Why the Irish Called Black People Blue

Emma Dabiri on hair, history, and why the Black/white binary is a design choice, not a fact of life.

Emma Dabiri wrote a book about hair. Except it wasn't about hair. Don't Touch My Hair used braiding as a trapdoor into 6,000 years of African philosophy, pre-colonial constructions of time, and the question of who gets to name things, and what happens to the things that get named wrong.

That argument has driven every book she has written since. The new one, Born to Be Blue, begins with a discovery in the Irish language: that people racialized as Black were traditionally called not Black but blue, after the iridescence of light on a dark surface.