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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen.

I felt that her whiteness allowed her to be disinterested in Britain’s violent history, to close her eyes and walk away. To me, this didn’t seem like information you could opt out from learning.

Thousands of people being born into slavery and dying enslaved, never knowing what it might mean to be free.

Children born into slavery were the default property of slave owners, and this meant limitless labour at no extra cost.

Such one-sided compensation seemed to be the logical conclusion for a country that had traded in human flesh.

I had been denied a context, an ability to understand myself.

‘we are here because you were there’.

The racism was inherent here: whiteness was to be aspired to, whereas any hint of black heritage was considered a kind of contamination, leading to a hard line against mixed-race relationships and mixed-race people.

The notion of who does and who doesn’t look suspicious – particularly in a British political climate that just ten years earlier was denying black people employment and housing – was undoubtedly racialised.

‘Mugging’ was an American term, imported from police statements and press coverage in black-concentrated cities. The fear of mugging was imported, too.

(research in 2015 revealed parts of the country

where black people were seventeen times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.)40

Because history is written by the winners,

While some people called what happened in Tottenham and Brixton a riot, others called it an uprising – a rebellion of otherwise unheard people.

the extremity of a riot only ever reflects the extremity of the living conditions of said rioters.

some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.

We need to stop lying to ourselves, and we need to stop lying to each other.

To assume that there was no civil rights movement in the UK is not just untrue, it does a disservice to our black history, leaving gaping hole...

Black Britain deserves ...

“OK – you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me.

Faced with a collective forgetting, we must fight to remember.

But looking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It’s in the very core of how the state is set up. It’s not external. It’s in the system.

While Stephen Lawrence’s life was frozen at eighteen, theirs had continued, unhindered, in part aided by the police.

Doreen Lawrence’s struggle for justice stretched out alongside the timeline of my childhood. Reports of the Stephen Lawrence case were some of the only TV news I remember absorbing as a child. A vicious racist attack, a black boy stabbed and bleeding to death, a mother desperate for justice. His death haunted me. I began to lose faith in the system.

if white extremism really is the bar at which we set all racism, why and how does racism thrive in quarters in which those in charge do not align themselves with white extremist politics? The problem must run deeper.

When swathes of the population vote for politicians and political efforts that explicitly use racism as a campaigning tool, we tell ourselves that huge sections of the electorate simply cannot be racist, as that would render them heartless monsters. But this isn’t about good and bad people.

I appreciate that the word structural can feel and sound abstract. Structural. What does that even mean? I choose to use the word structural rather than institutional because I think it is built into spaces much broader than our more traditional institutions. Thinking of the big picture helps you see the structures. Structural racism is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with the same biases joining together to make up one organisation, and acting accordingly. Structural racism is an impenetrably white workplace culture set by those people, where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure. Structural is often the only way to capture what goes unnoticed – the silently raised eyebrows, the implicit biases, snap judgements made on perceptions of competency.

It is the kind of racism that has the power to drastically impact people’s life chances.

Highly educated, high-earning white men are very likely to be landlords, bosses, CEOs, head teachers, or university vice chancellors. They are almost certainly people in positions that influence others’ lives. They are almost certainly the kind of people who set workplace cultures. They are unlikely to boast about their politics with colleagues or acquaintances because of the social stigma of being associated with racist views. 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.

an artist, a doctor,

But let’s say that our black boy (and it’s always a boy – there’s little to no research in this area focused on the life chances of black girls)

It will take anonymity to get him the grade he deserves.

Given that black kids are more likely than white kids to move into higher education, it’s spurious to suggest that this attainment gap is down to a lack of intelligence, talent, or aspiration.

Full of hope, our black boy will still continue to send out CVs, because he believes in meritocracy.

There is more to life than getting a good education and a decent job, though. Productivity alone does not make a worthwhile human being.

A 2013 British report revealed that black people are twice as likely to be charged with drugs possession, despite lower rates of drug use.

In fact, relentless policing of the black community in Britain means that black people are over-represented on the National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database.

‘[black people] tend to receive higher doses of anti-psychotic medication than white people with similar health problems.

As our imaginary black man gets older, he is less likely to receive a diagnosis of dementia than his white counterparts. If he does, he will receive it at a later stage than a white British person.

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. He may be told by his parents and peers that if he works hard enough, he can overcome anything. But the evidence shows that that is not true, and that those who do are exceptional to be succeeding in an environment that is set up for them to fail. Some will even tell them that if they are successful enough to get on the radar of an affirmative action scheme, then it’s because of tokenism rather than talent. 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.

The way it was spoken about, you’d think that the FA’s plans weren’t suggesting having one person of colour on an interview shortlist, but instead were asking team heads to walk into their local supermarket and offer their most high-level jobs to the first random black person they saw in the vegetable aisle.

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.

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.

When pressed on lack of representation, some like to cite the racial demographics in Britain, saying that because the minority of the population isn’t white, that percentage and that percentage only should be represented in organisations. This mathematical approach is the true tokenism.

It is an obsession with bodies in the room rather than recruiting the right people who will work in the interests of the marginalised.

Representation doesn’t always mean that the representer will work in the favour of thos...

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.