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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Liverpool had been Britain’s biggest slave port.

The Albert Dock opened four decades after Britain’s final slave ship, the Kitty’s Amelia, set sail from the city,

racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances.

Windrush Generation, the 492 Caribbeans who travelled to Britain by boat in 1948.

Born in 1882 in Kingston, Jamaica, Dr Harold Moody was not one of the young Caribbeans who fought for Britain in the First World War. Instead, he arrived in Bristol in 1904, aged twenty-two, with a focus on advancing his education.

Dr Moody’s work with the League of Coloured Peoples was quite possibly Britain’s first anti-racism campaign in the twentieth century, and it would have far-reaching implications for Britain’s race relations in the future.

But Guy Bailey’s interview wasn’t a coincidence. It had been set up by a small group of young men: Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown. The group called themselves the West Indian Development Council.

The day before Martin Luther King, Jr told an audience of 250,000 that he had a dream, a meeting of five hundred bus employees met and agreed to discontinue Bristol Omnibus Company’s unofficial colour bar. The day after, general manager Ian Patey committed to ending it for good.

Street robberies have always existed in Britain. But the importation of the word mugging brought with it a coded implication that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly black, and that mugging was an exclusively black crime.

Most importantly, the report described institutional racism as a form of collective behaviour, a workplace culture supported by a structural status quo, and a consensus – often excused and ignored by authorities. Amongst its many recommendations, the report suggested that the police force boost its black representation, and that all officers be trained in racism awareness and cultural diversity.

We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power.

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.

The covert nature of structural racism is difficult to hold to account. It slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy. You can’t spot it as easily as a St George’s flag and a bare belly at an English D...

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.

Higher Education Statistics Agency that almost 70 per cent of the professors teaching in British universities are white men.10 It’s a dire indication of what universities think intelligence looks like.

2013 British report revealed that black people are twice as likely to be charged with drugs possession, despite lower rates of drug use. Black people are also more likely to receive a harsher police response (being five times more likely to be charged rather than cautioned or warned) for possession of drugs.14

roughly 30 per cent of all black men living in Britain are on the National DNA Database, compared with about 10 per cent of white men and 10 per cent of Asian men.

When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone.

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 those who need representation.

‘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”.’

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

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’. It is an absence of 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.

You might be surprised to learn that it was a white man who first gave white privilege a name. Theodore W. Allen was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919.

In 1967, riffing on the civil rights movement’s much-used phrase ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, he wrote ‘. . .

the injury dealt out to the black worker has its counterpart in the privilege of the white worker. To expect the white worker to help wipe out the injury to the Negro is to ask him to oppose his own interests.’

White privilege is dull, grinding complacency.

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

White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day. It’s brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don’t get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences. I have spent a lot of time biting my tongue so hard it might fall off.

White privilege is the perverse situation of feeling more comfortable with openly racist, far-right extremists, because at least you know where you stand with them; the boundaries are clear.

The insidious stuff is much harder. You come to expect it, but you can never come to accept

‘white victimhood’:6 an effort by the powers that be to divert conversations about the effects of structural racism in order to shield whiteness from much-needed rigorous criticism.

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.

stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice;

“I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” ‘Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’

the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn’t represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilisation.

Even more insultingly, he used the struggles of black and brown people who were colonised, raped and beaten by white British people to preserve white British culture.

colonial businessman Cecil Rhodes on their university campus. As well as founding mining company De Beers Consolidated Mines (eventually diamond purveyors De Beers), Cecil Rhodes played a key part in expanding the British Empire in South Africa, based on the belief that the British were ‘the finest race in the world’. His colonial project displaced Africans from their land. The country we now know as Zimbabwe was once named Rhodesia, after Rhodes. The country’s citizens attempted to resist British rule, and paid with their lives. For many, Rhodes was the father of South African apartheid. When he lived in Britain, he attended Oxford’s Oriel College, and a statue of him still stands there today. It was in 2015 that students studying at the university let it be known loud and clear that they wanted that statue gone.

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

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.

justice. It has always been about the redistribution of power rather than the inverting of it.

‘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.’

century on in 1984, black feminist, activist and poet Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches: ‘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.’

Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’.

It almost seems as though some educated women want to keep feminism for themselves, cloak it in esoteric theory and hide it under their mattresses, safe and warm beneath the duck-down duvet.’

feminism is a broad church that has less to do with the upkeep of your appearance, and more to do with the upkeep of your politics.

If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it’s important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.