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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

White feminism is a politics that engages itself with myths such as ‘I don’t see race’.

Whiteness positions itself as the norm. It refuses to recognise itself for what it is. Its so-called ‘objectivity’ and ‘reason’ is its most potent and insidious tool for maintaining power.

The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone’s skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it.

Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail.

Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

The mess we are living is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.

I understand that these demands are utopian and unrealistic. But I think feminism has to be absolutely utopian and unrealistic, far removed from any semblance of the world we’re living in now.

I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men.

To believe in emasculation, you have to believe that masculinity is about power, and strength, and dominance.

They suggest that many consider their class to be about their preferred culture and politics, rather than their relationship to assets and wealth.

‘identity politics’ – a term now used by the powerful to describe the resistance of the structurally disadvantaged.

Why am I saying one thing, and white people are hearing something completely different?

discovered anti-racism solely to oppose Jeremy Corbyn, there was no real interest in disrupting the overwhelmingly white political landscape. There was no interest shown in unpacking the race and class standards that marginalise people of colour in the political professions. It was anti-racism for the show of it.

The resurfacing of this story in order to elicit grief – or to guilt others who were already grieving – in order to make a point, was nothing but shallow, performative anti-racism.

The events in Kenya were cynically used so that people in the UK and US could prove to themselves and to their friends that they were socially aware. That they were one of the good ones. That they believed that black lives matter. Solidarity is nothing but self-satisfying if it is solely performative.

The perverse thing about our current racial structure is that it has always fallen on the shoulders of those at the bottom to change it. Yet racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve. You can only do so much from the outside.