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Summary
Summary
Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for January/February 2018
Sunday Times Bestseller
Winner of the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year
Winner of the Jhalak Prize
"This is a book that was begging to be written . . . Essential." --Marlon James
"The most important book for me this year." --Emma Watson
"One of the most important books of 2017." --Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it. She posted a piece on her blog, entitled: "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race."
Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanized by this clear hunger for open discussion, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today.
Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year
Blackwell's Nonfiction Book of the Year
Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by:
NPR
The Guardian
The Observer
The Brooklyn Rail
Cultured Vultures
Author Notes
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times , the Voice , Daily Telegraph , Guardian , Independent , Stylist , Inside Housing , the Pool , Dazed and Confused , and the New Humanist . She is the winner of an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle 's 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root's 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30. She contributed to The Good Immigrant. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race is her first book. It was chosen as Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction.
renieddolodge.co.uk / @renireni
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With its provocative title, this debut book by London journalist Eddo-Lodge is a plainspoken, hard-hitting take on mainstream British society's avoidance of race and the complexities and manifestations of racism. Eddo-Lodge describes Britain's history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination toward black people, and she shows how this history both mirrors and diverges from the history of America's treatment of African-Americans. Slavery existed as a British institution for 271 years, but most of the plantations that British citizens operated were in the Caribbean, and as a result "most British people saw the money without the blood." Once in Britain, black people encountered "No blacks, no dogs, no Irish" signs in the windows of many establishments. Eddo-Lodge's crisp prose and impassioned voice implore white Britain to look beyond obvious racism to acknowledge the more opaque existence of structural racism. She describes this deep-seated prejudice as "thousands of people with the same biases joining together to make up one organization, and acting according." She points to the "impenetrable white workplace culture" as an example of the collective effects of bias, and shows how black people face these sorts of disadvantages of every stage in life. Her analysis takes on contemporary issues, understanding Brexit through a lens of white fear of multiculturalism and chastising the kind of feminism that refuses to see the how gender and race intertwine. With this thoughtful and direct book, Eddo-Lodge stokes the very conversation that the title rejects. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
White people avoid discussing race, and when discussions are had, they fail to meet the reality of black experience Ignatius Sancho, whose parents died on the slave ship on which he was born, had the good fortune later in life to receive a classical education courtesy of the Duke of Montagu. As an adult, Sancho was feted as an African man of letters who, entering into a correspondence with Laurence Sterne in 1766, beseeched the author to use his authority to intervene in the plight of enslaved Africans. So for hundreds of years black writers in Britain have sought to engage white people on the subject of race. But not any more -- at least as far as Reni Eddo-Lodge is concerned. Yet the title of her book, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race -- it was first used in a widely read blog she posted in 2014 -- is surely ironic. Eddo-Lodge no more means to disengage from white people than Toni Morrison, who has said unapologetically that she is primarily writing for black people. It seems Eddo-Lodge is tired, as many black people are, of "playing nice". They are apparently supposed to have the good manners to shut up and overlook the structural racism that still exists in Britain and elsewhere. Her original blog resonated with those just as irritated as she is with white compatriots whose take on racism (rarely more, in any case, than an intellectual exercise) fails to meet the reality of her lived experience. Every black person I know shares the sentiment that white people would rather not talk about race -- and that they inevitably try to frame the terms of debate: discussions about racism are often led by those who are largely unaffected by it. Eddo-Lodge's weary title is a provocation, born of years of frustration with a deep and general lack of understanding on the part of white people. Early on, she highlights white fears of a rising tide of people of colour, which extended to objections to the casting of a black actor in the role of Hermione in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. "White fans," she writes, "couldn't imagine little black girls as precocious, intelligent, logical know-it-alls with hearts of gold" because "blackness in their heads is stuck in an ever-repetitive script, with strict parameters of how a person should be". Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race follows in the tradition (stronger among African American than black British writers) of angry warnings to an ignorant white readership. Writing on black life in Britain has long been the poor relation of its African American equivalent, not least because, in the hierarchy of suffering, the daily slights endured by black Britons do not bear comparison to the existential threat to African American lives. The gold standard example, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, still hits home with a sense of urgency, even though its warning of the racial conflagration that could engulf American cities was written in the 1960s. Penitent white readers found their way to race-awareness books as audiences might to a horror movie, with the expectation of being scared. White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelopes everything we know, like a snowy day Reni Eddo-Lodge But Eddo-Lodge accurately takes the temperature of racial discussions in the UK. In seven crisp essays, she takes white British people to task for failing to accept that "racism is a white problem". "White privilege," she writes, "is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day." She's strong on the pervasive racial marginalisation of black people, for example in the depiction of the working class that still so often comes with the prefix "white". Instead of framing the working class as "a white man in a flat cap" she suggests "a black woman pushing a pram". She has a clear eye for the assumptions that underpin racism: it's striking that the discourse on race today is stronger in tone than in the 70s suburban world in which I grew up, where British people were (usually) polite to the point of rudeness; the stakes are higher now. Eddo-Lodge aims also to interrogate how we got here. But the sections on the murder of Stephen Lawrence and other seminal moments in race relations are, perhaps inevitably, too brief. This kind of book is not designed to delve beyond the headlines in order to draw lessons from the past, as Raoul Peck has attempted in fusing civil rights with Black Lives Matter in his documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Based on a posthumously published and unfinished Baldwin essay, the documentary warns not of the fire next time, but of now. It is also tricky for the book to match the immediacy and passion of the initial blog; Eddo-Lodge's wit and mischief are admirable at first but become attenuated. The original blog ended with the assertion that she would not talk about race with white people, who "don't want to hear it ... and frankly don't deserve it". She makes an exception for former BNP leader Nick Griffin, whom she portrays as an extreme, unreconstructed everyman. Also featured are her disagreements with white feminists. The suggestion that racism might exist in feminist circles fuelled much resentment, Eddo-Lodge writes, as certain women seem to cling to the belief that "British feminism was a movement where everything was peaceful until angry black women turned up". She has put us on notice that we talk about race by not talking about it. We reframe and deflect the argument with spurious notions of "reverse racism" and "positive discrimination". She paints a confused and scary picture. In my experience, white people play the "race card" by baiting black people to call them out on race, knowing the social and legal near impossibility of doing so. Equally, however, there are risks to individuals in going through life on amber alert, with antennae quivering to pick up instances of racism, real or imagined. Eddo-Lodge invokes Martin Luther King Jr: incarcerated yet again in 1963 after a peaceful protest, King expressed his grave disappointment with white moderates who, alarmed by the unrest heralded by civil rights, were "more devoted to 'order' than to 'justice'". The quotation needs context, however. At the end of his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail", King imagined a future where he would nonetheless engage with infuriating white moderates in welcoming a time "when the dark clouds of racial prejudice will pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities". Despite her reservations about talking to white people about race, Eddo-Lodge would likely say amen to that. - Colin Grant.
Library Journal Review
Eddo-Loge's powerful debut is based on a 2014 blog post of the same title about the frustrations of talking about race and racism. The post went viral and sparked deeper conversations further detailed in this book. Using research, personal experience, and firsthand interviews, the author details what it means to be black in Britain, especially in a theoretical postracial society. She clearly outlines the history of oppression in her country by examining systemic racism, white privilege, feminism, immigration, race and class, social justice, and more. Of note is the review of intersectionality in feminism and the difficulties of understanding feminism without considering class and race as part of the struggle. This informative work challenges readers to study the patterns of racism and how it has unwittingly upheld societies. Although frustrated with having frequent discussions about race, Eddo-Loge comes to terms with the necessity of continuing the conversation and the implications of remaining silent. VERDICT A provocative read for anyone interested in race, politics, social history, and the lives of people of color; a must-read that expertly reflects the challenges of addressing structural racism.-Tiffeni Fontno, Boston Coll. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
