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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  Despite its utterly inoffensive nature, the idea of implementing the Rooney rule in British football sent the nation into a spin. Chairman of Blackpool FC Karl Oyston called it ‘tokenism’ and ‘an absolute insult’ to people in the sport.21 Carlisle United manager Keith Curle essentially called it a box-ticking exercise.22 Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, introduced plans to develop a pool of black coaches instead, and called the Rooney rule unnecessary.23 The way it was spoken about, you’d think that the FA’s plans weren’t suggesting having one person of colour on an interview shortlist, but instead were asking team heads to walk into their local supermarket and offer their most high-level jobs to the first random black person they saw in the vegetable aisle. In 2016, the English Football League opted to put forward proposals to implement the Rooney rule on a mandatory basis. The Premier League chose not to entertain the idea even on a voluntary basis.24

  Around the same time as Britain’s Rooney rule conversation, a similar debate was taking place in the business sector. Then Business Secretary Vince Cable tabled plans to diversify business boards, announcing an aim of 20 per cent black and ethnic minority FTSE100 directors in just five years. Research in the same year found that over half of FTSE100 companies didn’t have a single person of colour at board level.25 With the conversation about boardrooms previously focusing solely on a very white version of gender, Cable’s intervention was refreshing. But, again, there was pushback against the idea, with the director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, telling the Telegraph: ‘Businesses seek to appoint board members on the basis of competence. They may not always make good decisions but there is little sign of systematic racial prejudice at the top of British business.’26

  In 2015, a debate pondering the possibility of quotas to secure an increased number of women and people of colour judges prompted senior judge Lord Justice Leveson to announce to a lecture hall that the idea was entirely demeaning. ‘Creating a principle of appointment not because of merit but in order to achieve gender or ethnic balance’, he told his audience, ‘will inevitably lead to the inference that those appointments are most decidedly not based on merit alone.’27 Although it was established in 1875, the High Court only welcomed its first black judge, Dame Linda Dobbs, in 2004. She was born in Sierra Leone, received her legal education in Britain, and was called to the bar in 1981. In an interview with video archive First 100 Years, she detailed some of the discrimination she faced, saying, ‘It was difficult to complain about things in those days. There were no procedures. None of that was recorded, so to try and prove that, you know, you were discriminated against was very difficult indeed.’28 Dame Linda Dobbs retired from the High Court in 2013. In 2015, just 7 per cent of judges across courts and tribunals were black or from an ethnic minority background.

  When it comes to women, lack of representation prompts calls for all-out quotas. A 2015 London School of Economics report called for gender quotas in all senior public and private positions. When a survey in the same year showed that less than 20 per cent of senior managers in the City of London were female, women in the financial sector began calling for quotas to tackle the over-representation of men.29 And when surveyed in 2013 over half the women working in construction – many of whom were working in companies where women were just 10 per cent of the workforce – supported the idea of quotas.30

  But when it comes to race, the language used to raise awareness of similar issues is much less definitive. Instead of talk of quotas – where progress can be measured with numbers – the solutions posed are vague. The head of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills suggested positive discrimination in teaching recruitment in 2015, stressing that the ethnic mix of teachers should reflect the pupils they teach.31 When he was head of the Greater Manchester Police, Sir Peter Fahy called for a change in equality legislation so that police constabularies could use positive discrimination when hiring black police officers, but he was sure to let it be known that it wasn’t about ‘targets’.32 It seems that the root of the problem of both the under-representation of race and gender is essentially the same, but the solutions proposed for each are radically different. When there are no hard targets behind programmes of positive discrimination, initiatives are in danger of looking like they’re doing something without actually achieving much.

  Positive discrimination initiatives are often vehemently opposed. Descriptions of the work addressing the over-representation of whiteness inevitably reduce it to tokenism, nothing more than an insult to the good hard-working people who get their high-ranking jobs on merit alone. Whenever I do the panel-event circuit, meritocracy and quotas tend to be an issue that rests heavily on audiences’ minds. The main questions asked are: is it fair? Do quotas mean that women and people of colour are receiving special treatment, getting leg-ups others can’t access? Surely we should be judging candidates on merit alone? The underlying assumption to all opposition to positive discrimination is that it just isn’t fair play.

  The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

  Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because, if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men. Those who insist on fairness fail to recognise that the current state of play is far from fair. When pressed on lack of representation, some like to cite the racial demographics in Britain, saying that because the minority of the population isn’t white, that percentage and that percentage only should be represented in organisations. This mathematical approach is the true tokenism. It is an obsession with bodies in the room rather than recruiting the right people who will work in the interests of the marginalised. Representation doesn’t always mean that the representer will work in the favour of those who need representation.

  In the interests of honesty, I must disclose that there was a time when I thought efforts to increase black representation were suspicious. I didn’t understand why there was a need for it. I could never understand why, growing up, my mum had also instructed me to work twice as hard as my white counterparts. As far as I was concerned, we were all the same. So when she forwarded me an application form for a diversity scheme at a national newspaper when I was at university, I felt angry, indignant, and ashamed. At first I resisted applying for it at all, telling her, ‘If I’m going to compete against my white peers, I’m doing it on a level playing ground.’ After some cajoling on her part, I applied, got through to the interview stage, and eventually landed the internship.

  A few things were apparent to me from the outset when working there. At the interview stage, I was one of the few applicants who weren’t currently studying at, or a graduate of, Oxbridge. Then, during the internship itself, I quickly understood why it was needed in the first place. To me at the time, internship schemes looking for specifically black and minority ethnic participants seemed fundamentally unfair, but once I got through the door, the black faces working there were more likely to be doing the catering or cleaning than setting the news agenda. Moreover, back then, it was rare for internships to be formalised at all. Until fairly recently, medi
a internships had been running on word of mouth and nepotism, relying on someone who knew someone who knew someone. If you didn’t have someone in your family, friendship group or extended network who was in the profession, or you weren’t prepared to work for free, you were cut out. I worked on a shop floor for months so I could afford to work unpaid for three weeks, and my family lived in London, so my living expenses were minimal.

  It was in that moment that I had to reluctantly accept that pushes for positive discrimination were not about turning the whole place black at the expense of white people, but instead were simply about reflecting the society an organisation serves.

  Structural racism is never a case of innocent and pure, persecuted people of colour versus white people intent on evil and malice. Rather, it is about how Britain’s relationship with race infects and distorts equal opportunity. I think that we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don’t see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don’t want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie, the aforementioned drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it’s not being practised.

  When we live in the age of colour-blindness, and fool ourselves with the lie of meritocracy, some will have to be silent in order for others to thrive. In 2014 I interviewed black feminist academic Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw, she elaborated on the politics of colour-blindness. ‘It’s this idea that to eliminate race, you have to eliminate all discourse, including efforts to acknowledge racial structures and hierarchies and address them,’ she said. ‘It’s those cosmopolitan-thinking, twenty-first-century, “not trying to carry the burdens of the past and you shouldn’t either” [people]. Along with them are people who consider themselves left, progressive and very critical, who in some ways join up with the post-racial liberals and colour-blind conservatives to say, “if we really want to get beyond race, we have to stop talking race”.’

  Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism. It starts and ends at ‘discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad’, without any accounting for the ways in which structural power manifests in these exchanges. With an analysis so immature, this definition of racism is often used to silence people of colour attempting to articulate the racism we face. When people of colour point this out, they’re accused of being racist against white people, and the accountability avoidance continues. Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.

  Repeatedly telling ourselves – and worse still, telling our children – that we are all equal is a misdirected yet well-intentioned lie. We can just about recognise the overt racial segregation of old. But indulging in the myth that we are all equal denies the economic, political and social legacy of a British society that has historically been organised by race. The reality is that, in material terms, we are nowhere near equal. This state of play is violently unjust. It’s a social construct that was created to continue racial dominance and injustice. And the difference people of colour are vaguely aware of since birth is not benign. It is fraught with racism, racist stereotyping, and for women, racialised misogyny.

  White children are taught not to ‘see’ race, whereas children of colour are taught – often with no explanation – that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed. There is a disparity here. Colour-blindness does not get to the root of racism. Meanwhile, it is nigh-on impossible for children of colour to educate ourselves out of racist stereotyping, though if we accumulate enough individual wealth, we can pretend that we are no longer affected by it.

  Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon – earned or not – because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.

  3

  WHAT IS WHITE PRIVILEGE?

  When I was four, I asked my mum when I would turn white, because all the good people on TV were white, and all the villains were black and brown. I considered myself to be a good person, so I thought that I would turn white eventually. My mum still remembers the crestfallen look on my face when she told me the bad news.

  Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected. Those who are coded as a threat in our collective representation of humanity are not white. These messages were so powerful that four-year-old me had already recognised them, watching television, noticing that all the characters who looked like me were criminals at worst, and sassy sidekicks at best.

  How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the negative consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost, an absence of ‘less likely to succeed because of my race’. It is an absence of funny looks directed at you because you’re believed to be in the wrong place, an absence of cultural expectations, an absence of violence enacted on your ancestors because of the colour of their skin, an absence of a lifetime of subtle marginalisation and othering – exclusion from the narrative of being human. Describing and defining this absence means to some extent upsetting the centring of whiteness, and reminding white people that their experience is not the norm for the rest of us. It is, of course, much easier to identify when you don’t have it, and I watch as an outsider to the insularity of whiteness. I coveted whiteness once, but I knew in the back of my mind that conning myself into assimilation would only ever make me a poor imitation of what I would never be.

  You might be surprised to learn that it was a white man who first gave white privilege a name. Theodore W. Allen was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. In his adulthood he was active in the trade union movement. Deeply affected by the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, his reading of black writers like W. E. B. Du Bois led him to start exploring what he called ‘white-skin privilege’. His was an anti-capitalist perspective on race in the labour movement. In 1967, riffing on the civil rights movement’s much-used phrase ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, he wrote ‘. . . the injury dealt out to the black worker has its counterpart in the privilege of the white worker. To expect the white worker to help wipe out the injury to the Negro is to ask him to oppose his own interests.’1

  To some, the word ‘privilege’ in the context of whiteness invokes images of a life lived in the lap of luxury, enjoying the spoils of the super-rich. When I talk about white privilege, I don’t mean that white people have it easy, that they’ve never struggled, or that they’ve never lived in poverty. But white privilege is the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.

  White privilege is one of the reasons why I stopped talking to white people about race. Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me. The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency. It is par for the course in a world in which drastic race inequality is responded to with a shoulder shrug, considered just the norm.

  We could all do with examining how the system unfairly benef
its us personally. A few years back, confronted with a four-hour round trip of a commute, I found that the only way to keep costs down and still make it to work was to get the train halfway, and cycle for the rest of the journey. An uncomfortable truth dawned on me as I lugged my bike up and down flights of stairs in commuter-town train stations: the majority of public transport I’d been travelling on was not easily accessible. No ramps, no lifts. Nigh-on impossible to access for parents with buggies, or people using wheelchairs, or people with mobility issues, like a frame or a cane. Before I’d had my own wheels to carry, I’d never noticed this problem. I’d been oblivious to the fact that this lack of accessibility was affecting hundreds of people. And it was only when the issue became close to me that I began to feel infuriated by it.

  I have to be honest with myself. When I write as an outsider, I am also an insider in so many ways. I am university-educated, able-bodied, and I speak and write in ways very similar to those I criticise. I walk and talk like them, and part of that is why I am taken seriously. As I write about shattering perspectives and disrupting faux objectivity, I have to remember that there are factors in my life that bolster my voice above others.

  Racism is often confused with prejudice, and is sometimes used interchangeably. It’s another retort wielded against anti-racists, who have to listen to those who wish to undermine the movement muster up outrage about discrimination against white people because they are white. Some black people hold a burning hatred for white people, they will say, and it’s unacceptable. It’s ‘reverse racism’, they insist. Prejudice is real across communities of colour. Years ago, buying myself a lunch of Caribbean food, I was greeted by a smiling owner behind the counter who waited until his white customers had left before confiding in me that he saves the best cuts of meat for ‘people like us’. Yes, that man was prejudiced. Yes, my lunch was delicious. No, the owner of the cafe couldn’t possibly affect the life chances of his white customers with his feelings against them. All he could affect in any terms was their lunch.