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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience.

So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?

In a tutorial, I distinctly remember a debate about whether racism was simply discrimination, or discrimination plus power. Thinking about power made me realise that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances.

This was history only available to people who truly cared, only knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study.

‘I wanted an anti-racist approach to it. Because the problem is not a black problem. It’s not my culture, not my religion that is the problem. It is the racism of the white institutions.’

This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin.

Most importantly, the report described institutional racism as a form of collective behaviour, a workplace culture supported by a structural status quo, and a consensus – often excused and ignored by authorities.

We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Representation doesn’t always mean that the representer will work in the favour of those who need representation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. Challenging it can have real social implications. Because it’s a many-headed hydra, you have to be careful about the white people you trust when it comes to discussing race and racism. You don’t have the privilege of approaching conversations about racism with the assumption that the other participants will be on the same plane as you. Raising racism in a conversation is like flicking a switch. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person you’ve just met, or a person you’ve always felt safe and comfortable with. You’re never sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.

Racism does not go both ways. There are unique forms of discrimination that are backed up by entitlement, assertion and, most importantly, supported by a structural power strong enough to scare you into complying with the demands of the status quo. We have to recognise this.

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.

white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

‘Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’10

Race consciousness is not contagious, nor is it inherited.

And I was like, yes, but racism is more than a one-off incident. It’s about the world you live in, and the way you experience your environment.

Being accountable for that, really only to myself. Doing things when there’s nobody there to see it, because it’s not really about somebody witnessing it or patting me on the back for it.’

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.

This ‘freedom of speech’ fight can hardly even be called a debate. Instead, it is one-sided, with the powerful side constantly warping the terms of engagement. Couching opposition to anti-racist speech and protest as a noble fight for freedom of speech is about protecting white people from being criticised. It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism.

the only way to foster any shared solidarity is to learn from each other’s struggles, and recognise the various privileges and disadvantages that we all enter the movement with.

In black feminists, we used the word intersectionality to talk about the crossover of two distinct discriminations – racism and sexism – that happens to people who are both black and women.

That led to intersectionality, looking at the ways race and gender intersect to create barriers and obstacles to equality.’

White feminism in itself isn’t particularly threatening. It becomes a problem when its ideas dominate – presented as the universal, to be applied to all women. It is a problem, because we consider humanity through the prism of whiteness. It is inevitable that feminism wouldn’t be immune from this. Consequently, white feminism enforces its position when those who challenge it are considered troublemakers. When I write about white feminism, I’m not reducing white women to the colour of their skin. Whiteness is a political position, and challenging it in feminist spaces is not a tit-for-tat disagreement because prejudice needs power to be effective.

White women seem to take the phrase ‘white feminism’ very personally, but it is at once everything and nothing to do with them. It’s not about women, who are feminists, who are white. It’s about women espousing feminist politics as they buy into the politics of whiteness, which at its core are exclusionary, discriminatory and structurally racist.

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.

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.

There isn’t any evidence to suggest that if ‘my kind’ all ‘go back to where we came from’ life would get any better or easier for poor white people. The same systems and practices that lead to class hierarchy would still stand.

But immigration blamers encourage you to point to your neighbour and convince yourself that they are the problem, rather than question where wealth is concentrated in this country, and exactly why resources are so scarce.

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.

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.