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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  The projection of an ever-encroaching black doomsday is what I call ‘fear of a black planet’. It’s a fear that the alienated ‘other’ will take over. Enoch Powell’s fears of a flipped script have lived on in modern-day political rhetoric on immigration. When, in the run-up to the 2015 general election, the Labour Party released official merchandise which included a mug that read ‘controls on immigration’, they played into that fear. Some insist that we are living on a tiny island and it’s time to shut the doors. There is a worry the ever-disappearing essence of Britishness is being slowly eroded by immigrants whose sole interest is not to flee from war or poverty, but to destroy the social fabric of the country.

  The fear takes on many guises. We hear it in the form of ‘concerns about’ immigration, touted by political parties in recent general elections. We hear it in the form of ‘preserving our national identity’. At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn’t represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilisation.

  It seemed borderline paranoid when UKIP’s Nigel Farage2 expressed a nervousness at hearing fellow passengers speak different languages in his train carriage. In a 2014 speech, he said, ‘The fact [is] that in scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable. Whether it is the impact on local schools and hospitals, whether it is the fact in many parts of England you don’t hear English spoken any more. This is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren.’3

  Decades after Enoch Powell’s speech, and the fear of a black planet has in no way subsided. The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you. And, in the spirit of 1980s-style political blackness, ‘immigration concerns’ are less about who is black, and more about who isn’t white British.

  In campaign literature for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the Vote Leave campaign wrote that ‘there were 475,000 live births to mothers from other EU countries between 2005 and 2014, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Manchester to the population.’4 This was cloaked in a conversation about the ‘strain’ immigrants put on the NHS, but I’ve heard this discussion before. In the US, the phrase ‘anchor baby’ is used in the pejorative sense to admonish US-born children of immigrants. It suggests a takeover. Britain is not innocent of this kind of punitive talk. In 2016, one hospital began considering passport checks for non-emergency patients – including pregnant women – before they received treatment.5 In more campaign literature before the referendum, posters from UKIP read: ‘We want our country back: Vote to Leave’.6 The last time I heard the slogan ‘we want our country back’ was in my university town, when far-right group the English Defence League were staging a protest about what they called the ‘Islamification’ of Britain. Now, another form of the phrase – ‘taking our country back’ – is used as a strapline by Britain First. An IPSOS Mori poll published days before the EU referendum vote confirmed that immigration was the top issue for would-be leave voters.7 What was once fringe is now mainstream.

  This is nothing new. For a long time now, far-right political groups have hijacked the anti-colonial struggles of native people in America and Australia to create a story of the embattled indigenous white British, under siege from immigration. Around the same time the English Defence League were marching through my university town, a group of my friends crowded into my student bedroom to watch former British National Party leader Nick Griffin on BBC Question Time. I watched in disbelief as he said: ‘No one here would dare go to New Zealand and say to a Maori “what do you mean indigenous?” You wouldn’t dare go to North America and say to an American Red Indian “what do you mean indigenous? We’re all the same.”’ He continued: ‘The indigenous people of these islands, the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh . . . it’s the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aboriginals here . . . The simple fact is that the majority of the British people are descended from people who’ve lived here since time immemorial. It’s extraordinarily racist, it is genuinely racist when you seek to deny the English. You people wouldn’t even let us have our name on the census form. That is racism. And that’s why people are voting British National Party.’

  It seemed to be that for Nick Griffin, accommodating difference was akin to erasing white Britishness. The comfort of white privilege blinds him to the fact that he is part of the majority and that he is already catered for. In his Question Time monologue, Griffin appealed to that British sense of fairness to conjure images of an embattled white minority under attack, losing control of their heritage and culture. Even more insultingly, he used the struggles of black and brown people who were colonised, raped and beaten by white British people to preserve white British culture.

  Because of British defamation laws, you can get into hot water if you publish something that harshly criticises someone without giving them the right to reply in the same piece of work. I think that a book detailing British racism would be remiss to overlook the vast influence Nick Griffin and the British National Party has had in how we talk about race today. So I found myself in the position of trying to get in contact with Nick Griffin, a man who, throughout my lifetime, has openly attacked the idea of people like me being truly British, and who represented a party that held policies stating that my mixed-race family is an abomination.

  Having been in the same position a few years before me, an editor I work with gave me his address. I wrote Mr Griffin a letter. He replied the next day, agreeing to speak to me. I suggested meeting at my publisher’s offices. He declined, saying he hardly ever goes to London, as it’s ‘largely a foreign country’. We agreed to speak on the phone the next day.

  I was very worried throughout this whole process, but I chose to use my own mobile number to call him, in an effort to be as open and honest as possible. I needed the interview, after all, and acting suspicious or withholding information was not going to help with that. But I’d handed over my personal phone number to one of the most infamous British far-right leaders in the last fifty years. If he so wished, he could make my life a living hell with a few keystrokes. He could choose to post my number online. I knew it was something he’d done before – posting the address of a gay couple online back in 2012.8 My only security was that we both had something over each other – I had his number and email address. So I took the risk. Our conversation was so surreal that I publish it here in full.

  REL: Back in 2009, you said something along the lines that white British people are an ethnic minority in Britain. Do you still think that?

  NG: Not are. Will become.

  Why do you think white people will become an ethnic minority in Britain, then?

  It’s simply a demographic fact. If you want to go and look, I’d look at Professor Coleman from Oxford University. He’s probably Britain’s leading demographer. Using government figures, not my figures, he said some years ago we’d be a minority in our own country by the end of this century at the latest. That was at present trends, but of course, present trends have got worse. So there’s simply no doubt about it. Not just Britain, but the whole of Western Europe.

  But currently in Britain, 81.9 per cent of the population is white British, don’t you think that’s a bit far-fetched?

  No, that’s how demographics works. The British population is very large compared to the others, you’re right. But if you look at the age differences between the populations, and the British population is significantly made up of two waves of baby boomers who, over the next twenty years, are going to die off at
an incredible rate . . . It’s going to go up. Whereas the age profile of a number of the immigrant populations is much younger, therefore they’ll have more children. You’re not arguing with me, you need to go and argue with Professor Coleman. He’s a leading demographer in the world, and you and I aren’t. What he says is true. There’s really no doubt about it.

  Why do you think that his projections are bad news, then?

  I regard that as a racist question. Because no white person would dare to go to, say, Nigeria, if Nigeria was being flooded with Chinese, and say ‘Why do you think it’s a bad idea that Nigeria should cease to be Nigeria?’ It’s self-evident that all the peoples of the world have a right to remain the dominant people, culturally and ethnically, in their own homeland. Anyone who says otherwise, just because we happen to be Europeans, is a racist.

  I see. So I’m a racist then.

  No, no, I’m not saying you’re a racist. It’s in saying that, with that point of view. [If you’re happy to] have fewer rights than Nigerians, then you’re a racist. If you’d be absolutely happy for Nigerians to become Chinese, then you’re not a racist, you’re just mad.

  This was many years ago, so please do clarify for me, [but] is it true that the BNP had a policy, or had some sort of statement on the website, saying no to mixed-race relationships?

  Yes.

  Is that an idea that you share?

  I think that it’s unfortunate when people are wiped out by a vast amount of racial integration. Muhammad Ali said exactly the same thing. I think that either nature or God made people separate, unique and wonderful, all of them, then it’s a shame if we’re all simply obliterated into one indistinguishable mass all over the world. It’s a pity. Having said which, it’s not for any state to determine who falls in love with who.

  So do you think that the white British population is under attack from immigration and mixed-race relationships?

  I think that the identity of all the peoples of Europe is under threat from mass immigration, integration, and mixed-race relationships, which aren’t in fact happening just because it’s a natural thing, but because they’re constantly promoted by every element of the mass media as a good thing. It’s a deliberate policy, it’s very very clear. If you go back to Coudenhove-Kalergi, the man who founded the European Union, he was openly saying in 1926 that the idea [was to] obliterate the nations of Europe in constitutional terms but also the peoples who made them. Through mass immigration and mass assimilation. Socially engineered assimilation, that’s what’s happening. We’re under attack. Not by immigrants, but by an elite who want to use immigrations to obliterate the nations of Europe.

  I’m pretty sure it was British government policy, particularly in the post-war period, to actually bring over people from the Commonwealth for labour reasons. Don’t you think it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that these people who sometimes have been asked, and sometimes have been ruled by Britain . . . if they come over to get their piece of the pie, why is that unfair?

  It’s wrong because of the effect it has on Britain. I’m not blaming the immigrants. You’re quite right, if the government support them, if senior civil servants have encouraged people. It’s the people who control the mass media, the big corporations, big business that wants cheap labour, to undermine the power of organised unionised labour. They’re the people to blame, not the immigrants.

  Why do you pinpoint mass media when a lot of our media in Britain – I mean it’s owned by a few people, you’re right there – but we have a lot of tabloid media that is quite explicitly anti-immigration.

  We do indeed. It’s explicitly anti-immigration. But it generally happily goes along with the genocidal implications of mass immigration. So it’s certainly not a nationalist media. And in terms of the media that really influences how people think and what they do, there is no comparison between print media, and what people see. It’s the power of the Hollywood films, it’s the power of the television news, particularly the power of the soap operas. These are the things which are particularly effective at changing how people view the world and what they do. A newspaper, however it reports the news, is in print. It doesn’t have anything like the power of the broadcast media. It’s the fact that the broadcast media, run by a tiny handful of people and directed by a very small interest group that all want the same thing, they’re the ones who really have the effect. Forget the Daily Mail, it’s the soap operas that decide how people work in their heads.

  When you say they all want the same thing, what is it that you think they want? Because I work in the media, and it’s very white – British journalism is something like 96 per cent white. These newsrooms and places are not particularly multicultural.

  No, no, no, they’re not, but they’re part of the hypocrisy of the liberal elite. They want the ordinary working class to enjoy the tremendous diversity and benefits of mass immigration that goes with it. But they don’t want it for themselves, do they? They don’t want it for their kids. The Rupert Murdochs of this world want power and they want wealth, and they don’t want anyone to challenge it. The whole corporate, the 1 per cent around the world, they are well aware they are looting our public services, the resources. It used to be that colonialism and the looting was done by the West in the Third World. The looting is now of the corporations of all of us, and they’re well aware that sooner or later, any sovereign, any European people that still has its identity intact, they can say we’ve had enough of the looting, we’re taking it all back. So the only way to make sure the looting is permanent is to get rid of the peoples who otherwise would say we’re having a revolution.

  Do you think that by Britain accommodating difference, people from different races and cultures, that that is akin to erasing white Britishness?

  In small numbers, no. But that is the aim and it’s the inevitable result of large numbers, yes.

  My parents are from a [former] Commonwealth country, and I’ve got a British passport. Born and raised here. When you say these things, you may pinpoint the elite as spreading an agenda and what not, but it does tend to make someone like me feel quite unwelcome. There’s many, many second-generation immigrants who feel very British.

  You’re quite young, I would recommend that you get the hell out of this country and you go and have kids somewhere decent, probably somewhere connected with your own heritage, because Britain is, to be crude, utterly fucked.

  Nick Griffin is an extreme example, but he voices the same fears that are evident in the low-level grumblings and resentment of some British people who are resistant to change. They spend their time yearning for a nostalgic Britain that never was.

  Fear of a black planet maintains that people of colour are unfairly vying for precious, rationed and scarce resources, and that having more people of colour in these positions of power might instigate a drastic tipping of the scales. To some, every time a new curry house opens, every polski sklep that opens, and every time Sainsbury’s expands its ethnic food aisle, it’s a symbol that white Brits are sleepwalking into new minority status. Some start boycotting halal meat on cruelty grounds, as though there are varying degrees of acceptable animal death they’ll withstand for the benefit of eating their burgers. Fear of a black planet is a fear of loss.

  Another incarnation of the fear reveals a deep-seated discomfort with anti-racist talk and protest. Couched in the pernicious frame of ‘freedom of speech’, it materialises when a person with anti-racist values voices their disgust at something racist. They will then be told that their sheer objection to it actually inhibits freedom of speech.

  Late 2015 saw the rise of a British Rhodes Must Fall movement. Inspired by similar protests from students in South Africa’s University of Cape Town, students at Oxford University set their sights on removing a statue of colonial businessman Cecil Rhodes on their university campus. As well as founding mining company De Beers Consolidated Mines (eventually diamond purveyors De Beers), Cecil Rhodes played a key part in expanding the British Empire in South Afric
a, based on the belief that the British were ‘the finest race in the world’. His colonial project displaced Africans from their land. The country we now know as Zimbabwe was once named Rhodesia, after Rhodes. The country’s citizens attempted to resist British rule, and paid with their lives. For many, Rhodes was the father of South African apartheid. When he lived in Britain, he attended Oxford’s Oriel College, and a statue of him still stands there today. It was in 2015 that students studying at the university let it be known loud and clear that they wanted that statue gone.

  A national debate about whether the statue should fall ensued. The black student protesters were accused of being undemocratic. ‘Cecil Rhodes was a racist,’ read one headline, ‘but you can’t readily expunge him from history.’ That was a strange conclusion to draw, because campaigning to take down a statue is not the same as tippexing Cecil Rhodes’ name out of the history books. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign was not calling for Rhodes to be erased from history. Instead they were questioning whether he should be so overtly celebrated. The campaign’s opponents – who included Lord Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University – said that by exercising their democratic right to protest, the students were actually impinging on freedom of speech. By making a fuss, disrupting the everyday, and pointing out the problem, they had become the problem. Somehow, it wasn’t believable that Lord Patten simply wanted free and fair debate and a healthy exchange of ideas on his campus. It looked like he just wanted silence, the kind of strained peace that simmers with resentment, the kind that requires some to suffer so that others are comfortable.