Daniel August,
hip-hop/R&B artist

Music was a way out for me. A way to express the pain and confusion I felt growing up in my teens; it allowed me to find and accept my identity as a person of colour in Northern Ireland. Growing up most times as the only Black child in the room was hard. I felt pressure placed from my peers, as if I was singlehandedly supposed to represent my entire race. This was due to the fact that there wasn’t much multicultural diversity, and most of what my peers understood of what it was to be Black, was based off what they ingested from popular media.

It made it difficult to try and find my own identity, not only as a Jamaican, but also as an Irish man. The growth of multiculturalism in Ireland as a whole, while it still has a long way to go, has helped put me in fewer situations where I feel this way. So now, there’s less ignorance and more of an acceptance and willingness to learn about different cultures. Even before that, music allowed me to express my angst – but it also allowed me to mix the Jamaican culture I had left with the Irish culture I was growing up in.

It allowed me to form and create my own identity – one I could not only be proud of, but one I could wholeheartedly say was me.

Read Part 2 of 100 Voices: #AllAgainstRacism in the current issue of Hot Press:

Special thanks to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission for their support in this project.