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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous.

Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched. And how desperate could they really be if some of them had mobile phones?

fringe hate website Breitbart settled into the heart of global power when Trump appointed executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist shortly after Trump was elected president. Nigel Farage boasted about meeting with Trump4, and Marine Le Pen was spotted in Trump Tower5. Not only was the malignant political force of the far right – considered defeated after World War Two – making a triumphant comeback, but it appeared to be forming allegiances. The whole thing was a horror show. The same ideologies I had taken to task in the book were happening in real life. White genocide theory, inherent to the ideology of the far right, was back. Every far right electoral gain was paired with ethno-nationalism and accusations that migrants and refugees were threats to national unity. In chapter 4, I’d written about fear of a black planet and the inherent misogyny of white nationalism – then Finland’s far right swept into power with their eyes on white women’s wombs. I’d written about multiculturalism becoming a dirty word, of scaremongering and white victimhood – and suddenly these political strategies were all a part of our politics, enveloping our everyday chat.

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.

When I posted the cover to social media, roughly a year before publication, the shares were out of control, and the anticipation was palpable.

Much of this response was thanks to that cardinal sin – judging a book by its cover.

There has been a tendency for audience frustration to be aimed at whatever heritage venue has been hosting me – legitimate anger at the fact that this is one of the few times these institutions have properly engaged with the topic.

There has been a renaissance of black critical thought and culture. Whether it has come from companies with big budgets or creative individuals using social media, it feels like the critical anti-racist perspective is on top of a wave, kept afloat by a groundswell of support.

Fashion magazine British Vogue – an institution in itself – appointed its first ever black male editor. An interview given by Alexandra Shulman, then the magazine’s outgoing editor, involved a question asking why, under her leadership, the magazine had a diversity problem. She responded with an insistence that she was ‘against quotas’ and that her Vogue simply included the people she thought were ‘interesting’6 – who just happened to be overwhelmingly white. She hasn’t got a racist bone in her body, she said, plus her grandson had a relative who was a civil rights leader, so the suggestion was deeply offensive to her.

The Tate Modern put on an unstoppably successful exhibition on art in the age of black power.

I hope that the success of this book means I become part of a contemporary British crowd, rather than a stand-alone voice.

I’m filled with hope, and a kind of political nourishment, when I hear the conversations that come to the fore during my events. Every time I do one I see the audience as a hub of knowledge and potential. I see change. I see talent. It’s there in the crowd, buzzing in the atmosphere. I learn a lot, too, from the people of colour who turn up, who

are experts in their respective fields and have taken on the additional job of ‘anti-racist in the room’ at work. Sometimes at these Q&A’s I think there are people in the audience who are far more qualified than me to answer specific questions. This is the power of the collective.

My dream is that the people who turn up to my events take that opportunity to meet each other, swap details and form their local resistance. I consider myself to be part of a movement, and I think that if you are deeply touched by what...