced loud, blunt, aggressive racism from white men on this island—like four years ago at that very same Hazelbank beach, when a group of white teenagers surrounded me and my three tiny children, throwing the N-word and making monkey noises while I desperately tried to keep my babies safe from the water.

Before this week, I had worked so hard to reclaim that park, forcing it to be safe for us again. But that overt bigotry is easy to spot. It doesn't hide.

The racism that has caused me the most profound, identity-stripping damage has come directly from white women. It is a racism wrapped in a veneer of progressive language, helper complexes, and surface-level friendship. It is the racism that waits until you build trust, and then instantly turns on you, weaponizing its own perceived vulnerability. The second a Black or brown woman stands in her power or sets a boundary, the white woman's tears are deployed to instantly flip the script—turning the aggressor into the victim and the Black woman into the threat.

I’d pick the bear any single day.

The Price of the Passport

Black and brown men are routinely fetishized, coddled, and protected by white women in ways that actively isolate and harm Black and brown women. They get a pass, while we get hyper-surveilled.

I am so profoundly exhausted of being Black in this country. The psychic weight of constantly navigating this calculated survival is a tax on my health. I spent ten days in Kenya last year, and even as a queer woman navigating a complex landscape, I felt safer there than I do walking down the street here. Why? Because in Kenya, my skin is the baseline. The exhausting layer of racial hyper-vigilance is stripped away. You can just be.

I long to move there permanently one day. I want to escape the reality of Northern Irish summers, where the tension rises with the temperature and violence against our bodies feels like an annual calendar event. I want to take my boys away for the whole summer this year, but logistically, I am bound here. I have to stay, and I have to watch careless men hand weapons to the people who want us gone.

To the men who thought a public park was the place to wave swords: your patriarchal ignorance is a luxury we cannot afford. You played with fire, but it is our baskets that you are burning.

We are tired. We are hyper-vigilant. And we are completely out of patience for your carelessness.

The Architecture of the Deflection

There is a distinct psychological violence in the way people use social media comments to turn human tragedy into a zero-sum game.

Recently, whenever I speak publicly about Yves Sakila—a Black man who died after being pinned face-down by private security on Henry Street—my comment sections are immediately flooded by bad-faith actors. They don't come to discuss justice or human dignity. They come to scapegoat immigrants, they come to tell me to go back to my country, they come to laugh at my grief and other people’s grief, they come to minimise black and brown people’s legitimate fears, they come to tell me how to raise my kids and  they also come to drop another name: Alex Coughlan, a white man tragically and brutally killed by two teenagers in Blanchardstown. All these tactics are designed to take focus away from the issue at hand. I could talk about them all (and might do so at another time) but in this article I want to focus on what dropping Alex Coughlans name intends to achieve.

Narcissism, at its core, is defined by a lack of empathy, a fierce superiority complex, a sense of entitlement, antagonism and an insatiable drive to dominate. When a narcissist is confronted with an uncomfortable truth, they do not self-reflect. They gaslight, they manipulate, and they deflect. They make you feel like you are the one doing something wrong just for asking for accountability.

When people bring up Alex Coughlan to counter posts about Yves Sakila, they are engaging in a macro-level narcissistic deflection known as "whataboutism". The unspoken narrative they are trying to push is grotesque: they want to use citizen-on-citizen violence to justify, normalise, or erase structural violence. They want to create a false rivalry of trauma.

Let me be entirely clear: I can speak about Yves Sakila without diminishing the absolute horror of what happened to Alex Coughlan. The teenagers responsible for Alex's death must face full legal justice. Mourning Yves and demanding accountability for the excessive force and anti-Black racism that took his life does not take a single thing away from Alex's memory.

Grief is not a competitive sport. But to the collective narcissist, everything is a battle for dominance.

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