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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  One thing is consistently clear to me: writing about race taps into a desperate thirst for discussion from those who are affected by the issues. In a way, I can understand that desperation, that feeling of thirst. It’s why I started writing. I got into political commentary because I wanted to change that consensus, to widen the narrow confines of political ideas that were deemed acceptable. But over the years I have realised both the necessity and futility of this job. Attempting to challenge the racism deemed acceptable in political discussion is tacitly tolerated, but making white people feel uncomfortable is impermissible.

  If you keep up with news and current affairs, you’ll find that every day there’s a new reason to justify no longer talking to white people about race. There is so much injustice, and there are so many reasons to keep your despair about it to yourself. You might see it, but you won’t dare speak it, for fear of social sanctions. Since I wrote a blog post declaring that I no longer wanted to talk to white people about race, I have come to realise that I’m not alone in my despair. I have come to realise that there are thousands fighting this battle every day. People who want to dismantle racism don’t need to be persuaded or cajoled.

  I know that, at first, talking about race is uncomfortable, because too many white people are angry and in denial. And I understand that after white people begin to get it, it’s even more uncomfortable for them to think about how their whiteness has silently aided them in life. A lifetime learning to empathise with white people’s stories means that I get it. But I don’t want white guilt. Neither do I want to see white people wasting precious time profusely apologising rather than actively doing things. No useful movements for change have ever sprung out of fervent guilt.

  Instead, get angry. Anger is useful. Use it for good. Support those in the struggle, rather than spending too much time pitying yourself. Unlike white people, people of colour don’t often ask me for advice on what I think they should do to fight racism. Instead, they ask me if I have any good strategies for coping. I don’t have any magic formulas, but I’m a big advocate for setting boundaries when needed. Surround yourself with people who you can draw strength from. If you need to stop talking to white people about race, don’t feel guilty about it. Rest and recharge, so that you’re ready to do your anti-racist work in a sustainable way. I don’t want anyone of any race, when faced with the insurmountable task of challenging racism, to collapse into despondency. As a long-time depressive I know how much it can paralyse, how the feeling of hopelessness works to utterly crush creativity, and passion, and drive. But those are the three things that we will definitely need if we’re ever going to end this injustice. We have to fight despondency. We have to hang on to hope.

  In a world where blunt, obvious acts are just the tip of the iceberg of racism, we need to describe the invisible monolith. Now, racism can be found in the way a debate is framed. Now, racism can be found in coded language. Attacking racist frame, form, functions and codes with no words to describe them can make you feel like you are the only one who sees the problem. We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything.

  In a conversation about structural racism, a friend of mine once made a point that was both glaringly obvious and painfully elusive. Structures, she said, are made out of people. When we talk about structural racism, we are talking about the intensification of personal prejudices, of groupthink. It is rife. But rather than deeming the current situation an absolute tragedy, we should seize it as an opportunity to move towards a collective responsibility for a better society, taking account of the internal hierarchies and intersections along the way.

  It doesn’t have to be like this, and the solution starts with us. Racism’s cultural reach is so pervasive that we must take up the mantle of changing our workplaces and social circles ourselves. Often in these conversations, someone will pipe up to say in order to win, we need unity. But I think that if we wait for unity, we’ll be waiting for ever. People are always going to disagree about the finer points of progress. Waiting for unity is just inviting inertia.

  So, a word to those who feel the weight of racism, who keenly feel the effects of how it suffocates kindness, and generosity, and potential. How it is slowing down the world we live in. We cannot escape the legacies of the past, but we can use them to model our future. The late Terry Pratchett once wrote ‘there’s no justice. Just us.’ I can’t think of any other phrase that best sums up the task ahead.

  It’s on your shoulders and mine to dismantle what we once accepted to be true. It’s our task. It needs to be done with whatever resources we have on hand. We need to change narratives. We need to change the frames. We need to claim the entirety of British history. We need to let it be known that black is British, that brown is British, and that we are not going away. We can’t wait for a hero to swoop in and make things better. Rather than be forced to react to biased agendas, we should outright reject them and set our own. Most importantly, we must survive in this mess, and we do that any way we can.

  If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it’s up to you. You don’t have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn’t access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.

  AFTERMATH

  This book is nothing without the political climate that greeted it.

  The events of 2016 caused a state of shell shock for progressives across the western world. It began with Britain voting to leave the European Union – a symbol of continental unity – in June 2016, and ended with the election of an unqualified, unpredictable opportunist, Donald Trump, in November of that year. Among progressive circles, it felt like we spent the beginning of 2017 agonising over Trump and Brexit. If we weren’t agonising, we were using these electoral gains as a reason to organise, a point to stand against. Because these seemingly unexpected political gains happened in both Britain and America, they dominated conversation. But they were part of a political trend that was totally encompassing Europe – a lurch to the far right. We should have seen it coming.

  Almost a decade on from the global financial crisis, during which the vast majority of people had been living with prolonged financial insecurity, an old kind of politics emerged. Brutal, punitive strong man values were back on the agenda. The resurgence of the fascist, violently anti-immigrant group Golden Dawn in Greece, a country hit hard by the financial crash, was testament to this; by 2015, Golden Dawn had become the country’s third largest political party, with far reaching tentacles in the judiciary and police force. Late 2015 saw Switzerland's anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party win the biggest share of vote in the federal election. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far right Party for Freedom topped political opinion polls in 2016. The same year saw Sweden’s white nationalist Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazism, become the country’s third biggest political party. In France’s 2016 presidential election, Marine Le Pen and her far right party Front National were so successful that they made it into the final round of a two candidate race, losing with a 34 per cent share of the vote. The unstoppable tide of European far right electoral gains also took place in Cyprus, Denmark, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Italy, Greece and Hungary. Their archaic, regressive values were demonstrated in the success of Finland’s Finns Party, who won second place in the 2015 election. According to the BBC, their 2011 manifesto suggested that young white Finnish women turn away from education to concentrate on providing the next generation of Finnish workers – thereby circumventing any need for immigrant labour.1 In the white nationalist revolution, a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

  These politicians grasped at public opinion amid the backdrop of the catastro
phic migrant crisis, reaching its worst in 2015. A vicious civil war in Syria saw almost five and a half million of the country’s population registering abroad as refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency. But across Europe, governments were largely ambivalent to their needs. Some helped. Germany took in a million refugees in 2015. Other countries were less giving. Rather than extending an arm of compassion, in 2016, Hungary’s government published a booklet suggesting that allowing migrants to settle would endanger the country’s culture and traditions.2 Angela Merkel was harshly criticised for her compassion by far right political party Alternative for Germany, and their berating of her helped them climb in the polls.

  It felt like everywhere, public opinion was veering towards hostility. The drawbridges came up and the atmosphere turned sharp. Every country was full, and every country had to look after their own. The world had turned inward. Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous. Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched. And how desperate could they really be if some of them had mobile phones?

  Racism has always been on my mind, but I recognise that that’s not always been the case for other people of colour in Britain. That changed after the Brexit vote. British citizens were told to ‘go home’, while visitors on visas were told by sneering ill-wishers that their time here was up. Nigel Farage of UKIP seemed to be on the television constantly, pretending to be representative of the average Brit while clutching a pint in a pub, or standing in front of a campaign bus declaring Britain had reached breaking point because of migration. In the United States, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement had gone global, with the new technology of smartphones shining a harsh light on long running injustices inflicted by law enforcement onto black communities, the blurry footage posted on social media, igniting the righteous rage of a new generation of activists. America was barely impacted by the refugee crisis, but it didn’t stop Donald Trump describing Mexicans as the creeping ‘black threat’ I’d discussed in chapter 4, using his presidential campaign to call for building a wall to keep them out (the infamous quote: ‘They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’3). Meanwhile, fringe hate website Breitbart settled into the heart of global power when Trump appointed executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist shortly after Trump was elected president. Nigel Farage boasted about meeting with Trump4, and Marine Le Pen was spotted in Trump Tower5. Not only was the malignant political force of the far right – considered defeated after World War Two – making a triumphant comeback, but it appeared to be forming allegiances.

  The whole thing was a horror show. The same ideologies I had taken to task in the book were happening in real life. White genocide theory, inherent to the ideology of the far right, was back. Every far right electoral gain was paired with ethno-nationalism and accusations that migrants and refugees were threats to national unity. In chapter 4, I’d written about fear of a black planet and the inherent misogyny of white nationalism – then Finland’s far right swept into power with their eyes on white women’s wombs. I’d written about multiculturalism becoming a dirty word, of scaremongering and white victimhood – and suddenly these political strategies were all a part of our politics, enveloping our everyday chat. Brexit and Trump were two electoral blows to progressive politics that loosely sandwiched two years of despair.

  In chapter 6, I had analysed how a council in north east London had de-prioritised the needs of social housing tenants as an example of how race and class were intricately linked. Just two weeks after the publication of this book, I, and the rest of the country, watched in hopelessness and mourning as seventy-one residents of Grenfell Tower were incinerated in their own homes. Survivors of the fire lost family members and everything they owned. It was a sickening case study of some of the most marginalised people in Britain: working class people, immigrant families, white pensioners with disabilities, foreigners, school children, recent migrants, people who had made England their home for decades. The death toll took so long to determine that the country identified the victims from the makeshift missing person posters plastered across west London. Transfixed by 24-hour rolling news, I wondered how local government could have failed these people so catastrophically. It was eerie to have made an analysis of race, class and social housing so close to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to watch the de-prioritising of human lives that I identified in the book play out on television in a burning high rise building. I feel guilty even now drawing links to it, an overtly political tragedy that I want to be wary of politicising lest I trample insensitively over heartbreak.

  All of the above: this was the climate that the book entered the world into. My thinking on race had remained consistent for half a decade, and was considered wildly radical back in 2012. But by 2017, the politics of the western world had changed drastically. People were looking for answers – a balm to soothe, or an antidote to fight back.

  My initial aim with this book was simple. I wanted to change the national conversation about race. By the time the book was published, the stars had aligned in such a way that people were ready for it. At the turn of 2017, I was full of apprehension about how it would be received. I had decided, with encouragement from my editor, to stick to the same title as the original blog post. It was important to me to be totally honest with readers about that initial flash point of frustration and despair. I knew things were about to get real when I saw the draft book cover. Greg Heinemann, Bloomsbury’s design wizard, had, on reading the blog post, translated the words into an image that couldn’t be more suited. When I posted the cover to social media, roughly a year before publication, the shares were out of control, and the anticipation was palpable. Much of this response was thanks to that cardinal sin – judging a book by its cover. At the very least it says ‘this has not been written by a white person’. At the very most, it says to white audiences ‘this is not for you’. And, like a red rag to a bull, the attention came in droves. It enthralled some, and sent others into a rage. In amongst the praise were early signs of ire from white people; some lectured me about segregation, or told me that Martin Luther King Junior would never approve of my work. Others admonished me for my prejudice.

  Passionate responses to the way this book looks have never really slowed down. I’ve heard stories from booksellers who have had the book on display in their window, and stories from readers who have read my book on their daily commute. In every instance, a white person tried to start an argument with them about what they were reading or selling. This was the scenario an east London bookseller relayed to me after I visited her shop to sign some books. An elderly white man had entered the shop, saw the book in the window, and, shaking with rage, proceeded to make a scene at the counter, angry because ‘it wouldn't be allowed the other way round’. ‘He was so angry, I couldn’t speak to him’, she told me. Then there was the young black man who, on reading the book in public, had to endure the displeasure of a white woman approaching him to let him know that the book he was reading ‘really didn’t help the conversation’. White middle class people can be particularly calculated with their discomfort. I have had a lot of people working on the periphery of the book – booksellers, photographers, producers – earnestly tell me that my work is provocative. ‘It’s very controversial, isn’t it?’ they’ll ask, over and over again, in the space of a thirty minute conversation. ‘Is it?’ I’ll respond. ‘Have you read it?’ ‘No’, they will inevitably say.

  Beyond the public’s gut reaction to the cover, I was keen to see if the content of the book would have an impact on Britain’s discussion on race. It’s never not scary to present your ideas to the public, ready to be picked apart. But the initial reactions were positive. A day before the book published, a four-thousand-word extract was printed in the Guardian. My inbox filled with reader reactions
, from heartfelt and reflective to the utterly confusing. One person recommended that I take up yogic flying, assuring me that once I learnt how to levitate, racism might not bother me anymore. But beyond the absurd was a trend. I watched white people reflect on the dynamics of their own lives, and start to consider how race had shaped it. I watched as the book dislodged a pressure valve for readers of colour, who told me that it had given them the confidence to give up on a belligerent friend, or have a difficult conversation with a boss.

  The first event for the book took place at London’s Southbank centre, three months before publication – a conversation between myself and journalist Hannah Pool. My throat constricted in anxiety as I watched the queue to enter the venue snake down the stairs half an hour before it was due to begin. My friends in the audience told me afterwards that the atmosphere was ‘electric’. After forty-five minutes of me discussing my frustrations with white people centring their feelings, we opened up to questions. A white woman raised her hand, began to talk, and promptly burst into tears. I had seen it coming, had heard her voice begin to wobble. She felt terrible about all of this, she said. She had considered self-harm. She didn’t know what to do. Gritting my teeth, I cut her off mid-monologue and confidently asserted that wallowing in despair would not get us anywhere. As I felt the pressure mount on me to steer the atmosphere of the room, I realised I was about to become responsible for a lot of people’s feelings.

  So much of touring this book has involved the regulating of other people’s feelings. At book events there have been happy tears, guilty tears, laughter and rage. There has been a tendency for audience frustration to be aimed at whatever heritage venue has been hosting me – legitimate anger at the fact that this is one of the few times these institutions have properly engaged with the topic. There have been inspiring children and teenagers in the audience, genuinely giving me hope for the future. There has been in-real-life trolling in the form of a man who turned up to an event alone, ignored everything I said, and proceeded to follow me around after the book signing was finished, not allowing me to sit quietly or eat in peace, hurling question after question until my publicist told him to go away.