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

By Reni Eddo-Lodge

Bloomsbury Circus

£16.99

Review by Dani Garavelli

WHEN white student, Jenny Lundt, posted a photograph of herself waving a ceremonial sword about at New York's Colgate College last month she was making a point about "white privilege". The liberal arts school had gone into lock-down because a black student had been seen carrying a glue gun. Lundt was saying: “Look, this is institutional racism.” A white woman can brandish a lethal weapon without causing alarm, while an African-American with a craft tool is regarded as a threat.

"White privilege" was also evident in the mass support for her intervention. After all, black and minority ethnic (BAME) activists expose this kind of discrimination all the time, but when a white women gets involved, the world sits up and takes notice. To be fair to Lundt, she quickly acknowledged the injustice of the attention she had attracted. "My influential friends and thus their influential friends made this post go 'viral'. All of that is privilege at work," she wrote.

According to Reni Eddo-Lodge however, the vast majority of white people are not willing to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. In 2014, frustrated by the defensiveness she encountered whenever she tried to discuss what it meant “in power terms” to be white, she wrote a blog post entitled: "Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race."

But things didn't work out the way she had planned. Suddenly, everyone wanted to hear what she had to say; she was inundated with offers to take part in debates and radio programmes, so, for a while , she did little else but talk to white people about race.

This is the central irony of her book, and its contradiction. Despite its title, it is written chiefly for a white audience – yet white readers interested enough to pick it up are likely to be those most acutely aware of, and willing to confront, the advantages that come as their birthright; and therefore, those with the least need to read it.

That's what I thought when I started it, anyway. And, sure enough, the first few chapters – which explore the UK's history of racism from the slave trade through the Brixton and Toxteth riots to Stephen Lawrence – contain little to surprise anyone who is engaged in social justice issues.

Where the book becomes thought-provoking (and deeply uncomfortable) is when it begins talking about intersectionalism and the way white feminism maintains existing power structures to its own advantage.

Even this idea is not new. The contemporary women's movement has been dogged by criticism that it is dominated by white, middle-class voices. The Women's March on Washington, held the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, initially prompted a backlash on the grounds that leading black feminists were being sidelined.

What Eddo-Lodge does, however, is to force her readers to confront their own complicity. Quoting at length from think pieces, she shows how white women writers frequently dismiss "intersectionalism" (the idea that some groups, such as black women, are doubly oppressed because they are victims of more than one form of prejudice) as esoteric and divisive, and how the whole idea of "identity politics" has been maligned. "British feminism was characterised as a movement where everything was peaceful until the angry black people turned up," she writes. With this sentence, she equates white feminists with men's rights activists whose reaction to campaigns for gender equality is to try to discredit those involved as "feminazis".

Eddo-Lodge's question is this: if white women can understand patriarchy; if they can see that sexism is systemic and that men often pay lip service to equality while shoring up their own positions, then why are so many of them (or us) unable to perceive "whiteness as a political structure in the very same way"? It's a good question; a challenging question. And if the temptation is to say "not all white women”, then she has effectively made her case.

Eddo-Lodge is also excellent on class. She says the Ukip-promoted narratives of the on-the-make immigrant and the neglected white working class, which fuelled the Brexit vote, fly in the face of the facts, which are that the most economically disadvantaged areas of the UK have large BAME populations.

Her book is a call to action. She doesn't want white people wallowing in guilt or hijacking anti-racist campaigns, which must be led "by the people at the sharp end of injustice", but to provide financial or administrative assistance to such campaigns, to intervene in bystander situations and to talk to other white people about race.

Such demands may seem prosaic, but what makes the book radical is the way it shifts the burden of ending racism on to white people. "It is a problem in the psyche of white people that white people must take responsibility to solve," Eddo-Lodge writes. "You can only do so much from the outside."