My life in books

In 2014, British blogger Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a post on her blog entitled “Why I’m No LongerTalking to White People about Race.” In it, she expressed her frustration and exhaustion at trying to explain even the basic facts of living as a person of colour in a white supremacist society, at dealing with white fragility and hostility. I remember reading the post, which circulated very widely in social justice circles, and thinking quite a bit about it.

Now Eddo-Lodge has written a book in which she talks a great deal, and with great passion and patience, about race, and called it, with some irony, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. One welcome aspect of the book for me is that so much of the current work on racism and white supremacy is coming from an American perspective, but this is s problem that crosses borders and has a long and bitter history in all white-majority countries and the countries that have been colonised and exploited by them.

Eddo-Lodge begins with a brief history of racism against people of colour in Britain, providing background I’d known little to nothing about. And much of which, she notes, she herself had known little about before beginning her research.

“Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. 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.

But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.”

Eddo-Lodge goes on to discuss issues of systemic and institutional racism, white privilege, white feminism, and intersectionality within the context of the British experience. And she explains these issues with great clarity, making this an excellent introductory book for beginning anti-racist activists, and particularly white people struggling with understanding these concepts and explaining them to others. Her words could easily serve as a handbook for every white person who takes up the task of speaking to white people about race, and I’m grateful that she has done this work.