The Journal's new article about anti-black racism in Ireland is utterly vacuous dribble

It took them 2600 words to say nothing at all

Joseph Okoh in The Journal has a new article about the “endemic” racism experienced by black people in Ireland. I won’t pretend that I went in with high expectations, and sure enough, it’s a rambling mishmash of thin and misleading data, confirmation bias and paranoid mind-reading, which did nothing to persuade me that anti-black racism is the scourge of Irish society that Okoh seems to think it is. I’ll go through it graf by graf, highlighting the weaker claims, shoddy argumentation and unsourced assertions as I see them.

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The article starts as it means to go on, with a title its contents make only the faintest effort to justify:

‘It’s endemic’: Prevalence of racism in Irish workplaces at record levels.

The source of the second clause is a yet-to-be-published report compiled by the Irish Network Against Racism, which indeed found that reports of racist discrimination in the workplace by colleagues or employers had increased from 16 in 2021 to 69 in 2022.

Let’s assume for a moment that every reported incident in 2022 was a real instance of racist discrimination. Does that justify the title’s claim that racism in the Irish workplace is “endemic” (which I’m assuming Okoh intended in the colloquial sense of “widespread; prevalent”)?

As we learned from the last time I wrote about this topic, there are 64,639 people in Ireland who identify as “black or black Irish - African” or “black or black Irish - any other black background”. Assuming that none of these alleged incidents of racist discrimination are from repeat reporters, this means that the likelihood of a black person in Ireland experiencing an incident of racist discrimination in the workplace is about 1 in 1,000.

A caveat: the article does point out that black people in Ireland experience unusually high rates of unemployment, and naturally you can’t be the victim of racist discrimination in the workplace if you don’t have a workplace to go to. Citing the 2016 census, the article points out that the Nigerian rate of unemployment is 43% and the Congolese 63%. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the average rate of unemployment for black people in Ireland is the midpoint of these two points (53%). That would put the number of employed black people in Ireland at 30,380, meaning the likelihood of a black person in Ireland experiencing an incident of racist discrimination is about 1 in 450. Okoh somehow managed to write nearly 3,000 words about how, last year, a staggering 99.8% of black people in Ireland experienced no racist discrimination of any kind from colleagues or employers, and the reader is meant to come away from it thinking that anti-black racism in Ireland is widespread to the point of being inescapable. And all of this is assuming that all of the 69 instances of racist discrimination targeted black workers, which the article never specifies (the previous year’s report provided demographic breakdowns of various statistics, but not the specific statistic regarding alleged workplace discrimination). If only a subset of those instances were reported by black people (as seems to be the case), Okoh’s case is even weaker, and racist workplace discrimination against black people in Ireland is even less common than this.

One of the report’s co-authors, Dr. Lucy Michael, seems dimly aware of how thin the data for her position are, offering the weak defense that “we believe there are many cases that go unreported.”

Ireland also fares poorly when compared to other European countries. Research by the European Union Agencies for Fundamental Rights found that when it comes to racist incidents in the workplace, Ireland ranked as one of the worst Europe-wide with a rate of 33%, compared to an average of 24%.

I’ll come back to this point later. Moving on.