“We need to stop lying to ourselves, and we need to stop lying to each other.” Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

 

FORGIVE Ms. Eddo-Lodge for titling her book so: she and her publishers knew you probably wouldn’t read a book about race in Britain unless the cover enraged you. This makes Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury) part of a long history of campaigning books with provocative, even obnoxious titles: titles designed to grasp and challenge an uncaring public. Forgive, but don’t be fooled: more than anyone else, this book is written for white people. The words chosen by most commentators in reviewing this book (“blistering”, “searing” etc.) suggest a work born of anger, and while anger is certainly present, the real worth of this book is found in its cool, methodical dismemberment of the myths Britain likes to tell itself about race. Rather than making her case by recounting personal experiences of maltreatment and telling us how distressed or angry it made her feel, as many contemporary writers are lamentably fond of doing, Eddo-Lodge insists on sticking to the rigidly objective: the documented historical facts, and the available data on race and life outcomes. Objectivity gives her something of a distinctive voice within the swelling chorus of young left-wing writers, and the effect is devastating. Where personal experiences are discussed, as they necessarily are in a moving chapter on mixed-race families, the author writes thoughtfully and carefully. Indeed, the book’s disappointments (such as they are) occur mostly where Eddo-Lodge blunders out of this mode by reprinting some lazy, far-left cliché (even “fragile masculinity” makes an appearance).

Why I’m No Longer Talking opens with a brief but necessary history of black and minority ethnic (BME) people in Britain, including their experiences of vicious racism and their resistance to it. Unlike the American civil rights movement, the fight for freedom waged by black Britons is almost entirely forgotten by this country’s white majority. Suffice to say, the silence of our school curriculum on this subject is scandalous, and this neglect is alone a good enough reason to read the book. Indeed, the author is at her strongest when she is dismembering the pious story we like tell ourselves about race: that Britain’s history of racism is long behind us, and that racism in modern Britain is confined to the attitudes and efforts of a few horrible people. Eddo-Lodge is in the business of spoiling such myths, and is rarely thanked for her efforts. Indeed, the title refers to her frustration at the refusal of many white people to accept or even listen to her when she raises the subject of racial inequality, and her anger at the expectation that she tip-toe around white people’s feelings when talking about race.

The book effectively argues several controversial points, attacking the fallacy that defeating racism is as simple as “not seeing” race, or that racist attitudes are only held by straightforwardly bad people. Eddo-Lodge convincingly demonstrates that people today still suffer the consequences of the injustices committed against their parents, grandparents and distant ancestors, and that this suffering is an urgent moral call to action. Crucially, she argues that the phenomenon of racism in modern Britain is less a matter of conscious individual prejudice and more one of systematic exclusion of BME people from privilege and wealth. This exclusion takes multiple forms, the most important of which is the indifference and ignorance of otherwise good people, and not deliberate persecution by hate-laden racists. In forceful brush strokes, Eddo-Lodge paints a picture in which past and present injustices, many of which may be individually small, amass to block the way for BME people to access Britain’s many opportunities, however worthy or industrious they may be.

For all the scorn the author rightly pours on whites who refuse to listen to complaints of racial injustice, and for the hostility she predicts her book will receive, at times she appears to take for granted that those whites who do read the book will be so abject with guilt as to accept her arguments without question. This is apparent in her handling of the most contentious issues in her book, where the opposing opinion is rarely given a fair hearing. For instance, she is surely right when she argues that racism does not simply “cut both ways” (as though the consequences of white racial prejudice and black racial prejudice are of even remotely comparable magnitudes), or when she rebuts the claim that talking about racial injustice fuels racism, but in both cases I was left with the feeling it would have been more persuasive had she taken the other side more seriously, however obvious she thinks their errors are. For example, while campaigning for racial justice certainly mobilises white identitarian opposition, and while this is clearly more often a case of exposing latent racism than it is of causing it, the conclusion Eddo-Lodge appears to draw – that anti-racism campaigning is never responsible for white racism – is misleadingly righteous. While anti-racist activism will always provoke some sort of racist opposition, there are clearly more and less effective ways of appealing to the white majority. At risk of stating the obvious, calls to violence (consider Fox News’s favourite clip of a Black Lives Matter protest: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!”) will trigger hostility from otherwise neutral or even supportive whites, and will encourage white nationalists to engage in violence of their own. Criticism of the need to prioritise white people’s feelings isn’t a case for being politically repulsive. Similarly, whilst the argument that racism cannot “cut both ways” because racist black people have no equivalent means to hurt white people is true on its own terms, this understanding depends on using the word “racism” in a way that most people don’t recognise: namely, as a term referring to systems of privilege rather than individual prejudice. Rather than admit this, the necessary task of demystifying the arcane jargon used by Eddo-Lodge and other activists is denounced as the unfair expectation that anti-racist activists “educate” their oppressors on the theory of systems of privilege.

This is a shame, because Eddo-Lodge is generally good at doing so: notably, she gives a convincing account of what white privilege is and why it is almost invisible to those who have it. Her analysis is consistently rigorous and sophisticated, which makes the rare instances of lazy thinking quite infuriating. Consider this excerpt, from a passage on the black attainment gap at university:

“Given that black kids are more likely than white kids to move into higher education, it’s spurious to suggest that this attainment gap is down to a lack of intelligence, talent, or aspiration. It’s worth looking at the distinct lack of black and brown faces teaching at university to see what might contribute to this systematic failure. In 2016, it was revealed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency that almost 70% of the professors teaching in British universities are white men. It’s a dire indication of what universities think intelligence looks like.”

Now, I’m as open to the suggestion that we need more non-white and non-male academics as anyone. But by this point in the book, Eddo-Lodge has set you up to expect a thorough dissection of the relevant race-related issues, many of which she has already fleshed out. For instance, BME students might receive less financial support from their economically marginalised parents, and therefore be obliged to take up a job alongside full-time education. Or perhaps BME students are, for any number of reasons, more prone to loneliness, isolation or mental illness. Perhaps they are simply more likely than their peers to feel alienated from a white-dominated education system. The author doesn’t even give the reader a nod to such possibilities: just a vapid assumption that the white professors must be racist. Nor is the above example the only instance where the author trips over the reader’s assumed ideological assent. In her extended commentary on feminism and race she incisively exposes the inherent misogyny of the white supremacist right and their chilling fixation on white women’s wombs, while dismissing the blatant and deadly misogyny of Islamic supremacists – quite as though two dozen teenage girls hadn’t been blown to pieces by one at a concert in this country not twelve months ago. In another utterly surreal section she seems convinced that a policy put forward by then Prime Minister David Cameron to ensure that vulnerable migrant women learn English was actually motivated by racism, rather than a desire to prevent these women from being isolated and controlled. These intrusions of ideology, unexamined, unwanted and mercifully few in number, are lumps in the porridge that the book could do without.

As regards the future, the author draws some dismal conclusions. She cares little to comfort the guilt-ridden white reader, who by the final pages is desperate for some good news. For all the advancement in human civilisation supposedly made over the decades and centuries since the demise of the slave trade, the defeat of fascism and the end of empire, she evinces little hope that racial injustice will be meaningfully addressed in her lifetime. Her disdain for the pretence of being “colourblind” is sharp enough to suggest that she does not think a race-blind society is a possible or even desirable form of emancipation. Fundamentally, this despair seems to rest on her bleakly economic calculation that white privilege equals black oppression, and therefore that gains by the minority must impose costs on the majority – costs the majority will not readily accept. In this, I think she underestimates the potential of bad ideas – of stupid, wicked and false doctrines – to make almost everyone worse off, and of good ideas to improve life for all. For instance, in her chapter on race and class she lays bare the hypocrisy of appeals on behalf of the “white working class” against immigrants and ethnic minorities (appeals invariably made by the same politicians who seek to strip the welfare state to the bone), but never seriously questions whether the white working class really benefits from such favouritism. She should do so: it is not a coincidence that the only major industrial economy without a comprehensive welfare state – the United States – is the one with the most racially divided working class.

Above all, this book is an appeal to your personal responsibility: it argues that each of us, in a tiny but tangible way, through our actions and our inactions, contributes to injustice in Britain, whether we are aware of it or not. It proclaims that your only choices are complicity or resistance. The author is not interested in your guilt or your apologies, but in your efforts to make things right. This need not be an invitation to politicise everything, but to navigate life with your eyes open to the reality of who has power in our society, and who does not. Though imperfect, and weighed down by its author’s ideological baggage, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race paints a vivid picture of injustice in modern Britain, of how it operates and what its consequences are, and is worth your time to read.

 

Nathan

Thursday May 3^rd, 2018

London