Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  ‘These are difficult conversations to have. It’s quite raw,’ she says. ‘I’ve grown up mainly around my white family. The black side of my family has been affected by domestic violence, which has affected how involved that side of my family has been. For the majority of my thirty years, until the age of twenty-eight, I just didn’t talk about race with my white family. My mum’s white and my dad’s black, and really both my mum and my dad have brought me up in a kind of colour-blind way.’

  Unlike me, Jessica can’t choose to just stop talking to white people about race. She doesn’t have the option of desensitising herself from these discussions, because her mum, and half of her extended family, is white.

  ‘As I’ve grown older and I understand race a bit more as a mixed-race woman – I identify as black – I’ve not been prepared for things as a mixed-race woman out in the world,’ explains Jessica. ‘Now, I’ve started to have conversations about race with my family. It’s uncomfortable because I think they just avoided it. [When I was younger] they pretended like it wasn’t an issue. When I’ve been talking to my mum about it, she said she never thought it was an issue, because I never seemed to have any problems growing up. There were never any racist incidents. And I was like, yes, but racism is more than a one-off incident. It’s about the world you live in, and the way you experience your environment.

  ‘Throughout my childhood and throughout my early adult life I’ve had a feeling of being different, and a bit strange. I could never quite understand why I felt out of place. Now that I’m older and I understand things, I think it was about race. Being the only black child in my class, living in a white town, being surrounded by white family.’

  I asked Jessica about some of the difficult conversations she’s been having. ‘Recently,’ she replied, ‘my uncle and my cousin have been quite . . . well, they’ve been really racist. Sharing things on Facebook, sharing Britain First stuff, sharing stuff about “ban the burqa”. I’ve been trying to have conversations with them about why that’s racist and why that’s hurtful to me as well, and [I’m] just not getting anywhere. They see me talking about race as if I’m a problem, as if I’m a troublemaker. It’s caused me to distance myself over the last couple of years from my white family. I don’t really see them any more. I couldn’t deal with them not understanding where I’m coming from.’

  Later, she confides, ‘As I’ve become more conscious in terms of race and where I am in the world, they’ve become more distant. I know that they are uncomfortable with me, and my sister feels that as well. The more I’ve become myself, the less comfortable they feel around me. It’s really sad, because we used to be a very close family, but I just avoid family get-togethers now.’

  Extended family can be avoided. But what about one of the closest relationships in a person’s life – what about her relationship with her mother? ‘She does get a bit defensive,’ says Jessica. ‘She’s said to me: “I feel like you’re forgetting that you’re white as well.” And I was like “Yeah, Mum, but when I walk down the street, people see a black woman.” I experience myself as a black woman. It’s hard with our relationship, because I love her, and I want her to accept me, but also she does come out with stuff that’s racist . . . That’s very painful. My mum, she’s completely blinded by her whiteness a lot of the time . . . She just thinks “I can’t believe someone can be that biased.” She can’t imagine institutional bias. So you have to start with the basics. I can’t do that with all my family, you know?’

  One of Jessica’s mum’s comments was about her Jamaican dad, and it played into racial stereotypes. ‘I remember once she made a comment about black men, and the size of their penises, and how it was true, because of my dad. I was like, Mum, you don’t know how fucked up [saying] that is.’

  ‘I feel a lot of love for my mum,’ Jessica says with certainty. ‘We have a very close relationship, we speak to each other all the time. But she does make me angry when she doesn’t understand things. She’s making small moves, but in the past, I’ve had to protect her from my anger. I’m torn. Can I speak my truth to my mum? Even after she’s said something, I feel like I couldn’t get angry with her. But then weeks after I feel like calling her up and starting an argument about something, to get my anger out. I have to divert the rage to something else.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of anger. My family just didn’t consider what my needs would be as a mixed-race child. My mum and dad, when they got married, it was an issue, because interracial relationships were still controversial, I think. When they got married about thirty-five years ago, they did lose friends. So why didn’t they think: “Well, what’s this mixed-race child going to experience?” They never did anything to address my cultural needs, so things like how to do my hair, things like Jamaican food, you know, all that stuff that I think is integral to growing up and knowing where you’re from.’

  Jessica tells me that she is currently in counselling, and has sought out local groups comprised of mixed-race people who have had similar experiences. ‘I’ve had these feelings about my identity and I’ve just pushed them down, deep down, and I do think they have affected my mental well-being. I have quite a few friends with white mothers who struggle as well. [White] mothers who are using the N word, and saying it’s fine because they have black children. Now, when I see an interracial couple, I feel uneasy, even though I’m in an interracial relationship. When I see a white parent with a mixed-race kid, I think “Is that child going to get what they need?” Because I didn’t get what I needed. I think, for white people who are in interracial relationships, or have mixed-race children, or who adopt transracially, the only way that it will work is if they’re actually committed to being anti-racist. To be humble, and to learn that they are racist even if they don’t think that they are.’

  Of her partner, she says, ‘He knows what I’ve been through. We want children together, and he is the kind of white person who will do that unlearning and unpicking. I only have a few white people in my life like that, and I couldn’t be in a relationship with a white person who wasn’t. The conversation about race in this country is very limited, and the conversation about mixed-race people in the country is very limited. There are people thinking that you’re half and half, that you can only ever be stuck between two worlds. I used to worry about not being black enough, but I’m starting to feel that I’m part of the diversity of blackness. There’s more than one way of being black.’

  Jessica and her mother’s relationship is nuanced, at once deeply loving and deeply painful. It speaks to a number of complexities about racism – showing a truth that is often left out in clunky media coverage – that it is not enacted by malicious monsters driven by ill will, but that it happens by way of whiteness. Rather than mixed-race relationships proving that society is over race, they prove that people’s actions often move faster than social progress.

  It makes sense that interracial couples might not want to burden themselves with the depressing weight of racial history when planning their lives together, but a colour-blind approach makes life difficult for children who don’t deserve this carelessness. It seems that in the same way long-term couples might discuss marriage, money and children, couples of different heritage must discuss race – what it means to them, how it currently affects their lives, and how it might affect their future children’s lives.

  In among the ‘ending racism’ confetti being strewn upon mixed-race families is the suspicious eye of busybodies who can’t quite understand the set-up. Our demographics are changing faster than our attitudes, and it is causing confusion. Anecdotally, I hear from adult children of other mixed-race families who tell me that as children, they’ve been stopped and questioned in the street when out with their parents, and have endured insults and slurs when their family is travelling out as a group, the tamest being ‘rainbow family’.

  And there is very little talk of white privilege in transracial adoption – when children of colour are adopted by white families. In 2010, journalist Joseph Har
ker wrote: ‘My own Nigerian father abandoned my Irish mother before I was born. Three years later she married an English local, who later adopted me, and I took his name. I was never short of love, support and encouragement. But when race regularly collided with my life I was ill prepared. I found it difficult to cope with the playground and classroom taunts and, as I grew older, the disconnect with my African heritage became more of an issue. I’ve spoken to many black people of similar upbringing and they often talk of the same experiences.’12

  His words strike at the heart of the issue. There’s nothing to suggest that a black child with a white parent, or who is adopted into a white family, won’t be on the receiving end of immeasurable love and support. But, having never experienced it, the parents might not be well equipped to deal with the racism their child will receive.

  In 2012, in the ultimate act of colour-blindness, former Prime Minister David Cameron laid out his plans to remove the legal requirement for local authorities to consider a child’s racial, cultural and linguistic background during the adoption process. The move was not without goodwill. In 2013, the Department for Education told the press that black and ethnic minority children are adopted, on average, a year later than their white counterparts. The longer a child is in care, the more likely it is that he or she will develop attachment problems later in life, they said, so finding a good family fit with speed is critical. ‘If there is a loving family ready and able to adopt a child,’ said the then education secretary Michael Gove, ‘issues of ethnicity must not stand in the way.’13

  It was with a cunning linguistic sleight of hand that the politicians insisted that considering a child’s race was actually fuelling racism, with Gove’s remarks implying that the fact that black children waiting much longer to be adopted was because of politically correct ‘barriers’ that (Cameron branded) ‘state multiculturalism’ had put in place, rather than systemic racism. Why black children wait longer to be adopted is not something easily explained. But we do live in a world riddled with racism, and these waits indicate another blow to a black child’s life chances.

  Meanwhile, white parents who adopt children of colour take on a new responsibility to be race aware. They embark on a very new journey of self-discovery, and they have a duty to no longer commit to the limiting politics of colour-blindness. They have this duty because a black child cannot be burdened with the responsibility of weathering the world’s prejudices on their own. Not all white parents take the time to learn. Sadly, I’ve met white parents of mixed-race children who have angrily confronted me, insisting that they ‘just don’t see’ race, and telling me that what I’m doing isn’t helping at all. Of course, I don’t demand that they agree with every point I make, but I do think that it is important that they recognise that we are still living in a racist society, if only so they can counsel their children with some ease. Not for their sake, but for their kids’ sake. I really believe that it is the least they can do. On the flip side, I have also met white parents of mixed-race kids who express a real eagerness to understand what their child will face. These are efforts to bridge an information gap that white people don’t often have to make. Pretending that everything is fine helps no one.

  Despite the title of this book, I knew I couldn’t write about race without speaking to at least one white person who thinks about race as much as I do. Jennifer Krase is an American, but has lived in the UK for the last seven years. She is a white immigrant in Britain, which makes her both an outsider and insider: an outsider because her country has its own culture, and its own well-documented racism, and an insider because her white American-ness will have her positioned as an ‘expat’ rather than an ‘immigrant’. She is refreshingly self-aware about all of this. ‘I think white people get defensive when you call them white,’ she tells me over Skype, ‘because they’ve internalised a message that goes it’s rude to point out somebody else’s race, and it’s dangerous territory because you might inadvertently be racist, because they could take offence at that mention of race. There’s a really bizarre circuitous logic that doesn’t touch on any of the underlying issues.’

  I asked about her early conceptions of racism as she navigated the world as a white child. Being white, Jenny would have probably gone to a school where she was among other white children. And although children always find something to bully each other about, being white, Jenny won’t have experienced racism in the playground. ‘Originally,’ she says, ‘I just thought you shouldn’t use certain words. Colour-blindness was something that was definitely taught to us in school.

  ‘Growing up, I would have told you that racism is about calling people slurs. Or that racism was about laws about segregation. Or that racism was a two-way street, that anyone can be racist. I probably would have said that words like the N word were worse than someone calling somebody a cracker, for example, but I would have said that cracker is still racist. Now, that sounds ridiculous to me, but that was my very simplistic understanding. That racism was individuals, and I would not have seen systemic things.’

  Jenny grew up in the town of Fort Worth in the state of Texas. I asked her about when she became peripherally aware of race in her life. ‘Race was something I was always aware of, just not in relation to myself,’ she said. ‘I thought race was something that applied to other people. Other people who were not white, basically.’ Texas, she says, ‘has always been a racially charged environment . . . there’s always been racial divides between English and non-English speaking people, Latinos. Fort Worth is a very divided city, not only in terms of geography but also life outcomes for people.’

  Everything about her heavily monoracial upbringing was comfortably calculated, Jenny explained. ‘I lived a really deliberately sheltered existence on a lot of fronts. Not only living, I guess deliberately, around other white people and white communities – my school that I went to was majority white – it was also a fairly middle-class school. The neighbourhoods around the school at the time were fairly affluent. There were all these different factors that led to me being in a very specific environment. I don’t think any of that was accidental. My parents buying a house – you look at the neighbourhoods and you look at the schools, and you make decisions based on your own criteria, some of which may be overtly racist, or classist. “I want my kid to have a good school.” What does a good school mean?’

  Given her background, I wondered how her stance on race could so drastically change from then to now. In my experience, a white person who has had an almost all-white upbringing brings with them an insularity, as well as a reflexive urge to defend whiteness when it is criticised. At what point in her life did she first realise she was white? ‘[I had a lecturer whose] class was unbelievably challenging for me, because he talked about race. He talked about race, he talked about imperialism . . . That was my first exposure, not just to the facts of it, but to politically challenging historical viewpoints on it. At the time I was really resistant to it. Thinking back to what I said now, and I just fucking cringe at it. But that really planted the seeds of change for me.’

  At first, she was defensive. ‘I think what made me feel defensive is that I was embarrassed that there was a chance that someone knew something that I didn’t. On some level, maybe I could sense that accepting whatever that person was saying would open a can of worms. It was a combination of embarrassment and panic. I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was trying to protect or defend. I think it was an indignation.

  ‘I’ve lost a lot of sensitivity about being told I’m wrong. That’s a massive gain, on a personal level. I haven’t lost my white privilege. It hasn’t reduced because I suddenly understand what it is.’

  I was curious to learn how Jenny’s anti-racist politics affected the rest of her life. ‘I discuss [racism] with family, with friends, in a work context, although those discussions can be really difficult,’ she says. ‘In the last three or four years, I’ve definitely had a few mega-fails where that is concerned, where I’ve either picked the wrong disc
ussion to have or passed up the chance to have a discussion that was essential.

  ‘I’m trying to do more things in my ordinary day-to-day life that aren’t in activist spaces, to bring issues up when they’re relevant at that time. Because I don’t know what the other people in the room are thinking, but if I’m thinking about that and no one else is saying it, then it’s on me to say something. Being accountable for that, really only to myself. Doing things when there’s nobody there to see it, because it’s not really about somebody witnessing it or patting me on the back for it.’

  It is unusual that Jenny is willing to do the heavy work of dismantling racism. Frankly, it’s unusual because she is white. So many white people think that racism is not their problem. But white privilege is instrumental to racism. When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren’t. To me, it is like yin and yang. Racism’s legacy does not exist without purpose. It brings with it not just a disempowerment for those affected by it, but an empowerment for those who are not. That is white privilege. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. Why don’t white people think they have a racial identity?

  4

  FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET

  In 1968, the late Conservative politician Enoch Powell told a rapt audience in a speech about the ills of immigration: ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’1 Inadvertently, he revealed his own tacit recognition of racist power relations in the country at the time, and although he didn’t explicitly say it (because he knew what side he was on), Powell clearly thought that a power transfer in race relations would lead to white British people facing the mistreatment and systemic barriers that black people were working to overcome. There is a reason why he said ‘whip hand over’ rather than using the less symbolic phrasing ‘advantage over’. Whip conjures images of beatings, misery and forced labour, of subjugation and total dominance – of slavery. Enoch Powell’s speech has consistently been earmarked as one of the most racist speeches in British history, but his language was only as racially charged as Britain’s relationship with blackness has historically been. The only way he could envision power being maintained in Britain was by subjugation of a people, because that is how Britain has held and maintained its power in the past.