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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

‘we are here because you were there’.

Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences.

Eugenicists argued that those with desirable qualities should be encouraged to reproduce, while those without should be discouraged.

1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects. The country’s

In the 1970s, police officers often wielded a section of the then archaic 1824 Vagrancy Act. The section in question gave the police the power to stop, search and arrest anyone they suspected might commit a crime. This Vagrancy Act came to be known as ‘sus laws’ (taken from wording of the Act that described a ‘suspected person’). Because the police didn’t keep statistics on those they were stopping under the Act, it’s difficult to know just how many people were bothered by the police for the crime of not looking respectable.

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.

Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be cruel, vindictive and prejudiced. Everyone has the capacity to be nasty to other people, to judge them before they get to know them. But there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on the kind of grand scale it currently operates at against black people. Are black people over-represented in the places and spaces where prejudice could really take effect? The answer is almost always no.

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.

I think that there is a fear among many white people that accepting Britain’s difficult history with race means somehow admitting defeat.

Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity. Those who are repeatedly struck by racism’s tendency to hinder their life chances are told to toughen up and grow a thicker skin.

reading Harry Potter’s Hermione as black is a whole different ball game. It brings to light the incredibly racialised language of blood purity used in the wizarding world, of mudbloods and purebloods. This is terminology that could have been easily lifted straight from Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Hermione’s parents were muggles after all, and that is how states and scientists have categorised races and fuelled racism – as though some heritages are contagious and are spread through lineage and blood.

A black or mixed-race Hermione enduring spat-out slurs of ‘mudblood’ from her peers, plucked from her parents, told she’s special and part of a different race altogether, might be very keen to assimilate, to be accepted. No wonder she tried so hard. No wonder she did her friends’ homework, and was first to raise her hand in class. She was the model minority.

The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character.

This line of thought demonstrates a real struggle to identify with black humanity in any conceivable way. To them we are an unidentifiable shifting mass, a simplistic, animalistic herd. They don’t believe that black characters have the capacity to be sophisticated like James Bond, or intelligent like Hermione Granger. But those of us who aren’t white have been subjected to having to identify with the lives of white main characters since film began.

White people are so used to seeing a reflection of themselves in all representations of humanity at all times, that they only notice it when it’s taken away from them.

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.

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.

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.

The phrase white working class plays into the rhetoric of the far right. Affixing the word ‘white’ to the phrase ‘working class’ suggests that these people face structural disadvantage because they are white, rather than because they are working class.

These are newly regurgitated old fears of white victimhood, fears that suggest that the real recipients of racism are white people, and that this reverse racism happens because of the unfair ‘special treatment’ that black people receive.

When Margaret Thatcher said in 1987 that there was no such thing as society, she solidified a national feeling that it was individual ambition alone that would allow a person to get on in life.

It feels like a cliché to say, but if anyone feeling resentful about their immigrant neighbours took the time to talk to them and find out a bit about their lives, they would almost certainly find that these people do not have everything handed to them on a plate, but instead are living in poor, cramped conditions, likely having left even worse conditions from wherever they’ve moved from.

Years before this country had a significant black and immigrant presence, there was an entrenched class hierarchy. The people who maintain these class divisions didn’t care about those on the bottom rung then, and they don’t care now. 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.