Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Centrality of Race

Eddo-Lodge’s concern is not with prejudice, the irrational bias by white people against people of colour. It is with what she calls ‘structural racism’ for which overt racial prejudice is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. Structural racism is what is left after all the explicit legal, technical and other formal constraints on the developmental possibilities available for people of colour have been largely removed. Structural racism is cultural; it is invisible; and it, not the rules and regulations, has always been the source of the ‘racial problem’ - not only in Britain but throughout that part of the world dominated by European culture.

Structural racism is the result of unrecognised presumptions by white people - and also by ‘assimilated’ black people - that are psychologically ingrained and sociologically enforced to mistrust, malign, demean, dismiss, and discount the abilities and competence of black people. And because white people hold the power to hire, fire, reward, punish, recognise or ignore black people, these presumptions become racism. The effects of these presumptions are rarely dramatic or even discourteous: “White privilege is dull, grinding complacency.”

The presumptions involved need not be consciously held. They are in fact most powerful when they are unrealised and unexpressed. The central presumption is one that is held not by the overt racist but by the self-designated anti-racist: that race does not matter. This is the only presumption necessary, that race does not exist, for racism to flourish. Whiteness is not a neutral characteristic which can be ignored in order to nullify its effects, its entitlement, its privilege. It represents an absence of all the existential conditions for those who are the victims of racism.

Like it or not, in today’s society, to be white is a sufficient condition for being racist. This is precisely Eddo-Lodge’s experience: “The claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don’t want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie, the... drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it’s not being practised.”

The cure for this inherent racism is not to examine oneself for residual prejudices; this may produce guilt but not effective action. Rather the essential therapy, if I understand Eddo-Lodge correctly, is to develop an appreciation of what it is to be black in a white man’s world, to understand the range of intended or incidental slights, suspicions, exclusions, and denigrations which a black person endures as a matter of course. This is of course extremely difficult to accomplish. Among other things it demands that one be constantly open to education - mostly from black people - about when, where and how these apparently trivial, but cumulatively profound, events occur.

This is a bitter pill for those who consider themselves the allies of anti-racism and she knows it. “Who really wants to be alerted,” Eddo-Lodge says, “to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?” And she knows that it simply is not easy to see what’s missing: “In culture particularly, the positive affirmations of whiteness are so widespread that the average white person doesn’t even notice them.” The essence of white privilege is its diffuse ubiquity: “White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility.” Overcoming white privilege is intimately personal and non-political, and for just those reasons extremely difficult.

“Seeing race is essential to changing the system,” she says. Attacking racism therefore implies seeing the absence of people of colour on television and in film; the absence of memorials to the victims of slavery; the absence of the history of exploitation of black people by white people in school textbooks and popular history documentaries; the absence of criticism of those white cultural heroes like the founding fathers in America and the pillars of British society who participated in this exploitation. Without this sort of positive, painful, persistent empathy, structural racism will continue to exist for generations and centuries to come.

Whether one agrees with her or not, Eddo-Lodge has to be taken seriously for what she has accomplished: the articulation of a devastating, factual description of the world from inside black skin. That experience she summarises as a “manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day.” I don’t see how this can be gainsaid as anything but truth.

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