26: Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race

A book by Reni Eddo-Lodge

This is a fun question:

My answer? Well, the hospital I was born in is, according to Google Maps, all of one mile from my home; the house I grew up in (till I was 11) is even closer: 1,232 yards. I walk past both of them regularly.

I would hope, though, that I am not as parochial as that suggests, not least because Wandsworth, where I live, is a pretty cosmopolitan place. And I’m sure that living in Wandsworth, both now and as a child, is at least partially responsible for why I see multiculturalism as a good thing.

As Reni Eddo-Lodge puts it in her 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, that is not true of every white person in Britain. Indeed, she writes: “The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits.”

I read Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race in mid-July of 2020, a little under two months after George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. The first of those two events was, of course, prompted by the second. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the world, social media and newspapers were flooded with constructive ways that (particularly white) people could educate themselves on the history of race both here and in the United States:

I was not alone in turning to Eddo-Lodge. In June, she became the first black British author to top the UK’s official book charts (itself a damning indictment of the structural racism she discusses in her book). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race has become a key text in the anti-racism conversation.

As is now widely known, the book started life as a blog post of the same name which Eddo-Lodge posted in February 2014. At least in the copy I have, the whole post is included as a preface. It opens thusly: “I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms.”

It is, of course, paradoxically, exactly the group “who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms” that most need to read Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, because it explains “the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms”. And it is that group that are least likely to read it. Indeed, simply owning a copy of the book could provoke the oh-so-damning “criticism” from said group that you’re woke (“alert to injustice in society, especially racism”) or liberal (“willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas”), and there’s no coming back from that kind of burn!

Anyway, there is a lot to recommend Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, particularly for white people. It’s informative, angry, illuminating, eminently readable, uncomfortable, at times powerful and moving. At its best it pinpoints why racism in Britain is both so ridiculous and so insidious.

In the chapter entitled ‘Fear of a Black Planet’, Eddo-Lodge muses on the “low-level grumblings of some British people who…spend their time yearning for a nostalgic Britain that never was.” That was the group emboldened and enfranchised in the Brexit referendum, when UKIP inevitably went with the slogan: “We want our country back”, as though they’d misplaced it somewhere in our colonial past.

And in the opening chapter, ‘Histories’, we see some of John Fernandes’s findings from his research into the attitudes of trainee police cadets in the early 1980s. Fernandes, a black sociology lecturer at Kilburn Polytechnic, was trying to prove that an anti-racist, rather than multicultural, approach was needed when it came to educating cadets. So he asked the trainees to submit anonymous essays on the topic of “blacks in Britain”. The responses Eddo-Lodge relays are shocking to read, if depressingly predictable.

"They come over here from some tin-pot banana country were [sic] they lived in huts," reads one. "They are, by nature unintelegent [sic]," says another. Proof, as if it were needed, that long before Twitter trolls, Daily Mail commenters, or indeed, the Home Office in 2016, the practice of demanding every immigrant learn English while bungling the language in the process had a long and sorry history.