Europeans aren’t racist for wanting less immigration.White people aren’t supremacists for wanting to their homelands preserved.Conor McGregor isn’t a xenophobe for wanting Ireland to feel Irish

Maureen McBrideIn January 2019, American hip-hop singer Azealia Banks made headlines with a series of anti-Irish comments on social media following a row with Aer Lingus cabin crew on a flight from London to Dublin. Her initial comments, branding Irish women ‘ugly’, soon escalated into a rather bizarre anti-Irish rant which contained overt racializing language:You lot are a bunch of prideful inbred leprechauns who have ZERO global influence and ZERO white privilege. The rest of the world’s white folk don’t want to associate with you lot at all and it’s because you are barbarians.I’m happiest knowing the Irish are quarantined on an isle so they can continue to inbreed and keep their defective genes away from humanity.Banks is no stranger to controversial statements. In 2016, she was dropped from her headline slot at a UK festival after making racist and homophobic remarks (again on social media) towards former One Direction singer Zain Malik. In this latest outburst, she once again faced accusations of racism, this time against Irish people. Engaging with various challenges to her comments, she responded to one online critic with ‘Don’t you all have a famine to go die in?’ a reference to the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, the tragic event in which one million people died of starvation and a further one million were displaced.As undoubtedly offensive as these comments were, it is probably not the case that Banks holds deep-seated racially driven prejudice against Irish people. It could be that her outburst was simply another publicity seeking exercise during her tour of the UK and Ireland. Yet many people construed her comments as examples of anti-Irish racism and many termed it ‘hate speech’. Indeed, her statement about the Irish having ‘zero white privilege’ do actually demonstrate some insight into the complexity of racism which is so frequently constructed in binary, colour-coded terms. It was this comment in particular which sparked my attention on the incident, given my own personal and research interests in the question of anti-Irish racism. My research focuses specifically on Scotland, and I argue that the experiences of Irish Catholics illustrates why debates on what ‘counts’ as racism are often taking place on unhelpfully narrow terrain. This is particularly the case in Scotland, because it has contributed to a ‘no problem here’ narrative in which Scotland is presented as a nation free from racism, but these arguments also have wider resonance.I recently completed my doctoral research on the phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland. Although the thesis was entitled ‘Rethinking Sectarianism’, the way in which the term is both conceptualised and popularly understood is so problematic that many would argue we should stop using it altogether. Part of the problem is that a ‘culture of equivalence’ tends to frame much of the political, media and public discourse, as well as the dominant academic work on the topic: ‘sectarianism’ is constructed as a problem of tensions between two ‘sides’ or ‘communities’: Protestants and Catholics. A history of unequal power relations in which the Irish Catholic minority experienced processes of racialisation, structural inequalities and overt discrimination tends to be overlooked or at best referred to as a ‘thing of the past’ with no reference to the legacy of inequality in contemporary society