Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  On 4 January 2012, nineteen years after Stephen’s death, two out of the five suspected men were finally found guilty and sentenced for his murder. When Gary Dobson and David Norris killed Stephen, they were teenagers. By the time Dobson and Norris were jailed, they were adult men, in their mid- to late-thirties. While Stephen Lawrence’s life was frozen at eighteen, theirs had continued, unhindered, in part aided by the police.

  Both men received life sentences. When passing the sentence, Judge Mr Justice Treacy described the crime as a ‘murder which scarred the conscience of the nation’. It was a monumental day for Britain, if long overdue. Many were wondering how the police had failed so catastrophically, and why justice took so long.

  I was three years old when Stephen Lawrence died, and I was twenty-two when two of his killers were convicted and jailed. Doreen Lawrence’s struggle for justice stretched out alongside the timeline of my childhood. Reports of the Stephen Lawrence case were some of the only TV news I remember absorbing as a child. A vicious racist attack, a black boy stabbed and bleeding to death, a mother desperate for justice. His death haunted me. I began to lose faith in the system.

  I used to have a feeling, a vague sense of security in the back of my mind, that if I returned home one day to find my belongings ransacked and my valuables gone, I could call the police and they would help me. But if the case of Stephen Lawrence taught me anything, it was that there are occasions when the police cannot be trusted to act fairly.

  For so long, the bar of racism has been set by the easily condemnable activity of white extremists and white nationalism. The white extremists are always roundly condemned by the big three political parties. The reactionary white pride sentiment, so often positioned in opposition to social progress, has never really gone away. It manifests in the ebb and flow of groups like the National Front, the British National Party and the English Defence League. Their political activity, whether it is storming down busy city streets in hoodies and balaclavas, or suited up and feigning respectability at their political conferences, has real-life consequences for people who aren’t white and British.

  If all racism was as easy to spot, grasp and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple. People feel that if a racist attack has not occurred, or the word ‘nigger’ has not been uttered, an action can’t be racist. If a black person hasn’t been spat at in the street, or a suited white extremist politician hasn’t lamented the lack of British jobs for British workers, it’s not racist (and if the suited politician has said that, then the racism of his statement will be up for debate, because it’s not racist to want to protect your country!). Then there’s the glaringly obvious point – if white extremism really is the bar at which we set all racism, why and how does racism thrive in quarters in which those in charge do not align themselves with white extremist politics? The problem must run deeper.

  We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power. When swathes of the population vote for politicians and political efforts that explicitly use racism as a campaigning tool, we tell ourselves that huge sections of the electorate simply cannot be racist, as that would render them heartless monsters. But this isn’t about good and bad people.

  The covert nature of structural racism is difficult to hold to account. It slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy. You can’t spot it as easily as a St George’s flag and a bare belly at an English Defence League march. It’s much more respectable than that.

  I appreciate that the word structural can feel and sound abstract. Structural. What does that even mean? I choose to use the word structural rather than institutional because I think it is built into spaces much broader than our more traditional institutions. Thinking of the big picture helps you see the structures. Structural racism is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with the same biases joining together to make up one organisation, and acting accordingly. Structural racism is an impenetrably white workplace culture set by those people, where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure. Structural is often the only way to capture what goes unnoticed – the silently raised eyebrows, the implicit biases, snap judgements made on perceptions of competency. In the same year that I decided to no longer talk to white people about race, the British Social Attitudes survey saw a significant increase in the number of people who were happy to admit to their own racism.4 The sharpest rise in those self-admitting were, according to a Guardian report, ‘white, professional men between the ages of 35 and 64, highly educated and earning a lot of money’.5 This is what structural racism looks like. It is not just about personal prejudice, but the collective effects of bias. It is the kind of racism that has the power to drastically impact people’s life chances. Highly educated, high-earning white men are very likely to be landlords, bosses, CEOs, head teachers, or university vice chancellors. They are almost certainly people in positions that influence others’ lives. They are almost certainly the kind of people who set workplace cultures. They are unlikely to boast about their politics with colleagues or acquaintances because of the social stigma of being associated with racist views. But their racism is covert. It doesn’t manifest itself in spitting at strangers in the street. Instead, it lies in an apologetic smile while explaining to an unlucky soul that they didn’t get the job. It manifests itself in the flick of a wrist that tosses a CV in the bin because the applicant has a foreign-sounding name.

  The national picture is grim. Research from a number of different sources shows how racism is weaved into the fabric of our world. This demands a collective redefinition of what it means to be racist, how racism manifests, and what we must do to end it.

  It seems like black people face a disadvantage at every significant step in their lives. Let’s say that a black boy starts his first day at school, the first British institution he will pass through independent of his parents. Mum and Dad are full of hope for what he might become – an artist, a doctor, the next prime minister – and this is where he will set himself up to achieve those wished-for goals. But perhaps his parents should temper their excitement, because evidence suggests that the odds will be stacked against him. According to the Department for Education, a black schoolboy in England is around three times more likely to be permanently excluded compared to the whole school population.6 But let’s say that our black boy (and it’s always a boy – there’s little to no research in this area focused on the life chances of black girls) avoids being excluded and makes it far enough into his school journey to take exams. He won’t be explicitly aware of the invisible barriers placed in his way, but they will exist. At the age of eleven, when he is preparing to take his SATs, research indicates that he will be systematically marked down by his own teachers – a phenomenon that is remedied when examiners who don’t teach at his school mark his exam papers.7 It will take anonymity to get him the grade he deserves.

  In the spirit of optimism, let us insist that our imaginary black child gets into a good secondary school, studies a subject he loves, and becomes determined to go to university. The evidence suggests his fortunes might drastically change as a greater proportion of black students than white students progress to higher education after sixth form or college. But, along race lines, access to Britain’s prestigious universities is unequal, with black students less likely to be accepted into a high-ranking, research-intensive Russell Group university than their white counterparts.8

  Perhaps the black child – now blossoming into an adult – has got the grades he needed, and is accepted into a good university, despite the odds being stacked against him. Three years later, and he’s furiously refreshing his university’s results page, eagerly awaiting the degree classification that will be his ticket to graduate employment. He’s hoping for a 2:1 at least, but has his fingers crossed for a 1st – because all th
e job ads he’s browsed so far explicitly mention that graduates with a 2:2 degree or lower shouldn’t waste their time applying.

  Although we don’t want to pour a bucket of water over his dreams, it’s not looking good. Between 2012 and 2013, the highest proportion of UK students to receive the lowest-degree ranking – a third or a pass – was among black students, with the lowest proportion being white students.9 Given that black kids are more likely than white kids to move into higher education, it’s spurious to suggest that this attainment gap is down to a lack of intelligence, talent, or aspiration. It’s worth looking at the distinct lack of black and brown faces teaching at university to see what might contribute to this systematic failure. In 2016, it was revealed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency that almost 70 per cent of the professors teaching in British universities are white men.10 It’s a dire indication of what universities think intelligence looks like.

  Because he exists in this book only to make a point, we can imagine that the young black man makes it out of education in one piece, with a good degree from a good university, and his eyes fixed upon getting a good job, like all determined graduates. Although he won’t know it, outside of education, the drastic racial disparities continue. He might look at the white kids he went to university with and watch them effortlessly transition from student booze-culture-loving lager louts to slick-young-professional status. Full of hope, our black boy will still continue to send out CVs, because he believes in meritocracy. There’s no difference between him and his white peers, he thinks. They sat in the same lectures and read the same books. But his potential employers might not see it that way. In 2009, researchers working on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions sent job applications with similar education, skills and work history to a number of prospective employers. The only distinctive difference in the applications were names – they either sounded white British, or they didn’t. The researchers found that the applicants with white-sounding names were called to interview far more often than those with African- or Asian-sounding names.11 ‘High levels of name-based net discrimination were found in favour of white applicants,’ the report commented.

  So, our young black man could find himself unemployed and scraping by for a very long time. Research in 2012 found that austerity was hitting young black men particularly hard, with their demographic facing a sharp rise in unemployment, predating even the 2008 recession. A staggering 45 per cent of black sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds were out of work in 2012 compared with just 27 per cent in 2002.12 More broadly, ethnic minority people in England and Wales have historically dealt with lower rates of employment and higher rates of unemployment than white people.13 Looking at twenty years of census data between 1991 and 2011, you’ll see that black men have had consistently high rates of unemployment – more than double those of their white counterparts. The same disadvantage is echoed in black Caribbean women and black African women compared to white women.

  There is more to life than getting a good education and a decent job, though. Productivity alone does not make a worthwhile human being. What about our young black man’s social and personal life? On his way to meet friends, or to school or work, he might find himself stopped and searched by the police. In fact, he will almost certainly have some contact with the police. A 2013 British report revealed that black people are twice as likely to be charged with drugs possession, despite lower rates of drug use. Black people are also more likely to receive a harsher police response (being five times more likely to be charged rather than cautioned or warned) for possession of drugs.14 That probably won’t come as a surprise to him, though, and he will be used to the feeling of an overbearing police presence in his life. He will have almost certainly seen his brothers, uncles and older male friends routinely patted down by the police. In fact, relentless policing of the black community in Britain means that black people are over-represented on the National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database. Although there’s no recent official figures, a 2009 report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission estimated that roughly 30 per cent of all black men living in Britain are on the National DNA Database, compared with about 10 per cent of white men and 10 per cent of Asian men. They also estimated that black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the police database. This led the commission to comment ‘. . . we are concerned that the high proportion of black men recorded on the database (estimated to be at least one in three black men) is creating an impression that a single race group represents an “alien wedge” of criminality.’15

  We must hope that, later on in his life, our black man is not adversely affected by health problems, either physical or mental. A 2003 NHS England report confirmed that ‘there is a uniformity of findings that people of African and African Caribbean backgrounds are more at risk than any other ethnic group in England to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals under the compulsory powers of the Mental Health Act’ – that’s being sectioned against your will.16 In the same year, an inquiry into the death of David Bennett, a black man who died in a psychiatric unit, added ‘[black people] tend to receive higher doses of anti-psychotic medication than white people with similar health problems. They are generally regarded by mental health staff as more aggressive, more alarming, more dangerous and more difficult to treat. Instead of being discharged back into the community they are more likely to remain as long-term in-patients.’17 As our imaginary black man gets older, he is less likely to receive a diagnosis of dementia than his white counterparts. If he does, he will receive it at a later stage than a white British person.18

  Our black man’s life chances are hindered and warped at every stage. There isn’t anything notably, individually racist about the people who work in all of the institutions he interacts with. Some of these people will be black themselves. But it doesn’t really matter what race they are. They are both in and of a society that is structurally racist, and so it isn’t surprising when these unconscious biases seep out into the work they do when they interact with the general public. With a bias this entrenched, in too many levels of society, our black man can try his hardest, but he is essentially playing a rigged game. He may be told by his parents and peers that if he works hard enough, he can overcome anything. But the evidence shows that that is not true, and that those who do are exceptional to be succeeding in an environment that is set up for them to fail. Some will even tell them that if they are successful enough to get on the radar of an affirmative action scheme, then it’s because of tokenism rather than talent.

  The statistics are devastating. But they are not the result of a lack of black excellence, talent, education, hard work or creativity. There are other, more sinister forces at play here.

  There are swathes of evidence to suggest that your life chances are obstructed and slowed down if you are born black in Britain. Despite this, many insist that any attempt to level the playing ground is special treatment, and that we must focus on equality of opportunity, without realising that levelling the playing ground is enabling equality of opportunity. This is far from new. Over a decade ago, Neil Davenport wrote in Spiked Online that ‘affirmative action enforces rather than overcomes notions of equal racial abilities’.19 Instead of being seen as a solution to a systemic problem, positive discrimination is frequently pinpointed as one of the key accelerators in rampant ‘political correctness’, and quotas are some of the most hotly contested methods of eliminating homogeneous workplaces in recent years. The method works a little bit like this: senior people in an organisation realise their workplace doesn’t reflect the reality of the world they live in (either because of internal or external pressure), so they implement recruitment tactics to redress the balance. Quotas have been suggested as a strategy in many sectors – from politics, to sport, to theatre – and they always receive a backlash.

  In 2002, America’s National Football League introduced measures to address the lack of black managers in the sport. Named after the NFL’s diversi
ty committee chair Dan Rooney, the Rooney rule worked through a rather mild method of opening up opportunities for people of colour. When a senior coaching or operations position became available, teams were required to interview at least one black or minority ethnic person for the job. This was a shortlist requirement only. Teams were under no obligation to hire said person. The rule wasn’t a quota. Neither was it an all-black shortlist, or a rigid percentage target. Instead, it was an incredibly tame ‘softly softly’ attempt to rebalance the scales. The Rooney rule was implemented a year after it was introduced. A decade after the rule’s implementation, the evidence was showing that it was working. In those ten years, twelve new black coaches had been hired across the States, and seventeen teams had been led by either a black or Latino coach, some even in quick succession. The general consensus was that the sport’s bosses had begun to see candidates that they wouldn’t have previously considered.

  Around the time of the rule’s tenth birthday, its success in the US led to the idea being floated in British football. For some football bosses, it was considered a good way to quell the sport’s ugly history of overt racism, a way to heal the jagged wounds of monkey noises and bananas thrown at black players on the pitch in years past. Then Football Association chairman Greg Dyke gave the idea a nod, confirming to the BBC in 2014 that the FA’s inclusion advisory board were considering some version of the rule. In British football, as of 2015, the numbers on race were pitiful. Despite overall black and ethnic minority representation of 25 per cent in both leagues, there was only one black manager in the Premier League, and just six black managers in the Football League. There were no black managers in Scotland’s top four divisions, and just one black manager in Wales’ Elite League.20