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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

A lot of them use their colour as leverage against us . . . they use it, and they use it very well. There’s enough people in this country prepared to listen, and turn a blind eye to what these people do.

and this is the crux of the issue, many white people believe POC, especially black people, use their race as a way to "get out" of things, when in fact they are targeted because of their skin color. Rather than holding a mirror up to our own prejudice and racisim, we shift the blame to the very people with which our racism harms. Whatever we do is violence.

So that I could explain to them, not to blame them for holding those views.

I get this sentiment, that people are shaped by the society with which they're raised in, but come on. we need to put some blame on us. being raised in a society that is racist doesn't make a person's actions justifiable or right, it makes them worse, because we are perpetuating a system that harms other human beings.

It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

There's never a point in British or American history where the police were set up to help black people. They've only ever been used to harrass, criminilize, and harm. Even the history of their founding points to this, to deny the abject harm police cause to people, especially black people, is to deny the racism built into the founding of both countries. When a country routinely called humans "cattle" there's no redemption to be found. They need to be torn to the ground and rebuilt, abolition is the only way forward. People want to deny the racism though, they look the other way, call history biased, and choose to ignore the countless harms caused. Rather than work to something better for everyone, because that's the issue. They don't want to put in the work to build something better when the current system already works in their favor. The age old, "why fix what isn't broke," when it's broken for everyone else since it's existence.

I had been kept ignorant.

people are fed the propaganda of history for this very reason. keep people ignorant of history and they won't see anything wrong with current affairs. they won't see it repeating itself.

Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism. It starts and ends at ‘discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad’, without any accounting for the ways in which structural power manifests in these exchanges. With an analysis so immature, this definition of racism is often used to silence people of colour attempting to articulate the racism we face. When people of colour point this out, they’re accused of being racist against white people, and the accountability avoidance continues. Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.

And white privilege is an absence of the negative consequences of racism.

But there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on the kind of grand scale it currently operates at against black people.

This is what white society fears the most, that if they give up their power they will be treated the way black people have been for centuries. They recognize the harm caused and don't want it returned.