Leon Diop was about 11 when he first experienced explicit racism. “We were playing and a group of older lads came over and started messing with us.” They singled Diop out and called him a name. It wasn’t the N-word, but it was racially charged and it was viscerally hurtful and it feels wrong to type it here. “Oh my God. It was such a horrible moment,” he says. “Just the complete shock. It was dehumanising. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be out.”
I meet Diop, the insightful, calm and good-humoured cofounder of the advocacy, community and educational group Black and Irish, at a hotel near the office where he works on Merrion Square. He has just published Mixed Up: An Irish Boy’s Journey to Belonging, a very moving, thought-provoking memoir about growing up as a “brown kid” in Tallaght.
He is very good at articulating how unthinking racism can affect a sensitive young person. The book is aimed at a teenage audience because, he says, “I would have benefited from something along the lines of this when I was that age ... From the work that we do at schools, we see that levels of racism are still high. [Many are] experiencing racism from other students or even from teachers at times. And then we also have kids who don’t really feel fully anything. They don’t feel like they can say that they’re Irish, because even though they were born here and have only ever known an Irish experience, both of their parents are from Cameroon or Nigeria or South Africa, but then on the other side, they feel they can’t say that they’re Nigerian or Ghanaian or South African, either, because they haven’t grown up there.”
Does he remember the first time he realised he was in a minority? “My mam recalls me [as a small child] identifying myself as a ‘brown kid’ and noticing that there was other black kids and white kids but I don’t remember it,” he says. “She was telling me that I was pensive about it, but later on that day I was out playing and I was fine.”
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He has a good life, he says, but racism and insecurity about his identity were recurring issues. He often didn’t feel either white enough or black enough. He has been called names, rejected by landlords and assaulted. As a teenager he experienced a serious assault when, after he tried to help a friend who was being attacked, he was set upon by four adults who shouted racial abuse at him. “My racial identity was impacting my self-esteem,” he says.
His mother did her best to support him, he says, but as a white Irish woman, a lot of things were beyond her experience. She once explained the N-word to him by playing an Ice Cube song. “I don’t want to critique my mother’s parenting skills,” he says. “She was and is a phenomenal woman. She was younger than I am now, when she was trying to explain this to me. I’m 31. She had me at 19. She was trying to do the best with the knowledge that she had. There wasn’t a whole lot of people around her that she could rely on and lean on to learn about these things. Do I think Ice Cube was the best person to explain the N-word?” He laughs. “Probably not, but she was doing her best.”
He had a lot of family disruption when he was growing up. His Senegalese father was troubled and often neglectful. Sometimes, when his mother was at work, he would lock Diop in a dark room and leave him there. “That caused a lot of stress, anxiety and worry,” he says. “To the point where even now when I knock off the light in the hall, I just leg it up the stairs. I’m 31. These things follow you.”
His parents eventually split up. At the time he was confused by what he was experiencing, which led to some internalised feelings of racism. “My dad’s accent was something that I really picked up on and I didn’t want him speaking out loud in public and he’d always be on the phone ... There were feelings of embarrassment. I mean, we understand what those things are now ‘accent bias’ ...
“Baye Fall is a faction of Islam which wears this type of attire,” he continues. “He rocked up to The Square one day on a visitation wearing traditional attire ... So your da’s wearing a pink dress in The Square in Tallaght!” He laughs. “These are difficult things to grasp as a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old. It caused a lot of frustration. That ultimately was internalised. I wanted to distance myself from blackness. I begin straightening my hair and trying to get a mullet. Trying to form a mullet of an afro was a very difficult process.” He laughs. “The smell off my mom’s GHD [hair straightener] was crazy ... I disconnected from my father at a young age. He was out of the home and then subsequently out of the country and then he died. So I was disconnected from my African identity earlier on than most young black people are. That was difficult in and of itself.”
Just this year he and his brother Adam took a visit to Senegal to meet some of their half-siblings for the first time, and it was a hugely positive experience for them both. Cultural diversity should be normalised, he says. “We shouldn’t allow kids to grow up thinking there’s one way of being normal. Your culture means that you will eat different foods, you’ll dress in different ways, you’ll speak with different accents, speak different languages, and that’s okay. We need to be accepting people based on the content of their character. Are they good contributing members of society?”
His working-class roots are also part of his story. Growing up he and many of his white and black friends experienced dysfunction, violence and economic disadvantage. He did well in school. He got 395 points in the Leaving Cert but he got accepted for his degree in psychology through science in Maynooth University via an access programme. He wears this as “a badge of honour” now, but he felt ashamed of it at the time. “I looked at some statistics around progression rates to third-level education. I saw one [private] school was at 99 per cent. On the flip side, if you’re in an environment where you’re dealing with one dysfunctional parent and a dysfunctional situation and a household which is below the poverty line, in an area where the colour of your skin means that racism is around any corner and you could be physically beaten, [that’s] not conducive to third-level education ... People said, ‘You’re going to be dead, or you’re going to be in prison’, and getting around that was huge.”
After a rocky start in college (he failed some first-year exams), he began channelling his life experiences in positive directions. He successfully ran as events and promotions officer, and later for student union president. “I knew what it was like to feel alone,” he says of his student union career. “I didn’t want people to feel that. I wanted to make sure that people felt like no matter what you’re interested in, there’s a space for them.”
One day he and Adam were singled out by security guards on the Luas. “There were younger black lads who were doing something, but it was nothing to do with us. Two security guards came over to me and my brother and were asking to see tickets. I showed them the ticket, and said, ‘What you’re doing is racially profiling.’ And the security guard said, ‘I don’t like your attitude, could you step off the Luas?’ I had bags and I was in a sling because I’d hurt my shoulder. I was furious. The other security guard stepped in and said, ‘You can sit down.’ I got off at the Red Cow to make a complaint. Adam was like ‘Why? This happens all the time. It’s a common experience’.”
Years earlier he had seen Adam stand up to a racist bully, he says, so the fact that he was now dejected “was the final straw”.
They took a legal case on the grounds of defamation. “It was thrown out of the Circuit Court on qualified privilege, but I was so angry about this that I hadn’t even left the Four Courts before I said, ‘I’m appealing’. The appeal was heard the following year in the High Court, and the judge gave us so much more time to talk through the nuances of the case ... I walked out of court with a win and was awarded a nominal amount but that was never the point. It was about the recognition that me and my brother were mistreated based on the colour of our skin. The incident was 2016. The case was 2018. The appeal was 2019. Black and Irish was started in 2020.”
That was when the story of the police murder of George Floyd broke. “I was so angry,” says Diop. “I was crying and very upset after seeing that. Many people in Ireland were talking about how this was wrong, but I thought we needed to have a more nuanced conversation. I was beaten in 2008 and had racial slurs chanted at me while it was happening. There was racial violence present in this country and we needed to talk about it.”
He founded the group Black and Irish with his friends Pierre Yimbog, Femi Bankole and Boni Odoemene as an online platform where people could talk about their experiences. They also wanted to celebrate the lives of black and mixed-race people. Black and Irish has since developed into a nonprofit advocacy organisation that offers talks and workshops. They produce books (Black & Irish: Legends, Trailblazers and Everyday Heroes cowritten by Diop and Briana Fitzsimons), podcasts (a new iteration of the Black & Irish podcast is being launched in the new year) and an awards gala (also to return in 2026). “We had 150 stories sent into us in the first couple of weeks, and 20,000 followers, which showed that people were ready to talk and people were ready to listen. We evolved from being a storytelling organisation to actually challenging these things.”
Some forms of racism had been normalised, he says. “When I was younger, I put up with a lot of crap ... In the locker-room, the group chats, there’d be racist stuff and really negative things. I don’t tolerate that at all now. I think people can engage in casual racism and not be racist people [but] I do think that we need to be educating people, particularly younger people. [After Black and Irish] I began receiving messages from people saying, ‘Leon, I used to say some horrible things. I’m so sorry, I was only joking. I never felt in any way negative about you.’ Casual racism can have a greater impact on individuals than they realise.”
There’s a danger, he says, that casual racism can ultimately cause people to form more fundamentally racist attitudes. “Your brain wants shortcuts. It wants quick thinking. It wants biases. It doesn’t want to use a lot of processing power to think about things deeply.”
And there needs to be scope for forgiveness, he says. “We also need to give the person grace to come out the other side of it, if they’re able to recognise that ‘You know what? What I did was wrong’.”
The anti-immigrant movement and the recent riots in Citywest worry him. “I’m listening to stories coming in now from people in Citywest, not just in the IPAS centre, about how people are living in fear. I had to pick up my wife yesterday because the Luas was no longer running to that part of Tallaght. I live very close to Citywest. Am I going to be stopped by a group of men who want to check my ethnicity when they see a black fella in a car?”
What if I’m able to be both Irish and Senegalese? What about if I’m 100 per cent both? I went from being only half of one thing to being two things
— Leon Diop
He believes the riots are a product of failures in housing policy, in child protection, in immigration services and community safety. “What the far right want to do is turn this into an immigrant problem. They just don’t like black and brown people. We’re living in a world where many people feel like they’ve been left behind. They’re concerned about their future. They’re concerned about where they’re going to live. And we also have huge geopolitical issues that mean more people have to come here for safety. And, also, we have a requirement for economic migrants to come here to prop up a lot of our systems. And then we’ve a lot of people playing on that, who are aware of people’s worries and concerns and are able to exploit them.”
The far right have no actual answers, he says. “We need to really stamp out racism because we have much bigger fish to fry in my opinion, with the rise of artificial intelligence and climate change and billionaires who will absolutely be glad to see you work 20 hours a day and live in a cardboard box.”
He believes everyone needs to sit down every now and again to analyse their assumptions. He did this in his early 20s, he says. “I had been saying really nasty things to myself. I was telling myself ‘I’m not enough’. The term that was used for mixed race people was ‘half-caste’, a very derogatory term. ‘Caste’ comes from the Latin for ‘pure’. So you’re calling yourself ‘half pure’. When you’re describing yourself as half of anything, you’re telling yourself that you’re not enough of something. So when I was able to sit with myself and go, ‘Hold on, why am I saying this to myself? Why am I saying these things? Why am I upsetting myself? What if I’m able to be both Irish and Senegalese? What about if I’m 100 per cent both? And then all of a sudden, I went from being only half of one thing to being two things.”
He wants this sense of secure healthy identity for all young people. He is a proud Irish man, and he has an expansive and inclusive notion of Irishness. “Ireland has the potential to change the world,” he says. “We recognise what we went through during the Great Hunger. We recognise what we went through during the Troubles and we want to make sure, through things like Irish aid and our peacekeeping forces that these things don’t happen to others ... That’s why we all need to be owning our story, telling our story, using our story to empower us in the spaces that we can. It’s the message I hope to send to young people: You belong. You have the power to change things that you’re unhappy with, and we can create a better world for all of us.”
Mixed Up: An Irish Boy’s Journey to Belonging is published by Little Island
