5-minute read

Dermot Feenan

LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA

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“You don’t sound like a Dermot,” he said.

It was another of my regular encounters with apparently casual racism in Hampshire, England.

As I waited last week for a train at my local station on the Portsmouth to London line I learn that the train is cancelled due to engineering works.

I speak with a group of three white adults who have tickets for London and are concerned, like me, about missing pre-paid bookings in the capital. We discuss our options.

I phone the train operator and arrange that it pays for a taxi to take us four to a station almost 37 miles and several stations away which is unaffected by the works.

I suggest sharing contact details among the group in case we need to seek compensation.

One member agrees to act for the three. I share my name and mobile phone number with him. He has a southern English accent, like the two women with whom he is travelling.

“You don’t sound like a Dermot,” he says.

I look straight at him. “What does a Dermot sound like?”, I ask. He doesn’t answer.

What did he think? That a person with a particular name should sound a particular way?

The name Dermot is shared by numerous males born in countries across the world.

I might have continued by asking my English interlocutor: “what, like Dermot O’Leary, the English broadcaster? Dermot Mulroney, the American actor?

Perhaps Captain Dermot Richard Claud Chichester, 7th Marquess of Donegall, LVO, educated at Harrow and the Royal Military College Sandhurst?

How about Sir Dermot Boyle GCB, KCVO, KBE, AFC, one-time Marshall of the Royal Air Force—the highest rank in that branch of the British Armed Forces?

Or might you just have been thinking of Sir Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet, English solicitor, educated at Sherborne, Cambridge, and Oxford, and nephew of English mathematician Alan Turing OBE FRS?

Or maybe you just misheard me and thought I sounded like Diarmait mac Cerbaill one of the Kings of Tara (a High King of Ireland)?”

But that Diarmait died in 595 and probably spoke both Gaeilge Ársa (the oldest known form of the Goidelic languages) and some Latin.

But I didn’t, Michael—for that is your name, the man who said I did not sound like a Dermot.

My first name was given to me by my parents in the north of Ireland several decades ago.

This was long before I worked and lived in many countries around the world, long before making England my home with my English partner.

Born in London, you also told me Michael that you moved to Hampshire as a young child. Hampshire, man and boy. Ignorant, racist.

Perhaps you thought that everyone named Dermot was Irish and I did not speak like an Irish person? How else could your assumption be explained?

Certainly, the name Dermot originates in Ireland but it is not limited only to Ireland or the Irish. It is the anglicised version of the Irish names Diarmuid or Diarmaid, though the older form is Diarmait. But it is wrong to assume that everyone named Dermot comes from a particular place and speaks with a particular accent.

I speak as someone who has travelled the world, who has lived, loved and worked with many, many peoples, and who, trained as a Barrister-at-Law and as a lecturer in law, is confident in his voice.

Why were you so confident in your apparently racialised assumption? So confident to express that in public, face-to-face with a stranger, and in the company of your white English companions?

You were not malicious, but not all racism is malicious. Racism includes just such racialised assumptions or stereotypes about how people speak (or behave) on the basis of actual or perceived race, ethnicity, nationality or skin colour.

This racism often operates, as I regularly find in this part of England, as adamantine othering—an implacable marking out and differentiation which immediately makes one feel distanced, kept at arms’ length.

This racism feeds on the xenophobia and race hate of many in the country’s current government, but it draws from longer histories, notably of colonialism and its attendant conceit of English superiority.

That racism got much worse in the context of Brexit, especially for we Irish—as I noted in my essay ‘Brexit and the Rekindling of Anti-Irish Racism’.

Such racism is perpetuated when enabled by others who could act yet fail to do so, as I found to my considerable disappointment when an English colleague in a former workplace, the School of Law at the University of Portsmouth, declined to join my grievance against an English manager who had, he agreed, engaged in racially discriminatory comment (in addition to sexist comment).

While I proceeded anyway with the grievance, that manager subsequently sought in an investigation into her behaviour to justify one of those remarks by engaging in further racially discriminatory comment.

Perhaps that would not have happened had my colleague also held that manager to account. Perhaps that might have meant that the investigator, another manager, Professor Gary Rees, who failed egregiously to conduct a proper initial investigation into my own grievance would not have subsequently been found by an employment tribunal in a separate case decided in 2024 to have discriminated on the grounds of race against an Indian employee (Sharma v University of Portsmouth).

I was, nonetheless, able to ensure that my manager be removed from line-management responsibility over me.

Upon leaving the University, I also initiated legal proceedings against my former employer which I was able to bring to a satisfactory conclusion short of an employment tribunal hearing.

And here we return to the comment by Michael: that, too, amounts to racial discrimination—though in this instance the law provides no recourse because it was not made in an employment relationship. It is, nonetheless, discriminatory. It is an aspect of racism—pertaining to names and/or accents—which has received increasing scholarly attention and litigation. And, it, too, went unchallenged by his companions.

My English interlocutor’s othering did not seek to bridge a perceived difference.

Such othering maintains boundaries, separations, exclusions, hierarchies.

It is profoundly alienating, a chauvinism that creates a gulf between peoples, even amongst its own citizens; for I am also a British citizen (as well as an Irish citizen, holding dual citizenship).

Its regularity makes me feel less confident to work in this part of England, to invest time, energy, ideas, and money. It is damaging to me, to you, and others.

This is why, in large part, I call it out as much as I can.

Hampshire, in particular, saw the largest increase in hate crimes across southern England 2021—2022. Racist hate crime was the most common and it increased by about 54%.

Hampshire also has one of the highest rates of police stop and search of Black people.

I have had occasion to report racist statements, mainly anti-Black racism, to public authorities in Hampshire a number of times recently. Earlier this year, it was grossly offensive graffiti in Buriton, a small village in East Hampshire.

Last year, it was similar graffiti in Waterlooville, a  large town where Michael lived before moving to a smaller village several miles away.

While working as a polling clerk for Havant Borough Council in 2021, I encountered anti-Irish racism by an English member of polling staff. I challenged that person, too.

In 2022, I quit work as a volunteer at Citizens Advice East Hampshire in part because of its deficiencies in addressing my report of racist statements among other colleagues.

Years earlier, while volunteering at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire I also encountered racist comment from an English member of staff.

Over decades, I have founded, coordinated, and/or otherwise participated in numerous voluntary initiatives and employment, with colleagues from many countries, ethnicities and skin colours, but it is only in this part of England that I have experienced such persistent racism.

I no longer volunteer my time for charities based here because of such racism and the failure or inadequacy of management and colleagues to address such racism.

I’ve set out here just some of the many instances of racism that I’ve encountered personally in Hampshire. As a white person, I do not experience the much more extensive and egregious racism faced, especially in this part of England, by those racialised on the basis of their dark skin colour.

But I would not stay here save for the fact that my English partner has a lifelong and rare disability and is reliant both on specialist care in the NHS and easy access to family elsewhere in southern England.

My intervention with the train operator ensured our small group arrived at our next station in time to get to our bookings in London, our contractual interests preserved. Perhaps Michael will now think twice about his racialised assumption, in turn respecting the interests (and dignity) of others.

My trip to London was to visit two exhibitions designed to interrogate the concept of race. The first, ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768 – now: Art, Colonialism and Change’ at the Royal Academy of Arts explored connections between art associated with the Academy and Britain’s colonial histories.

The second exhibition, ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’ at the National Portrait Gallery explores the representation of the Black figure in art.

Michael wasn’t going to them.

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© Dermot Feenan 2024