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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

I would recommend that you get the hell out of this country and you go and have kids somewhere decent, probably somewhere connected with your own heritage, because Britain is, to be crude, utterly fucked.

Fear of a black planet is a fear of loss.

was in 2015 that students studying at the university let it be known loud and clear that they wanted that statue gone.

‘Cecil Rhodes was a racist,’ read one headline, ‘but you can’t readily expunge him from history.’

not the same as tippexing Cecil Rhodes’ name out of the history books.

not calling for Rhodes to be erased ...

criticised. It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism.

Rhodes Must Fall was a small-scale example of what racial injustice looks like in Britain.

When the seventh Star Wars film saw black British actor John Boyega cast as a stormtrooper, a new league of angry people took to social media to call for a boycott of the film, calling it anti-white propaganda.

In the run-up to Christmas 2015, the Internet was polarised by the prospect of a black Hermione Granger. The lead cast had just been announced for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play based on the books, set nineteen years after the seventh book ended. Hermione Granger was to be played by Noma Dumezweni, a black actress of South African heritage. Upon hearing the news, some were ecstatic, but others were outraged.

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.

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.

Fear of a black planet destroys good fiction, and it demonstrates how racism gets in the way of human empathy.

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.

There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women. This is no different.

‘When feminists can see the problem with all-male panels, but can’t see the problem with all-white television programmes, it’s worth questioning who they’re really fighting for.’

Gender equality must be addressed, but race could languish in the corner.

‘What lies at the bottom of the divisions, and why has the phrase “check your privilege” become so popular?’

The overwhelming whiteness of feminism – on a radio-show segment that would have been all white if it wasn’t for my presence – was not considered a problem.

These issues just don’t get the kind of airtime that feminism does in the UK press. Think hard about the last time you heard a person of colour challenge the virulently racist rhetoric around immigration in this country, or just state the plain fact that structural racism prevails because white people are treated more favourably in the society we live in. I was afforded the opportunity to do this live, on national radio. I didn’t take it lightly. After a concerted effort from many a white woman to portray black feminist thought as destructive and divisive, I’m aware that accepting these media requests is a double-edged sword. It was Audre Lorde who said: ‘If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.’ Though it sometimes feels like I am entering into a trap, I’m hyper-aware that if I don’t accept these opportunities, black feminism will be mischaracterised and misrepresented by the priorities of the white feminists taking part in the conversation . . . I’m tired of this tribal deadlock. I meant what I said on the programme: 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.

My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth.

‘To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile . . . any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness,’ it sounded like she was describing my entire existence.

but I had a feeling it was to do with class, education – and latent racism. The feminist circles I’d thrown myself into were almost all white. This whiteness wasn’t a problem if you didn’t talk about race, but if you did, it would reveal itself as an exclusionary force.

‘Yes, but you can grow out your short hair if you want to. I can’t change the colour of my skin to fit this beauty standard.’

‘That work started when I realised that African American women were . . . not recognised as having experienced discrimination that reflected both their race and their gender. The courts would say if you don’t experience racism in the same way as a [black] man does, or sexism in the same way as a white woman does, then you haven’t been discriminated against. I saw that as a problem of sameness and difference. There were claims of being seen as too different to be accommodated by law. That led to intersectionality, looking at the ways race and gender intersect to create barriers and obstacles to equality.’

‘I think that ’twixt de niggers of de South and the women of de North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about? That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? Then they talks ’bout this ting in de head; what this they call it?’ (‘Intellect,’ whispered someone near.) ‘That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or niggers’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?’

‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.’

‘Anger in isolation: a Black feminist’s search for sisterhood’ from the essay collection But Some of Us are Brave, Michele Wallace wrote: ‘We exist as women who are Black who are feminist, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle – because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one has done: we would have to fight the world.’

‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that . . . women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization. It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to reappropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.’

When black feminists started to push for an intersectional analysis in British feminism, the widespread response from feminists who were white was not one of support. Instead, they began to make the case that the word ‘intersectional’ was utter jargon – too difficult for anyone without a degree to understand – and therefore useless.

As the debate intensified on social media, feminists who didn’t comply with this line were routinely monstered in the press.

‘The Online Wimmin Mob takes offence everywhere, but particularly at other women who are not in their little Mean Girls club, which has their own over-stylised and impenetrable language, rules and disciplinary proceedings.’6

‘While the idea is obviously born out of honourable intentions, I believe the whole discourse around privilege is inherently destructive – at best, a colossal distraction, and at worst a means of turning us all into self-appointed moral guardians out to aggressively police even fellow travellers’ speech and behaviour. Why does this matter, you ask? The answer is simple: it matters because privilege-checking has thoroughly infected progressive thought.’7

Between 2012 and 2014, the most spirited takedowns of black women talking about race, racism and intersectionality were always published via the New Statesman, Britain’s foremost centre-left political magazine.

You are first and foremost male, female, other, straight, gay, black

or white and should refer to yourself as such. Martin Luther King should have checked his privilege when he had that nonsense dream of a world where people “will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”.

The trouble is, it has become faddish among people who don’t read books or essays but merely tweets and Internet comments, and thus don’t know what they are talking about.

Women of colour were positioned as the immigrants of feminism, unwelcome but tolerated – a reluctantly dealt-with social problem.

‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black woman will have the whip hand over the white woman’.

My speaking up about racism in feminism, to them, was akin to a violent attack on their very idea of themselves.

Instead of asking about high heels and lipstick, the pressing questions we have always needed to ask are: Can you be a feminist and be anti-choice? Can you be a feminist and be wilfully ignorant on racism?

Each time a celebrity stakes her claim on feminism, a little bit of the stigma surrounding the word is shattered.

everyone is keen to look like they approve of progress.

Being a feminist with a race analysis means seeing clearly how race and gender are intertwined when it comes to inequalities.

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.

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.

The far right loves this Asian sex-gang angle. To them, the women are their property, the women are ‘ours’.