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white_hartI had seen a number of people recommending Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race as a good introduction to issues of structural racism and why "I don't see colour" isn't the panacea many of us white woolly-liberal Guardian-reading types were brought up to believe it was; I bought a paperback copy about eighteen months ago, which sat in the TBR pile waiting for the "right time" to read a potentially "difficult" book. After last month's Black Lives Matter protests, I realised that there probably wasn't going to be a "right time" and I just needed to pick a time when I had a little bit of brain space to process it.
Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race begins with a chapter (the longest in the book) setting out the history of racism in Britain. Building on that, Eddo-Lodge then looks at structural racism, white privilege, racist fears of black domination, and the intersections of race with feminism and class, and uses this to explain why, in the words of the title and a 2014 blog post that provided the original seed for the book, she no longer wants to spend her time patiently explaining racism to white people who cannot or will not see the way it's baked in to all the structures of society. It's not a scholarly book, although Eddo-Lodge's argument is always grounded in facts, statistics and official reports; instead, it's a personal account of how racism has shaped the world that she exists in as a young black British woman, and I found that its impact was as much in allowing me to see inside her experience and showing how the effects of structural racism lie not in single incidents but in a wider pattern of things, each of which, on its own, could be explained away as the result of other factors (and I know that, as someone who finds it really difficult not to believe the best of everyone, I have been guilty of doing that explaining away in the past) as it was in providing new information about racism in Britain. As a feminist, I thought the chapter on feminism and why non-intersectional "white feminism" actively works against people of colour was particularly interesting (and also applicable to other intersections of oppression which are ignored by feminisms which only focus on women's oppression as women); generally, I'd recommend this book to any white person who wants to become a better anti-racist, or indeed any white person who thinks they don't need to.
Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race begins with a chapter (the longest in the book) setting out the history of racism in Britain. Building on that, Eddo-Lodge then looks at structural racism, white privilege, racist fears of black domination, and the intersections of race with feminism and class, and uses this to explain why, in the words of the title and a 2014 blog post that provided the original seed for the book, she no longer wants to spend her time patiently explaining racism to white people who cannot or will not see the way it's baked in to all the structures of society. It's not a scholarly book, although Eddo-Lodge's argument is always grounded in facts, statistics and official reports; instead, it's a personal account of how racism has shaped the world that she exists in as a young black British woman, and I found that its impact was as much in allowing me to see inside her experience and showing how the effects of structural racism lie not in single incidents but in a wider pattern of things, each of which, on its own, could be explained away as the result of other factors (and I know that, as someone who finds it really difficult not to believe the best of everyone, I have been guilty of doing that explaining away in the past) as it was in providing new information about racism in Britain. As a feminist, I thought the chapter on feminism and why non-intersectional "white feminism" actively works against people of colour was particularly interesting (and also applicable to other intersections of oppression which are ignored by feminisms which only focus on women's oppression as women); generally, I'd recommend this book to any white person who wants to become a better anti-racist, or indeed any white person who thinks they don't need to.
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