Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
By Reni Eddo-Lodge
Publication Year: 2017
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: essays, social justice
Read on 2019-08-01
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★☆
Not as provocative as the title would suggest. The book is mostly a rundown of the history of structural racism against Black people in Britain (e.g. incidents of police brutality), with later chapters giving a sort of broad intro to theories of intersectional feminism, socialism, and class and race alongside some personal anecdotes from Eddo-Lodge.
As far as critical theory goes, this book is very light; Eddo-Lodge very democratically spreads her references across canonical thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and folks like small-time UK vlogger Rosjana Halse Rojas. All this to say, this book doesn’t set out to be the next magnum opus/critical theory of race in the 2010s but is instead a very good snapshot of how discourses on race, feminism, and socialism have evolved over the course of the past decade across all of our many modern platforms. For some reason I thought the author was a man before I started reading this, and was absolutely delighted to discover Reni Eddo-Lodge’s distinct voice as a young woman with millenial references. She is utterly contemporary about her frames of reference in both her discussions on experiences of race as well as her historiography of race discourse. While it is apparent her book was written in a time frame that straddles Brexit and Trump’s election, I think she did well contextualizing her eponymous 2014 blog and subsequent chapters/manuscript of the book in the final chapter.
Eddo-Lodge also remains (in writing at least) exceptionally even-tempered, thoughtful, and inclusive towards her critics. She writes at length about encounters she has had with white folks who are deeply offended by the title and cover of her book, claiming she is “ending the conversation” and so on, without ever having actually read the book. Eddo-Lodge in fact reveals how she has had to talk to so many more white people about race since she published her viral 2014 blog post by the same name, as well as how she is in support of the increased conversations around race this book has provoked. No where in the book does she ever actually suggest to anyone to stop talking to white people about race as a sort of radical political act - she very explicitly and cogently frames her personal reasons for avoiding discussing race with white people as a form of self-preservation. It is precisely because so many white people, in a grossly naive and self-absorbed dance of privilege, guilt, and denial, try to convince you that racism doesn’t exist while simultaneously challenging you to prove to them that it does that so many people of colour like Eddo-Lodge are rightly tired of engaging in these conversations anymore. It is degrading, exhausting, humiliating, and nihilistic to try to share a lived experience with someone who is hell bent on telling you your experience of your own life and identity is wrong. That the very system of racism, privilege, and white supremacy affords white people the ability to be so utterly ignorant just makes such conversations even more tiresomely moot.
Eddo-Lodge moreover talks briefly about the melodrama of white guilt (my words not hers, she is much kinder) she has observed on the book tour for this book - “well-meaning” white people in tears asking her what they should do to remedy these historical and ongoing wrongs. As gracious as Edo-Lodge is in framing these encounters, she pretty explicitly shuts down this type of performance as well, curtly suggesting real material contributions over symbolic allyship. (And that’s the tea!!!!)
I equally enjoyed the very refreshing notion she puts forth that white people don’t need to be evil or virulent to be racist - complicity in racist institutional and socials structures requires only passivity from white people. This extends to other forms of inequality like gender and class, the intersections of which Eddo-Lodge discusses in dedicated chapters. She argues that these other intersections never subsume or override race, however, but rather that race combines and almost always compounds other forms of inequality.
Since the book focuses specifically on Blackness (she occasionally lumps “Black and brown people” together as well), there isn’t much reference to the unique racializations of other groups in the UK and other countries - Asian (as in South Asian), East Asian, Latinx, Muslim, etc. I don’t have a problem with this as this would’ve far exceeded the scope of the book. I was personally less captivated by sections of the book that re-hashed basic intersectional feminist theory and etc. that I was already familiar with, but I appreciate the strategic ground-up approach she took with this book. Also, again, the organization was a little choppy seeing as large swaths in the middle make no mention of Brexit and Trump, which only come in at the end rather than integrated in the body of the book. Apart from these small gripes, I thought the book was great. The book cover is worth a SOLID 5 stars, brilliant design.
