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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  To insist that Rhodes Must Fall campaigners were restricting discussion was simply a lie. The work of the protest movement brought little-known aspects of Britain’s colonial involvement in Africa to prime-time news, exposing the facts to audiences who almost certainly wouldn’t have learnt about it on the national curriculum. What student protesters achieved was the opposite of shutting down debate. That the campaign was misrepresented revealed the passive-aggressive anti-black sleight of hand that so many British conversations about race are guilty of indulging in.

  This ‘freedom of speech’ fight can hardly even be called a debate. Instead, it is one-sided, with the powerful side constantly warping the terms of engagement. Couching opposition to anti-racist speech and protest as a noble fight for freedom of speech is about protecting white people from being criticised. It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism. If Rhodes Must Fall’s detractors really believed in freedom of speech, they would have let the debate happen without throwing around disingenuous accusations that black people were stopping them from speaking freely. They would have engaged with the ideas being put forward rather than using intellectually dishonest tricks designed to circumvent taking the protesters seriously. I think that there is a fear among many white people that accepting Britain’s difficult history with race means somehow admitting defeat.

  Rhodes Must Fall was a small-scale example of what racial injustice looks like in Britain. It looks normal. It is pedestrian. It is unquestioned. It’s just a part of the landscape, you might walk past it every day. For people who oppose anti-racism on the grounds of freedom of speech, opposition to gross racial disparities is about ‘offence’, rather than the heavily unequal material conditions that people affected by it carry as burden. Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don’t really have anything material to oppose, faux ‘free speech’ defenders spend all their spare time railing against ‘offence culture’. When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from the benefactors of it to those who are likely to lose out because of it. Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity. Those who are repeatedly struck by racism’s tendency to hinder their life chances are told to toughen up and grow a thicker skin.

  Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why. The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments. If free speech, as so many insist, includes being prepared to hear opinions that you don’t like, then let’s open up the parameters of what we consider acceptable debate. I don’t mean new versions of old bigotry. I mean, that if we have to listen to this kind of bigotry, then let us have the equal and opposite viewpoint. If Katie Hopkins, with help from the Sun newspaper, publishes a column describing desperate refugees trying to travel to Britain as cockroaches,9 then we need a cultural commentator that advocates for true compassion and total open borders. Not the kind of wishy-washy liberalism that harps on about the cultural and economic contributions of migrants to this country as though they are resources to be sucked dry, but someone who speaks in favour of migrants and open borders with the same force of will with which Hopkins despises them.

  It’s about time that critiques of racism were subject to the same passionate free speech defence as racist statements themselves. Freedom of speech means the freedom for opinions on race to clash. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal, and racist speech and ideas need to be healthily challenged in the public sphere. White fear tries to stop this conversation from happening.

  Fear of a black planet exists not just in the real world, but also in the fictional. After four-year-old me came to terms with the fact that I would never turn white, I found refuge in white fictional British and American characters that I could relate to. For so long, that fictional heroic character loved by so many has been assumed to be white, because whiteness has been assumed to be universal. It is in film, television and books that we see the most potent manifestations of white as the default assumption. A character simply cannot be black without a pre-warning for an assumed white audience. Black characters as leads are considered unrelatable (with the exception of a handful of high-profile, crossover black Hollywood stars). When casting for film and TV does take the step to cast outside of whiteness, fans repeatedly reveal their ugly side, voicing their upset, disgust and disappointment. Fear of black characters is fear of a black planet.

  When Sony Pictures suffered the great email hack of 2014, correspondence from chairwoman Amy Pascal revealed that she was keen on the idea of black actor Idris Elba as the next James Bond. A year later, and artfully coinciding with promotions for his latest book, author Anthony Horowitz ended up apologising for saying that Idris Elba was too ‘street’ to play the iconic British character. Online, a debate was raging over whether a black Bond could ever be legitimate. That there was such uproar about James Bond, the epitome of slick, suave Britishness, possibly being tainted with just a hint of black, proved again the demarcation lines of what it means to be British. When newspapers covered the ‘Idris Elba as Bond’ speculation, the comments almost broke the Internet. ‘I’d never watch a Bond film again,’ cried one Daily Mail reader. What were they so scared of? This strength of feeling over classic stories being ruined wasn’t around when the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist was remade into a film in which the lead character was cast in the image of a cartoon cat.

  When the seventh Star Wars film saw black British actor John Boyega cast as a stormtrooper, a new league of angry people took to social media to call for a boycott of the film, calling it anti-white propaganda. This was because two of the film’s heroes were black, and the film’s villains were all white. The more extreme corners of the Internet echoed Nick Griffin by insisting that this casting decision was part of a wider cultural project to instigate a white genocide. The fear was intense – and it was linked to wider white nationalist fears about white people becoming a racial minority in the Western world.

  In the run-up to Christmas 2015, the Internet was polarised by the prospect of a black Hermione Granger. The lead cast had just been announced for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play based on the books, set nineteen years after the seventh book ended. Hermione Granger was to be played by Noma Dumezweni, a black actress of South African heritage. Upon hearing the news, some were ecstatic, but others were outraged. Some fans fixated on a sentence from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – ‘Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree’ – as hard evidence that any deviation from a white actress was sacrilege.

  As a child, I was a fully fledged Harry Potter fan, queuing up outside bookshops at midnight for the latest release, and speed-reading the books once I’d got my grubby hands on them so I could know the conclusion before any of my friends. Hermione’s race didn’t matter so much to me then, but when CBBC’s Newsround announced open auditions for the main cast, eleven-year-old me grabbed my copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban and read out all of Hermione’s bits as I paced around the back garden. I didn’t end up sending any of my information to the programme, though, because I sort of knew that if the book didn’t explicitly say she was black, then she probably wasn’t. There would be no point in auditioning for the part.

  It was heartening, then, to see J. K. Rowling come out in support of a black Hermione, rebuffing the angry literalists by tweeting that, when it came to the character, ‘white skin was never specified’. But when you are used to white being the default, black isn’t black unless it is clearly pointed out as so. As an adult Harry Potter fan, I’d begun to think of Hermione Granger, with her house-elf liberation ca
mpaign, as a well-meaning but guilty-feeling white liberal, taking on a social justice cause with gusto without ever really consulting the views and feelings of the people she was fighting for. Outside of the wizarding world, Hermione would be working at an NGO or a charity, or slowly climbing the bureaucracy of the United Nations. With her strong moral compass, she’d be educated and adamant about animal rights or global warming.

  Far from destroying our most well-loved works of fiction, abandoning assumptions of the whiteness of our characters infinitely expands all of the fictional universes, whether it be the wizarding world or the Star Wars galaxy. As vlogger Rosianna Halse Rojas points out,10 reading Harry Potter’s Hermione as black is a whole different ball game. It brings to light the incredibly racialised language of blood purity used in the wizarding world, of mudbloods and purebloods. This is terminology that could have been easily lifted straight from Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Hermione’s parents were muggles after all, and that is how states and scientists have categorised races and fuelled racism – as though some heritages are contagious and are spread through lineage and blood. A black or mixed-race Hermione enduring spat-out slurs of ‘mudblood’ from her peers, plucked from her parents, told she’s special and part of a different race altogether, might be very keen to assimilate, to be accepted. No wonder she tried so hard. No wonder she did her friends’ homework, and was first to raise her hand in class. She was the model minority. A black or mixed-race Hermione agitating to free house elves, after six or seven years of enduring racial slurs, might not have the courage to challenge her peers, and instead might have hung on to something she felt she really could change.

  That some Harry Potter fans struggled to imagine a black Hermione meant that they couldn’t imagine little black girls as precocious, intelligent, logical know-it-alls with hearts of gold. It’s a shame that they couldn’t imagine quiet, unassuming black middle-class parents who work as dentists. It’s sad that blackness in their heads is stuck in an ever-repetitive script, with strict parameters of how a person should be. The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character.

  We are told that black actors and actresses cast as central characters in works of fiction are unrealistic. We are told that they are historically inaccurate, or that they are too far a stretch of the imagination. But really, this is about a belligerent section of society that refuses to think outside of themselves, who believe that everything must cater to them and the rest of us must adapt to their whims and wishes. And this is nothing but insulting when heard by the black fiction lover who, if they are to enjoy their chosen genre, have no choice but to empathise with a character who looks nothing like them.

  This line of thought demonstrates a real struggle to identify with black humanity in any conceivable way. To them we are an unidentifiable shifting mass, a simplistic, animalistic herd. They don’t believe that black characters have the capacity to be sophisticated like James Bond, or intelligent like Hermione Granger. But those of us who aren’t white have been subjected to having to identify with the lives of white main characters since film began. Fear of a black planet destroys good fiction, and it demonstrates how racism gets in the way of human empathy. Seeing non-white characters relegated to sidekick or token status has been routine for so long that, for some, attempting to try and relate to black skin in a main character is a completely alien concept. We’ve been positioned as the ‘other’, only taking centre stage to portray subjugation or provide comic relief. White people are so used to seeing a reflection of themselves in all representations of humanity at all times, that they only notice it when it’s taken away from them.

  Fear of a black planet manifests in a co-opting of the language of liberation to describe white resentment, anger and discontent. There is talk of fairness, without acknowledging what is already unfair. It manifests in a rigid and shallow understanding of freedom of speech (generally understood to be the final frontier in the fight to be as openly bigoted as possible without repercussions). The fear of a black planet is the by-product of social and demographic change, and calls for state accountability. There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women. This is no different.

  And the fear is completely unfounded. Power and wealth in this country is still concentrated in very few, very white hands, and power never goes down without a fight. Your life chances are still drastically influenced by your race and class. Demographic change might spearhead some representational wins at the top, but we are far from any Noughts & Crosses-style black supremacy.11 Regardless, that isn’t the kind of world anti-racists are envisioning when they agitate for justice. It has always been about the redistribution of power rather than the inverting of it.

  The paradox, of course, is that those who oppose anti-racism have worked themselves into quite the double bind. It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s cat situation. If, as they say, racism doesn’t exist, and black people have nothing to complain about, why are they so afraid of white people becoming the new minority? I suppose we will all have to wait in suspense until 2066 – the projected year when white people will be a demographic minority in Britain – to find out.

  5

  THE FEMINISM QUESTION

  Back in October 2012, I sat in a cold university library, furiously typing out a blog post on race and feminism. I was supposed to be revising, but was so irritated I could barely sit still. Lena Dunham’s television programme Girls had premiered that year to critical acclaim. It was widely regarded as an accurate reflection of young women’s lives. The characters were all working low-paid jobs and waiting for their lives to begin. They bickered among themselves, and wrestled with jealousy, pettiness, and body-image troubles. These were all characteristics I recognised among my peers and myself. Most of us were just drudging ahead, balancing unpaid internships alongside bar or retail jobs in the hope that we would reap the same rewards for hard work as the generation before us did. We had been hoping for a nine-to-five job and secure housing. We thought that if we worked hard enough, we would rid ourselves of that panicky feeling that sets in when you don’t quite know where next month’s rent is coming from. The scenarios in Girls were hugely familiar. But the programme, set in New York City, was starkly white. Because of this, it was hard to take commentators seriously when they insisted that it was the most feminist television show in decades.

  As a result of the show, one of the most prominent debates in recent years about feminism’s race problem began to brew. Some asserted that it would be nothing but tokenistic for Dunham to write black characters into her TV show just for the sake of it. Others said that it was absurd to set a television show with an all-white cast in one of the most racially diverse cities in America. To me, it was obvious. It also wasn’t really about a TV programme, although the programme was symptomatic of a widespread problem. Finishing up the blog post, I wrote: ‘When feminists can see the problem with all-male panels, but can’t see the problem with all-white television programmes, it’s worth questioning who they’re really fighting for.’

  On reflection, the representation and inclusion of black faces wasn’t actually what I was passionate about. This wasn’t about being seen, or about being included. I was used to not seeing positive reflections of black people in popular culture. An all-white television programme was nothing new to me. What I was really upset about was the ease with which white people defended their all-white spaces and spheres. Theirs was an impenetrable bubble, and their feminism sat neatly within it. Not only this, but the feminists who insisted they were agitating for a better world for all women didn’t actually give a shit about black people and, by extension, they didn’t give a shit about women of colour. Gender equality must be addressed, but race could languish in the corner.

  The same sort of scena
rio happened repeatedly over the next couple of years. Just one year later, pop star Lily Allen released her first music video, ‘Hard Out Here’, after a long hiatus from the music industry. The formula of the resulting race row was similar to the furore around Girls. A young and successful white woman had revealed public work that was immediately lauded as raw, relatable and utterly, thoroughly feminist – the definitive anthem for young women everywhere. In this instance though, it wasn’t a lack of black people that sparked upset. The black bodies were present, but Lily Allen’s black back-up dancers were scantily clad, dancing in a parody of misogynistic hip-hop videos as she sang about glass ceilings, objectification, and strongly implied that smart girls didn’t need to strip to be successful.

  After a while, it became wise to stop paying attention to anything tagged vaguely feminist in popular media, as it would only end up being disappointing. What I carried on doing was writing.

  On New Year’s Eve of 2013, I was invited by a BBC producer to appear on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It was a fairly innocent request – to discuss the year in feminism alongside Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project, and Caroline Criado-Perez, who that year had campaigned to have historical women figures featured on British banknotes. When I took my seat in the studio, I realised I was the only black face in the room. That was the first red flag. I was joined by Laura and the radio presenter. Caroline was phoning in. The segment began. I was nervous. I explained that I didn’t really consider myself a campaigner, but that during the year I had been writing about racism in the feminist movement – my frustrations with a doggedly white-centric perspective from the movement’s ‘leaders’ – and found that lots of women who were not white were feeling exactly the same way. ‘A tide has turned in terms of these issues in feminism,’ I said. ‘They cannot be ignored any more.’1