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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  Speaking on national radio, Cameron let it be known that alongside dedicated funding for Muslim women in what he called ‘isolated communities’ to learn English, the plans would also come with compulsory language tests for these women within two and a half years of them arriving in Britain. As surreal as it was to hear David Cameron challenging a patriarchal society, it wasn’t surprising that his idea of patriarchy was described in direct opposition to our own advanced, so-called egalitarian and meritocratic British sense of self.

  When we tell ourselves that misogyny is simply an import from overseas, we are saying that it’s just not a problem here. David Cameron probably shouldn’t be too quick to insinuate that extreme misogyny is a foreign import to the British Isles. When the Office of National Statistics shows that, on average, seven women a month in England and Wales are murdered by a current or former partner,13 and 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year,14 we know that this is simply not the case. Misogyny is not a problem that can be solved with closed borders, nor a crash course in Received Pronunciation. It exists in the psyche of what it means to be a man in every country.

  Despite this truth, it was the idea that multiculturalism brings with it a corrosive sexism and misogyny that was touted after mass sexual assaults took place on New Year’s Eve of 2015 in Cologne, Germany. The same angle emerged when a child sexual exploitation ring run by Asian men was uncovered in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, in 2013. In 2012 and 2013, the phrase ‘Asian sex gang’ occupied what seemed like a million headlines. The far right loves this Asian sex-gang angle. To them, the women are their property, the women are ‘ours’. But the reality is that if every Asian man left the country, child sexual exploitation on British Isles would not go away.

  There is a race aspect to these incidents that can’t be ignored, and acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate any condemnation of grooming, abuse and misogyny. A lot of the time, being a black feminist situates you between a rock and a hard place, challenging the racism you see targeted at black and brown people and also challenging the patriarchy around you. And while the endless tug of war of political debate demands clear rights and wrongs, this topic desperately requires nuance.

  What is undeniable is that Western beauty ideals and Western objectification of female flesh focuses heavily on whiteness and on youth. White female flesh is commoditised in the public eye all the time. If black and brown flesh is ever included in these forums, it’s often considered a novelty – perhaps described as ‘ebony’, ‘chocolate’ or ‘caramel’, sometimes approached as taboo. Amid the No More Page 3 campaign was the little-referenced point that black Page 3 girls rarely exist, presumably because some media didn’t believe that black and brown women are beautiful enough to bother objectifying. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, often in entertainment and media in which creative control is designed to pander to the needs of black and brown men.

  Let’s look at how racialised bodies sit inside an understanding of sex and sexual abuse in a world drunk on overwhelming whiteness. Racist beauty ideals encourage a culture of certain types of female flesh being considered publicly available. After two Pakistani men were jailed in 2011 for raping and sexually abusing young white girls, it seemed like Jack Straw, former MP for Blackburn, took on the language of the abuser when he said that white girls were seen as ‘easy meat’ for Asian rapists. Speaking on BBC Newsnight, he said, ‘These young men are in a Western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.’15 There was pushback on his comments from other politicians, but the objections started and ended with indignation that Straw was stereotyping an entire community.

  What was missed was how Jack Straw not only echoed abusers, but also failed to challenge their language. First he indulged in the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse, as though fizzing and popping with testosterone is a precursor to violating another human being’s body. It never is, yet this pervasive belief excuses abuse and coercion as simply youthful curiosity. His second error was fairly simple: women are not flesh to be consumed. Women aren’t objects, passive and docile and open and waiting. There is something so insidious about this language of food and flesh, one that suggests that men must eat as much meat and fuck as many women as possible in order to be the manliest. In our gender relations, ‘meat’ strips women of basic bodily autonomy, asserting that we are only ever on the menu, and never at the table.

  This, plus a feeling of public piety around the hijab, the niqab, and covered black and brown female flesh in particular, makes for a toxic combination. The modesty expectation is just as limiting and judgemental as the compulsory bikini-body one. Both obsessively focus on a woman’s looks and how covered or uncovered her body is in determining her value, as though her body belongs to a male gaze before it belongs to her. There are always external factors influencing the way a women dresses, but the ultimate decision should be her own. All the while, in the case of the aforementioned abuses, the voices of poor white women and girls; and the voices of black and brown women and girls are denied any agency. This is not simply a question of patriarchy; it’s a manifestation of the virgin/whore dichotomy that spans across postcodes, countries and cultures.

  We cannot effectively destroy this kind of exploitation without attacking pervasive cultural messages, at home and away, that tell men that women’s bodies are always up for the taking. As long as women are groped on public transport, masturbated at in the street, and as long as female flesh stares dead-eyed and pouty-lipped from millions of images advertising goods as banal as exercise supplements and hooded jackets, we will have a misogyny problem.

  As we challenge racist, Islamophobic stories regarding sexual abuse, we’ve also got to challenge patriarchy where we find it. One cannot be done effectively without the other. At present, the conversation about misogyny that has reached the highest levels of government has maintained that it is a foreign import. This is disingenuous and it is done to pull the wool over our eyes. Feminist activists would be foolish to ally with political forces that only ever speak in defence of women when there are Muslims to bash.

  So, we know that as much as the subject needs nuance, groups of white men who rape and abuse children and babies are reported on by the press, but their crimes are not seized upon as indicative of the inherent problem with men in the same way that men of colour’s crimes are held up as evidence of the savagery of their race. When an organised gang of seven white men were found guilty of raping and abusing children (or conspiring to) in April 2015, the far right did not co-opt the story as evidence that we should deport all men from the country. The seven men, who were scattered across the UK, communicated online and streamed abuse to each other using conference-call technology. All the while, they were embedding themselves in their separate communities and grooming the parents of the children they were preying on. One even befriended a pregnant woman with a view to abusing her unborn baby. According to the BBC’s reporting on the cases, officers from the National Crime Agency called the crimes the most ‘vile and depraved’ they’d ever seen. These white men’s crimes didn’t get an affix of their race in the consequent headlines.

  We as a nation hate paedophiles. We malign them because they are paedophiles. But crucially, we see them as anomalies. We don’t think that their actions are because of the deviancy of white men. When white men target babies, children and teenagers for sexual gratification, we don’t ask for a deep reflection on these actions from the white male community.

  This isn’t about good men or bad men – binary notions that we feel comfortable enough with to slot into neat boxes – but about rape culture. We should be asking why, when children and women speak up about being raped or sexually assaulted, there are always people around them who bend over backwards to try and find ways to suggest that she incited or invited it. We should
question the class prejudice that allowed white, poor victims to be ignored by the authorities in a way that would be less likely to happen to a middle-class white girl raised in Islington. Class assigns your life with a correspondent value in the eyes of gatekeepers. The taboo in discussing these crimes isn’t about race, it is about men. Predatory men. Every woman who has ever been a teenage girl could tell you a tale about an encounter with a predatory man, men who smell youth and vulnerability, and seek only to dominate.

  Far from shutting down debate, incorporating the challenges of racism is absolutely essential for a feminist movement that doesn’t leave anyone behind. I’m not sure our most popular versions of feminism are currently up to that task.

  I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it. Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we’re in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

  The mess we are living is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. Beyond the obvious demands – an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap – feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren’t inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.

  I understand that these demands are utopian and unrealistic. But I think feminism has to be absolutely utopian and unrealistic, far removed from any semblance of the world we’re living in now. We have to hope for and envision something before agitating for it, rather than blithely giving up, citing reality, and accepting the way things are. After all, utopian ideals are as ideological as the political foundations of the world we’re currently living in. Above everything, feminism is a constant work in progress. We are all still learning.

  I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men. But it needs to be the whole package, to take into account every aspect of what writer bell hooks called ‘the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. Feminism doesn’t work well as a polite, gender-only analysis that is neat and unchallenging enough to be accepted in corporate environments. It has failed when it works as an unwittingly exclusive movement that isn’t self-aware enough to recognise where its participants benefit from the current system. At the point in which feminism has become a placidly white movement that claims to work on behalf of all women, but doesn’t question its own overwhelming whiteness, we really need to think about starting again.

  Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they attempt to address. The question is: who do we want to be equal to? Men, like women, are not homogeneous. The Chancellor of the Exchequer leads a very different life to the postman who pushes letters through my front door every day. He has had access to vastly different opportunities in his life than his governmental counterpart. He probably wasn’t born into wealth, and his parents probably couldn’t stump up the cash to get him into an elite private school that would buy him upper-class entitlement for the rest of his life. Men inhabit different spaces. Some face racism. Some face homophobia. Even if we as feminists decide to put the differences between men aside, does equality demand parity with people who have always had a disproportionately large share of resources?

  It’s clear that equality doesn’t quite cut it. Asking for a sliver of disproportional power is too polite a request. I don’t want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don’t wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The onus is not on me to change. Instead, it’s the world around me.

  Equality is fine as a transitional demand, but it’s dishonest not to recognise it for what it is – the easy route. There is a difference between saying ‘we want to be included’ and saying ‘we want to reconstruct your exclusive system’. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream.

  There is such stigma attached to speaking up and being a woman, let alone speaking up, being a woman, and being black. When, in 2013, model Naomi Campbell lent her voice to a campaign dedicated to getting more models of colour on the runways of Fashion Week (the statistic at the time was that 82 per cent of Fashion Week models were white), she was confronted by a Channel 4 News reporter who told her ‘you have a reputation, rightly or wrongly, for being quite an angry person.’16

  The angry black woman cannot be reasoned with. She argues back. She is not docile, sweet or agreeable, like expectations of white femininity. Her anger makes her ugly and undesirable. It’s for that reason she’ll never find a husband, and if she does, she will emasculate him. Emasculation as a concept is one that requires the rigid upholding of sexist gender roles. The angry black woman stereotype wields misogyny as a stick to beat black women over the head with. That angry black women appear to emasculate men is sexist because it makes assumptions about the characteristics of men that inevitably limits the scope of their humanity. To believe in emasculation, you have to believe that masculinity is about power, and strength, and dominance. These traits are supposed to be great in men, but they’re very unattractive in women. Especially angry black ones. Women in general aren’t supposed to be angry. Women are expected to smile, swallow our feelings and be self-sacrificial. Bossy is ugly, and of course, the worst thing a woman could ever be is ugly. As black women, our blackness already situates us further along the ugliness scale. God forbid we be fat.

  The ‘angry black woman’ phrase says more about maleness and whiteness than it does about black women. It speaks to a status quo that recognises its own simultaneous suffocating dominance and delicate fragility – of the reality of its increasing irrelevance over time, and a compulsive need to stop that looming change.

  I used to be scared of being perceived as an angry black woman. But I soon realised that any number of authentic emotions I displayed could and would be interpreted as anger. My assertiveness, passion and excitement could all be wielded against me. Not displaying anger wasn’t going to stop me being labelled as angry, so I thought: fuck it. I decided to speak my mind. The more politically assertive I became, the more men shouted at me. Performance artist Selina Thompson told me that when she thinks of what it means to be an angry black woman, she thinks of honesty. There is no point in keeping quiet because you want to be liked. Often, there will be no one fighting your corner bu
t yourself. It was black feminist poet Audre Lorde who said: ‘your silence will not protect you.’ Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us.

  6

  RACE AND CLASS

  In the time that I’ve spent writing and publicly speaking about race, I’ve become familiar with one particular question. ‘What about class?’ It’s a question that follows me everywhere I go. In it is an implication that it’s class, not race, that is the true battle to be fought in Britain – and that we have to choose between one or the other. I totally reject this assumption. But I’m going to try and answer the question. What about class? And how does it relate to race – if it does at all?

  In Britain, class is integral to how we understand our own position in society. Since the Victorian times, we have confined ourselves to one of three categories – working class, middle class, or upper class. We’ve understood class in a Marxist fashion, using a person’s relationship to the means of production as a defining factor. The saying goes that if you’re paid by the hour and you rent your home, then you’re working class, and if you’re paid monthly and you own your home, you’re middle class. But we no longer have a country full of factories, mines and mills with rigid structures of workers and bosses. I grew up in a generation defined by watching people older than me benefit from seemingly endless credit, so the demarcation between rich and poor was hard to spot. By the time I was twelve, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he wanted to see 50 per cent of young adults in higher education by the year 2010. Going to university was no longer a clear indication of class. In my generation, your first job was likely to be on a shop floor, in catering, or in a call centre. The language of blue-collar and white-collar workers never really resonated. Post-2008 recession, these categories have become even more blurred as job security for most became a dream rather than a reality.