My attention was gripped by Simon Hattenstone’s article (The Man in the Mirror, Weekend, 7 September) on Anthony Ekundayo Lennon’s struggle to be recognised as a black man of Irish white parents. I suspect that part of the reason for the scepticism about Mr Lennon’s claim to be black is that his parents were Irish, and there is a mistaken notion that Ireland, unlike England, didn’t have a significant black African component in its population in earlier centuries whose genes would be present in the gene pool of people today.
But that is quite wrong. Numbers might not have been as high as in England, but there were almost certainly more than 1,000 Africans in late-18th-century Ireland, and, my research suggests, between 3,000 and 10,000 who were black or mixed-race in the mid-19th century. Therefore many apparently white Irish people today could have African recessive genes in their DNA, and these might be expected to appear in some individuals.
Dr William Hart
Armoy, Co Antrim
• The story of Anthony Ekundayo Lennon is an important one – a man who was assumed to be mixed-race is challenged as white, but proves that he is mixed-race. To look black or white but not to identify as such, to have an identity imposed upon you, is an issue for our time.
Many more people will have dual and multiple ethnicities as the “mixed” population grows. People in Harmony, an organisation supporting mixed-race people, continues to use “mixed race” as the preferred term. We must expect and accept that many more people will self-identify in a way that does not necessarily accord with what others think or see. As a society we need to respect this and ensure we do not make judgments that are inaccurate – and, increasingly, irrelevant.
Dinah Morley
Vice-chair, People in Harmony
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