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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

In chapter 6, I had analysed how a council in north east London had de-prioritised the needs of social housing tenants as an example of how race and class were intricately linked. Just two weeks after the publication of this book, I, and the rest of the country, watched in hopelessness and mourning as seventy-one residents of Grenfell Tower were incinerated in their own homes. Survivors of the fire lost family members and everything they owned. It was a sickening case study of some of the most marginalised people in Britain: working class people, immigrant families, white pensioners with disabilities, foreigners, school children, recent migrants, people who had made England their home for decades. The death toll took so long to determine that the country identified the victims from the makeshift missing person posters plastered across west London. Transfixed by 24-hour rolling news, I wondered how local government could have failed these people so catastrophically. It was eerie to have made an analysis of race, class and social housing so close to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to watch the de-prioritising of human lives that I identified in the book play out on television in a burning high rise building. I feel guilty even now drawing links to it, an overtly political tragedy that I want to be wary of politicising lest I trample insensitively over heartbreak.