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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

I won’t ever stop myself from speaking about race. Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can’t afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak.

But I know now that I was resentful of her because I felt that her whiteness allowed her to be disinterested in Britain’s violent history, to close her eyes and walk away. To me, this didn’t seem like information you could opt out from learning.

Although enslaved African people moved through British shores regularly, the plantations they toiled on were not in Britain, but rather in Britain’s colonies. The majority were in the Caribbean, so, unlike the situation in America, most British people saw the money without the blood.

Despite abolition, an Act of Parliament was not going to change the perception overnight of enslaved African people from quasi-animal to human. Less than two hundred years later, that damage is still to be undone.

Britain’s involvement in the First World War wasn’t just limited to British citizens. Thanks to its rabid empire building, people from countries that weren’t European (apart from colonisation), were caught up in the expectation of dying for King and Country.

And even during the war, sepoys didn’t receive the treatment they were expecting. The highest-ranking sepoy was still lower in the army hierarchy than the lowest-ranking white British soldier.

Around 74,000 sepoys died fighting in the war, but Britain refused to deliver its promise of releasing India from colonial rule.

In the Caribbean, the British Army recruited from poor areas, and, similarly to India, there was a feeling among some would-be recruits that taking part in the war would lead to political reform at home. But this opinion wasn’t widespread, and there were a significant number of Caribbean people who were set against the West Indies fighting, calling it a ‘white man’s war’

Britain’s first race-relations act was tepid. It didn’t tackle endemic housing discrimination, and it had enough caveats to allow wriggle room for those who were intent on keeping black people in Britain as second-class citizens. An inadequate antidote to decades of targeted violence and harassment, the Race Relations Board appeared to exist only for posturing reasons. Most black and Asian people in Britain didn’t even know it existed. The 1965 Act’s weaknesses were obvious. The efforts to challenge racism came from the very same state that had sanctioned racism decades earlier with repatriation drives in the face of racist riots – the same state that picked up and disposed of black and brown bodies at its own convenience.

Language is important – and the term ‘race riot’ undoubtedly doubles down on ideas linking blackness and criminality, while overlooking what black people were reacting against. The conditions don’t seem to have changed. When the London riots of August 2011 mirrored, almost step by step, what happened in Brixton in 1985, I wondered how often history would have to repeat itself before we choose to tackle the underlying problems.

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. But this isn’t about good and bad people.

Seeing race is essential to changing the system.

White privilege is one of the reasons why I stopped talking to white people about race. Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me. The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency. It is par for the course in a world in which drastic race inequality is responded to with a shoulder shrug, considered just the norm.

In 2012, the conviction of two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers could have sparked a national conversation about race. We could have had a conversation about the police’s failure of Stephen’s family as they fought for justice (in 2016, the results from an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that while the police were bungling the investigation, an undercover officer was spying on the Lawrence family).7 We could have asked ourselves honestly, as a country, if taking two decades to convict just two of the gang who murdered an innocent teenager was acceptable. We could have asked ourselves if we were ashamed of that. Maybe we could have spoken about the fact that racism had only been a political priority for less than half a century. We could have had a conversation about riots and race, about accountability, about how to move forward from Britain’s most famous race case. We could have had a conversation about how to start eliminating racism. We could have started asking each other about the best way to heal. It could have been pivotal. Instead, the conversation we had was about racism against white people.

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.

Upset by conversations about white privilege that were happening at the time, left-wing writers drew the conclusion that those affected by racism were actually the most privileged, because talking about the effects of racism somehow gave them the moral high ground. This left-wing writer was angrier at people’s reactions to racism than the racism itself. This was the beginning of a backlash against conversations about white privilege.

Pretending that everything is fine helps no one.

‘I think white people get defensive when you call them white,’ she tells me over Skype, ‘because they’ve internalised a message that goes it’s rude to point out somebody else’s race, and it’s dangerous territory because you might inadvertently be racist, because they could take offence at that mention of race. There’s a really bizarre circuitous logic that doesn’t touch on any of the underlying issues.’

I haven’t lost my white privilege. It hasn’t reduced because I suddenly understand what it is.’

So many white people think that racism is not their problem. But white privilege is instrumental to racism. When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren’t. To me, it is like yin and yang. Racism’s legacy does not exist without purpose. It brings with it not just a disempowerment for those affected by it, but an empowerment for those who are not. That is white privilege. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. Why don’t white people think they have a racial identity?

The only way he could envision power being maintained in Britain was by subjugation of a people, because that is how Britain has held and maintained its power in the past.

Somehow, it wasn’t believable that Lord Patten simply wanted free and fair debate and a healthy exchange of ideas on his campus. It looked like he just wanted silence, the kind of strained peace that simmers with resentment, the kind that requires some to suffer so that others are comfortable.

Rhodes Must Fall was a small-scale example of what racial injustice looks like in Britain. It looks normal. It is pedestrian. It is unquestioned. It’s just a part of the landscape, you might walk past it every day. For people who oppose anti-racism on the grounds of freedom of speech, opposition to gross racial disparities is about ‘offence’, rather than the heavily unequal material conditions that people affected by it carry as burden. Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don’t really have anything material to oppose, faux ‘free speech’ defenders spend all their spare time railing against ‘offence culture’

I mean, that if we have to listen to this kind of bigotry, then let us have the equal and opposite viewpoint. If Katie Hopkins, with help from the Sun newspaper, publishes a column describing desperate refugees trying to travel to Britain as cockroaches,9 then we need a cultural commentator that advocates for true compassion and total open borders. Not the kind of wishy-washy liberalism that harps on about the cultural and economic contributions of migrants to this country as though they are resources to be sucked dry, but someone who speaks in favour of migrants and open borders with the same force of will with which Hopkins despises them.

It’s about time that critiques of racism were subject to the same passionate free speech defence as racist statements themselves. Freedom of speech means the freedom for opinions on race to clash. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal, and racist speech and ideas need to be healthily challenged in the public sphere. White fear tries to stop this conversation from happening.

The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character.

The paradox, of course, is that those who oppose anti-racism have worked themselves into quite the double bind. It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s cat situation. If, as they say, racism doesn’t exist, and black people have nothing to complain about, why are they so afraid of white people becoming the new minority?

‘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.’

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. Similar to the fact that they are man-heavy, our most recognised political structures are white-dominated.

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. But it needs to be the whole package, to take into account every aspect of what writer bell hooks called ‘the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’

Equality is fine as a transitional demand, but it’s dishonest not to recognise it for what it is – the easy route. There is a difference between saying ‘we want to be included’ and saying ‘we want to reconstruct your exclusive system’. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream.

In fact, before all of this white working-class talk, class was a political taboo. When Margaret Thatcher said in 1987 that there was no such thing as society, she solidified a national feeling that it was individual ambition alone that would allow a person to get on in life. Although we as a country are all obsessed with class, we had deluded ourselves for a long time that it didn’t matter at all.

‘There is no end point in sight,’ I reply. ‘You can’t skip to the resolution without having the difficult, messy conversation first. We’re still in the hard bit.’ After my talk, a group of black teenagers crowd around me outside, talking excitedly. ‘I think the people who want to skip to an end point are the ones not really affected by the issues,’ says one girl. I’m impressed by her insight.

Change is incremental, and racism will exist long after I die. But if you’re committed to anti-racism, you’re in it for the long haul. It will be difficult. Getting to the end point will require you to be uncomfortable.

Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race. Yes, you may be written off as a radical, but you have much less to lose.

But I don’t want white guilt. Neither do I want to see white people wasting precious time profusely apologising rather than actively doing things. No useful movements for change have ever sprung out of fervent guilt. Instead, get angry. Anger is useful. Use it for good.

Structures, she said, are made out of people. When we talk about structural racism, we are talking about the intensification of personal prejudices, of groupthink. It is rife.

But I think that if we wait for unity, we’ll be waiting for ever. People are always going to disagree about the finer points of progress. Waiting for unity is just inviting inertia.