Description
This paper explores the everyday lives of South Asians, also known as Desis, with a focus on the intersectionality of social integration and racism. This paper interrogates the relational aspects of the denial of racism and its impact on the social integration of the first-generation migrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who shared overlapping identity, language and culture. Studies are highlighting that South Asians have made significant contributions in the critical sectors of the economy—health, industry, transportation and business, etc., in Ireland. However, this study will test the model minority myth of CRT and will argue how the essentialization of the Desi community as a privileged group leads to obscuring their experiences of racism and exclusion in Ireland. An interpersonal reflexivity empowers me to represent the voice of Desis who seek to integrate into a local town and navigate integration into a country, generally known as white and catholic. The objective of this paper is to apply the novel concept of Asian Crits to unveil the everyday hustle of belonging/exclusion of South Asian Diaspora intersecting with the demand for epistemic justice. This paper will address the phenomenon of race blind logic of anti-racism policy as a central tenet of Critical Race Theory, and articulate the impact of race invisibility in undermining the racist incidents in Ireland. There is also a reflexive turn in problematizing the internal and external predicament of Desi, supplemented by the autoethnographic analysis. By leveraging the positionality of the researcher as an insider to the specific problem, this study brings the bottom-up approach for mapping lived experiences and bringing counter-narratives to unmask the ‘specificity of Irish racism’.
