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Gerry Adams defends N-word tweet Gerry Adams defends N-word tweet
(about 2 hours later)
Gerry Adams has defended using the N-word in a tweet about film Django Unchained in which he compared the struggle against slavery in the US to the plight of Irish nationalists. The Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, has come under fire for using the N-word in a tweet while watching Quentin Tarentino’s Django Unchained movie about racism and slavery in America.
The Sinn Féin president said he had either been misunderstood by those who had taken offence at his use of the term, or they were misrepresenting the post. Adams later deleted the tweet but one of the few black Irish republicans from the Sinn Féin leader’s West Belfast base also criticised Adams for comparing nationalists in Northern Ireland to the plight of black American slaves.
The offending tweet about the Oscar-winning Quentin Tarantino film appeared on his profile late on Sunday night. A frequent user of Twitter, Adams tweeted on Sunday night: “Watching Django Unchained - A Ballymurphy Nigger!”
It said: “Watching Django Unchained - A Ballymurphy Nigger!” Although the tweet was removed swiftly it provoked a furious reaction on the social media site. He followed it shortly with another tweet in which he said the first comment was ironic. The use of the N-word has provoked a storm of controversy in Ireland and beyond but Adams insisted in a subsequent tweet he was using the word ironically.
Any1 who saw Django would know my tweets&N-word were ironic.Nationalists in Nth were treated like African Americans.Any1 who saw Django would know my tweets&N-word were ironic.Nationalists in Nth were treated like African Americans.
The republican later issued a statement in which he said that attempts to suggest he was a racist were “without credibility”. In a statement, he said any attempt to accuse him of racism was “without credibility.” In his long career at the top of Sinn Féin Adams has been welcomed by notable black political leaders from Jesse Jackson in the United States to Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
He said: “I am opposed to racism and have been all my life. Adams said: “The fact is that nationalists in the north, including those from Ballymurphy, were treated in much the same way as African Americans until we stood up for ourselves.
“The fact is that nationalists in the north, including those from Ballymurphy, were treated in much the same way as African Americans until we stood up for ourselves.
“If anyone is genuinely offended by my use of the N-word they misunderstand or misrepresent the context in which it was used. For this reason I deleted the tweets.”“If anyone is genuinely offended by my use of the N-word they misunderstand or misrepresent the context in which it was used. For this reason I deleted the tweets.”
Adams said that anyone who had seen the film – which stars Jamie Foxx as the emancipated protagonist, Django, and Christoph Waltz as his ally – and was familiar with the plight of nationalists in the north until recently “would understand the tweet was not meant to insult”. One of the few black Irish republican prisoners to be held in the Maze prison, Tim Branigan said he was shocked Adams had used the word.
He said: “My tweets about the film and the use of the N-word were ironic and not intended to cause any offence whatsoever.” “Gerry and Sinn Féin won’t need me to tell them just how toxic it is and the sort of reactions it gets.
“I don’t think that you can equate what was happening in Belfast in 1965 with slavery,” Branigan said.
Alex Attwood, the SDLP candidate for West Belfast and former Stormont minister, said the tweet demonstrated a “staggering deficiency in judgment” by the Sinn Féin president.
“For years now Sinn Féin have embarrassingly tried to portray Gerry Adams as some kind of international icon. It was only in March that Gerry Adams was comparing himself to Rosa Parks [the black civil rights activist who refused to sit in the black section of a segregated bus in the American Deep South.]”
“If a similar remark had been made by any other political leader on this island, Sinn Féin would have unleashed an orchestrated wave of angry condemnation. They would not accept any talk of context or of irony. They should hold themselves to the same standard,” Attwood said.
During the Troubles Irish republicans including Adams associated themselves with the struggle for black liberation not only in the United States but in post-colonial states particularly in Africa. The IRA and Sinn Féin maintained strong links with the African National Congress and one of the ANC’s leaders became part of the team that oversaw the decommissioning of most of the Provisionals’ arsenal in the early 2000s.
Sinn Féin activists have also been involved in grassroots anti-racist campaigns in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Martin McGuinness as deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland paid a personal visit to a group of Roma families who were subjected to a campaign of racist violence in south Belfast just under a decade ago.
However, the party, alongside other more militant republicans, continues to revere one of the most controversial figures in 19th century Irish republicanism, John Mitchel.
The Newry-born Fenian fled Ireland to the United States where he became a slave-owner and active backer of the Confederate cause. Even after the Confederacy was defeated in the American Civil War Mitchel continued to argue for the re-introduction of the African slave trade.