Why White People Need to Talk about Race (A. Wilson)

By Alistair Wilson

Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Renni Eddo-Lodge

If you’re reading this, you’re probably white. As a self-help tool, this book is largely for you. To a person of colour, I'm told, it is more of a crystallisation into words of what was already fairly clear, and a very lived experience. The value of this book is proportional to the number of white people who are willing to read it and to deeply and thoughtfully consider its message, especially those in positions of authority and leadership.

You will learn things from this book that you probably never knew, evidence in its own right of a bias in our upbringing, of education, and history lessons. You will learn of the British history of slavery, police brutality and institutional racism, race riots and lynchings blamed on the victims, and biases in opportunity throughout education and employment, all of which either still exist today or still influence the way we live, see and treat each other.

Part dissection, part polemic, borne of a frustration at the failure of white society to comprehend the insidiousness of racism and the persistent, often instinctive, measures we take to muzzle any rational and honest analysis of it, this book analyses the roots and branches of racism in Britain today.

When people of colour challenge structural racism, it’s very rare for them to be popularly heeded and supported. Only the wilfully ignorant would deny racial inequalities exist, and yet we white people are persistently complacent despite our position of privilege.

Many of you may be squirming in your seats at the book’s title or brewing up collective outrage at the suggestion of your involvement in racism purely because of the colour of your skin, and that, my friends, is QED.

A large part of this book illustrates that white victimhood, ‘an effort by the powers that be to divert conversations about the effects of structural racism in order to shield whiteness from much needed criticism’.

‘It’s racist to accuse me of being complicit simply because I’m white,’ you plea, yet racism is defined as prejudice plus power, and as Eddo-Lodge points out, ‘Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be... prejudiced. But there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power...in the places and spaces where prejudice could really take effect.’ There’s really no reason for white skin to be so thin.

We have a simplified view of racism, outlined by far-right extremism and discriminatory slang, but something much more insidious is at play if we only opened our eyes to it. The musician, academic and author Akala, in his book ‘Natives’ asserts that ‘we have been trained to see racism- if we see it at all- as an issue of interpersonal morality. Good people are not racist, only bad people are. This neat binary is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all.” Our profession is largely full of good people but that doesn’t absolve us of our responsibilities to our colleagues.

‘But I’m not racist’, I hear you say, ‘I don’t see colour.’ This is familiar rhetoric of the white supervised racism discussion and is broken down in this book. ‘Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism. It starts and ends with ‘discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad’, without any accounting for the ways structural power manifests in these exchanges.’

Racism goes much deeper than the colours we see, or claim not to see, and condensing the issue into interpersonal discrimination or nothing, avoids the deeper problems. Eddo-Lodge illustrates this with research. When taking SAT’s at the age of eleven, a black boy will be ‘systematically marked down by his own teachers – a phenomenon that is remedied when examiners who don’t teach at his school mark his exam papers.’

Are teachers interpersonally racist? Do they actively and knowingly discriminate against black children, or is something more insidious affecting their subconscious? Only an overt racist could argue it’s not unjust, or that we ought not to be concerned.

It doesn’t end there, black students are less likely to be accepted into a high-ranking university and once at university, the highest proportion of students achieving the lowest ranking of a 3rd. or a pass are black students. Only the overt racists among you would assume it’s because of a lack of intelligence or effort, given that black teenagers are proportionately more likely than white teenagers to move into higher education in the first place.

Assuming Eddo-Lodge’s black student surfs the waves of educational marginalisation with good fortune and begins applying for jobs, there’s another wall of bias standing in his way. A study by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2009 showed that applicants with the same qualifications and skills but with Asian or African sounding names were called to interview far less often than those sounding more Anglo-Saxon, or white.

There are many reasons why diverse workplaces, and thus professions, are beneficial, and ours should reflect the society whose animals we treat, so we must strive to achieve more diversity. Yet if barriers like these remain unchallenged, we will remain predominantly white.

To make our profession, and indeed our nation, fairer, we need to share rational discourse about racism, and we need to listen. Sadly however, when people of colour do assert themselves, they’re often patronised and condemned with accusations such as reverse racism and the outrageous paranoia that Britishness may not always mean whiteness, as if not being white might be a disadvantage.

We’ve seen recently how words like ‘woke’ and ‘snowflake’ are weaponised as rallying calls for keyboard warriors in our profession to shout down progressive attitudes and maintain the status quo. This is how white privilege is preserved. The absence of the effects of racism, an unacknowledged advantage to all of us white people, is not a benefit that others enjoy. White privilege doesn’t mean the challenges you did face are lessened, or that you faced none, it just means that you will be in some way advantaged in life because of the colour of your skin, and you probably won’t even notice. “White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no-one. Everyone is complicit but no-one wants to take responsibility”. Anti-racists are instead told to ‘grow a pair’ by people who seem more offended by accusations of racism than by racism itself.

‘But I’m a white male vet, the new minority.’ Comes the fragile cry for help. We live in a World built by and for white men, any minority that exists within the profession is more than compensated for by the overwhelming predominance of white male faces in society’s positions of power, setting workplace cultures and controlling the discourse. Perversely, it’s often these men crying marginalisation who simultaneously call for progressive thinkers to be less attuned to the feelings and needs of others. ‘You should have thicker skin, other than when I want it to be thin.’

This is not a book without hope. Eddo-Lodge offers a pathway for change by listening, intervening when we see injustices, addressing inequality and accepting responsibility for our role in propping up the status quo. Just as many of us enthusiastically claim a tenuous collective credit for the actions of our ancestors in defeating Nazi Germany, winning the 1966 World Cup and the Industrial Revolution, so we must accept our responsibilities towards that of which we are less proud, or less aware.

Or we could think like Nick Griffin, who was interviewed for this book in the name of balance, for whom accommodating difference is akin to erasing white Britishness. Striving to treat others more fairly and dismantling barriers does not create barriers for ourselves, we are the majority, and are already well catered for.

Still, some of you will throw your toys out of the pram, write in, complain about the injustice of it all.

‘It’s too difficult!’. You may feel that the path to navigate these issues is too tricky. Phrases like ‘walking on eggshells’, ‘can’t say right for saying wrong’, ‘political correctness gone mad’. All weak excuses for allowing injustice to remain unchecked safe in your position of privilege, because it’s easier than reading this book for some insight, for example.

There is much to learn, but learn we should, and this book is a good starting point. It may not be comfortable reading, and as a white person you may feel slighted at times, that’s your privilege crying out, and evidence that your learning is justified. When we can discuss racism together with our colleagues of colour, without making it about us, or getting defensive and argumentative, we will make progress. People of colour in the profession are the product of the same ambitions, share the same focus and dedication in the name of the same cause, and are products of the same academic process, albeit achieved against a current of structural racism which we never even noticed let alone had to fight against.