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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

announcing an aim of 20 per cent black and ethnic minority FTSE100 directors in just five years. Research in the same year found that over half of FTSE100 companies didn’t have a single person of colour at board level.

‘Businesses seek to appoint board members on the basis of competence. They may not always make good decisions but there is little sign of systematic racial prejudice at the top of British business.’

achieve gender or ethnic balance’, he told his audience, ‘will inevitably lead to the inference that those appointments are most decidedly not based on merit alone.’27

High Court only welcomed its first black judge, Dame Linda Dobbs, in 2004.

‘It was difficult to complain about things in those days. There were no procedures. None of that was recorded, so to try and prove that, you know, you were discriminated against was very difficult indeed.’28

The head of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills suggested positive discrimination in teaching recruitment in 2015, stressing that the ethnic mix of teachers should reflect the pupils they teach.31

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.

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.

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.

Structural racism is never a case of innocent and pure, persecuted people of colour versus white people intent on evil and malice.

blindness. ‘It’s this idea that to eliminate race, you have to eliminate all discourse, including efforts to acknowledge racial structures and hierarchies and address them,’ she said. ‘It’s those cosmopolitan-thinking, twenty-first-century, “not trying to carry the burdens of the past and you shouldn’t either” [people]. Along with them are people who consider themselves left, progressive and very critical, who in some ways join up with the post-racial liberals and colour-blind conservatives to say, “if we really want to get beyond race, we have to stop talking race”.’

‘discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad’,

Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.

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.

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.

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’.

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 man who first gave white privilege a name.

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.

Racism is often confused with prejudice,

Some black people hold a burning hatred for white people, they will say, and it’s unacceptable. It’s ‘reverse racism’, they insist.

This is the difference between racism and prejudice. There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power.

‘created an atmosphere’.

‘reverse racist’,

White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one.

you have to be careful about the white people you trust when it comes to discussing race and racism.

Raising racism in a conversation is like flicking a switch.

White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know,

It scares you into silencing yourself:

challenging it can have implications on your quality of life.

lose out on job offers

spoken openly and...

“I do wish everyone would stop saying ‘the black community’

“Clarifying my ‘black community’ tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for ‘black community leaders’.”

The official numbers from the House of Commons show that 94 per cent of Members of Parliament are white.5

honestly, as a country, if taking two decades to convict just two of the gang who murdered an innocent teenager was acceptable.

spoken about the fact that racism had only been a political priority for less than half a century.

conversation about riots and race, about ...

how to move forward from Britain’s most fa...

conversation about how to start elimi...

asking each other about the best ...

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.

‘oppressed groups sit at the centre of every discussion, backed by the unquestionable moral weight of their subjective life experience, reinforced by an unaccountable structure of etiquette, which they can use to totally control the flow of discourse.’

‘The total effect is to create an environment in which free discussion of ideas is impossible. Oppressed groups and individuals operate as a form of unassailable priesthood, basing their legitimacy on the doctrine of original sin. To extend the analogy, discussions become confessionals in which participants are encouraged to self-flagellate and prostrate themselves before the holy writ of self-awareness. Shame and self-deprecation are encouraged to keep non-oppressed groups in their place, and subvert the social pyramid of oppression, with oppressed groups at the top.’8

Upset by conversations about white privilege that were happening at the time, left-wing writers drew the conclusion that those affected by racism were actually the most privileged, because talking about the ef...

‘Safe spaces is a direct corollary of the rise of identity politics,’

‘As the essentially economic argument between right and left died down, it was replaced by a culture war in which gender, sexuality and race were at the heart of the discussion.’

Martin Luther King, Jr wanted a world in which people were judged not on the colour of their skin, but the content of their character.

words are best suited to mean that white people should not be judged on the colour of their skin.

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