Thread by @akirasarika08, Years ago on brown Twitter, this clip from 'Bend it Like Beckham' [...]

Years ago on brown Twitter, this clip from 'Bend it Like Beckham' circulated. It was the scene where Jess is upset about being called a paki and her Irish coach Joe comforts her by saying he knows how she feels, and the girl who was recording this starts laughing at this point.

I don't remember who she was, but I wanna say she was American? But this scene became a big joke and everyone on Twitter laughed at the white boy saying he'd experienced racism - but if those people knew how England had treated the Irish, would this still have been as funny?

Irish people have historically been treated like scum in this country - might not be because they have a different skin colour, but it was there. "No Blacks, no Irish" signs were commonplace postwar, and more anti-Irish sentiment was high during the Troubles that ended as

recently as 1998. And India isn't the only former British colony to have experienced a famine as a result of British rule.

I think that 'Bend it Like Beckham' is a great film that anyone can watch, but you're going to get the most value out of it if you understand the

cultural context behind it. Yes, that means north Indian/Punjabi/Sikh culture, but it also means Britain and understanding this aspect of it. If you aren't familiar with British history then yeah, this scene is just a stupid white boy trying to get sympathy for a non-existent

problem. But he *also* carries ancestral pain. I think some people will take issue with me defending him, but I think that brown Twitter did him dirty and he didn't deserve to be treated that way. It's *not* unimaginable for him to have experienced racism, this film came out in

2002 and the Good Friday Agreement ending the Troubles was in 1998, and he's a 20-something in the film. His line probably carried more weight in 2002 than it does now, and people around my age either weren't born or don't remember the conflict, so of course it won't hold the

same meaning for us.

If you look at the history, there's a lot of similarities between Indian and Irish indepedence struggles - India took inspiration from Ireland, such as boycotting. We're not that different, and I think it adds a nice layer to the scene. Let's not forget the

fact that Ireland was ALSO partitioned on religious lines!! But it does piss me off when ignorant people laugh at him just because he's white, and they don't know better. I didn't know better either, so I probably retweeted it at the time because I really feel peer pressure on

this site and I hate it, but now that I've done a History degree and educated myself, I want to address this because it's not okay. We're all colonial legacies, and yes a white Irish person might benefit from white privilege in 2020 Britain, but the ancestral pain is there and

it's real! The discrimation existed for CENTURIES, and POC know it doesn't go away overnight. And I haven't even touched on Irish people being used as indentured servants across the British Empire, so please know: this shit really runs deep, and this is me claiming

Twitter justice for Joe.

Thanks for making it to the end, I didn't mean to go off this much lol. Here's some links to wider reading, if you're interested:

- https://bit.ly/3f74zDa
- https://bit.ly/2P0aKOQ
- https://bit.ly/3g3nNee

The Belfast blindspot: How Britain still doesn’t get Northern Ireland

Few predicted that the Irish border would become the defining issue of Brexit – but then again, the British media never really understood the Troubles.

https://bit.ly/3f74zDa

In case you can't see the last link, it's here: https://bit.ly/3g3nNee

The Belfast blindspot: How Britain still doesn’t get Northern Ireland

Few predicted that the Irish border would become the defining issue of Brexit – but then again, the British media never really understood the Troubles.

https://bit.ly/3g3nNee

You can follow @akirasarika08.

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