Talking About Race

“Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can’t afford to stay silent.” Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race is a powerful, challenging and uncomfortable read. But it is an important one. We need to take her premise seriously. I have been in the situation where the people in a particular church told me: ‘we don’t see colour’. However, they did. What they refused to do was to recognise just how they saw race.

Race is part of identity. It needs to be seen, both for the good contribution our diversity makes and as a means of recognising the discrimination and prejudice that exists. Reni Eddo-Lodge puts it like this: “Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon – earned or not – because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.”

We do need to recognise the weight of history and the ease with which institutional racism influences things. We need to find ways of changing that. We need to recognise that some of what we had done, however well intentioned, has come nowhere near achieving what is needed. As Reni Edo-Lodge points out: “The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you. And, in the spirit of 1980s-style political blackness, ‘immigration concerns’ are less about who is black, and more about who isn’t white British.”

These are hard words, but they are needed. “It’s on your shoulders and mine to dismantle what we once accepted to be true. It’s our task. It needs to be done with whatever resources we have on hand. We need to change narratives. We need to change the frames. We need to claim the entirety of British history. We need to let it be known that black is British, that brown is British, and that we are not going away. We can’t wait for a hero to swoop in and make things better. Rather than be forced to react to biased agendas, we should outright reject them and set our own.”