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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

In my original blog post of 2014, I spoke about a communication gap that was so frustrating that it pushed me away from talking to white people about race. I still think there is a communication gap, and I’m not sure if we will ever overcome it. Even now, when I talk about racism, the response from white people is to shift the focus away from their complicity and on to a conversation about what it means to be black, and about ‘black identity’. They might hand-wring about what they call ‘identity politics’ – a term now used by the powerful to describe the resistance of the structurally disadvantaged. But they won’t properly engage in the conversation, instead complaining that people mustn’t divide themselves off into small groups, and that we’re all one race, ‘the human race’. Discussing racism is not the same thing as discussing ‘black identity’. Discussing racism is about discussing white identity. It’s about white anxiety.