Reni Eddo Lodge @ 5x15 - Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

[Applause] view everyone can hear me fine excellent wonderful let me sit this round okay so I'm going to start by telling you an interesting story all based on real-life events in fact much like my book it's nonfiction so about a year and a bit ago a good friend of mine you may recognize his name Nicholas Shukla he's the editor of a very successful anthology which I contributed to called the good immigrant about you in a bit ago he teamed up with a another author named Sonny Singh and they sort of looked at what was happening in British publishing and they looked at who had been nominated and long listed for prizes and who was winning literary prizes and who was being published in general and they noticed a real problem they know it's the massive problem and the problem was overwhelmingly all of those names those who being long lifted shortlisted winning overwhelmingly those authors were white and they thought that was a crying shame because you know being in the network that they were in their new plenty of like talented non-white authors in Britain so they decided to set up a literary prize and they called it the Gillette prize and I think that was the first year of it it's a very recent literary prize and the aim was simple they wanted to celebrate wires of colour in Britain British born rights of color in particular so they went ahead they put it together it got lots of coverage and you know the trade magazine the bookseller everything was fine and dandy but but almost immediately it went into some controversy but the first I want to tell you about like the context in which they're putting this literary prize together so the bookseller did some research I think at the beginning of this year maybe the end of last year in which they they basically just collated data and it was difficult because publishers weren't collating the race of the authors that they were publishing so they just had to get in some circumstances but the bookseller pull together numbers on exactly who was being published in Britain because I think that's you know who's being published is an indication of who the industry thinks is talented right and the bookseller found that of the thousands of titles that were published by British publishing houses in 2016 a tiny fraction so fewer than 100 were by non white British authors so yeah we had Claudia Rankine and Carnegie seacoast and you know British readers were feeling hugely inspired by them but the the ground was not really being fertile for homegrown non-white Kalam and that was a context in which Nikesh and Sonny put together this literary prize I think that's really uncontroversial don't you write like let's celebrate some underrepresented voices so they launched this literary prize into the ever and they said to publishers nominate any kind of book we're not being restricted here it can be a cookery book it can be a children's book it can be whatever as long as it's by an author who isn't white based on the fact that they're so underrepresented in the industry so the first controversy that I ran into was the author Shappy Khorsandi the author and comedian on being nominated by the prize immediately called upon her publisher to take her name out of it she didn't want to be involved and her reasoning when at least this is what was quoted in the press was she felt that her being long listed or shortlisted for this particular prize was just simply tokenism it was not going to be about her talent it was going to be solely just because she was brown an interesting conclusion to draw I think when you look again at the landscape of the issue which is growth under representation and a situation in which she has already a bit of a profile being a comedian before she was an author but anyway that was a bit of a setback for the Jillette prize organisers and they just decided to soldier on stay optimistic etc etc then a few days before they were about to announce the winner of the prize I met with Nikesh my book was just about to come out and he was really he was slumped he was he looked really unhappy and I was like Nikesh what's going on what's the matter like Nikesh is have got the energy of a newborn puppy usually so this is really it was really unusual to see him like this and he said Reni we've had a letter from the equality and Human Rights Commission and they said that they've had a complaint from an MP they wouldn't say which empty I knew I knew this empty says that the prize is racist towards white people and they won the equality and human rights commission to investigate it and because the Equality in his Human Rights Commission is obliged to take forward any complaints wherever they may be even though only a particular kind of person is going to know how to put in a complaint your labor isn't going to know how to do that they were now being investigated and the Commission didn't say oh you've broken the law but it was just we've had this complaint now we need all this data from you to people drastically under erisa resource to people basically put your day jobs to one side and defend explain to us and defend to us why your prize doesn't contravene being quality at 2010 and Nikesh was absolutely devastated because from his point of view and from my point of view you can already tell it was he felt like he was doing a good thing he saw an industry that wasn't doing what it is ideal which was to publish points of view from Britain as a whole and to champion under represented voices and he wanted to help the industry do that and he was hit by a something a letter from equality and Human Rights Commission saying justify why you're doing this this is racist towards white people actually that's not what the Commission said verbatim just I'm paraphrasing here right anyway so they had to do all this heavy work the Commission investigated it and concluded that goodness but actually this was a this was a positive discrimination not a negative discrimination and a friend of a friend who actually this MP I'll tell you to name and we're going to mention his name again has already been mentioned once here or tonight Philip Davies MP a constituent of his wrote a letter to him and said Philip I'm really disappointed you know you are an MP elected to represent this constituency why are you spending your time and sort of wasting your time with this etc etc it's just very disappointing to see given the broad-based factual stats about clear under representation in publishing to which and I'm not quite in verbatim here people so just roll with me on this Philip Davy said political correctness lefties like you are the reason why I will continue doing the kind of work that I'm doing because this is clear discrimination against white people he gave comments very similar to the Guardian when they contacted him and asked him why he had made this complaint and actually complaints by him has have actually got literary prizes geared towards rights of color shut down completely in the past he successfully campaigned to shut down a literary prize for writers of color in 2009 he successfully shot that down so I think sometimes when people see the title of my book they go WOW oh my gosh Bernie's and that that's that's very extreme that's very extreme but I wanted to tell you a little bit about that story about some good-natured friends who are trying to champion writers who are not being heard to really illustrate to you how frustrating it can be to to attempt to do any sort advocacy on this issue there seems to be an understanding that we live in a meritocracy rather than we live in a society blighted by structural inequality and if you believe that we live in a meritocracy then anytime anybody attempts to try and redress the balance of a grossly unequal status quo you were pinpointed as the problem you will importers the person who is creating divisions rather than the actual structural forces of racism in this instance and not certainly what I found years ago when I was involved in like less groups and feminist groups they were always almost overwhelmingly white and I would point out hey this sir you're all white here I thought where I became for a better world and whatnot like I'm going to try and be a little bit more diverse you know especially based in London of all places and I was told no really you're being divisive by pointing out the problem you actually are the problem there is no problem by mentioning race you are the real racist and it was in that context that I wrote the following which was this was published in 2014 I just published it on my website and at this point I was a point of extreme emotional exhaustion I wrote I'm no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race not all white people just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and it's symptoms I can no longer engage with the golf of an emotional disconnect the white people display when a person of color articulates their experience you can see their eyes shut down and hardened it's like treacle is being poured into their ears blocking up their ear canals it's like they can no longer hear us this emotional disconnect it's a conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin color is the norm and that all others deviate from it at best white people have been taught not to mention that people of color are different in case it offends us they truly believe that the experiences of their lives as a result of their skin color can and should be universal I just can't engage with the bewilderment and the defensive nurse that they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that they do they've never had to think about what it means in power terms to be white so anytime they're vaguely reminded of this fact they interpret it as an affront their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in admit nation their mouths start twitching as they get defensive eating to talk over you but not really listen because they need to let you know that you've got it wrong the journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of color to prioritize white feelings even if they can hear you they're not really listening it's like something happens to the world as they leave our mouths and reach there is the words hit a barrier of denial and they don't get any further that's the emotional disconnect it's not really surprising because they've never known what it means to embrace a person of color as a true equal with thoughts and feelings that was valid as their own watching the color of fear by Lee Manoir I saw people of color break down in tears as they struggle to convince a defiant white man that his words are enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them or the while he said obliviously completely confused by this pain our best trivializing it at worst ridiculing it I've written before about this white denial being the ubiquitous politics of race that operates on its inherent and visibility so I can't talk to white people about race anymore because of the consequent denials awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others I can no longer have this conversation because we're often coming at it from completely different places I can't have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don't even recognize that the problem exists worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals we don't not to mention their entering into conversation with defiant white people is frankly a dangerous task for me as the heckles rise and the defias grows I have to tread incredibly carefully because if I sit expressed frustration anger or exasperation at their refusal to understand they will tap into their pre subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety it's very likely that they'll then paint me as a bully or an abuser it's also likely that their white friends will rally around them rewrite history and make the lives the truth trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that amid every conversation about nice white people feeling silenced by conversations about race there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives and live the consequences it's truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of color have to live the options are speak your truth and face the reprisal or bite your tongue and get ahead in life it must be a strange life always having permission to speak and finally being asked feeling big indignant when you're finally asked to listen it stems from white people have a question entitlement I suppose I cannot continue to emotionally exhausting to get this message across while also telling a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their world of perpetuating structural racism less a character assassinate me so I'm no longer talking to white people about race I don't have a huge amount of power to change the world the world change the way the world works but I can set boundaries I can hold the entitlement they feel towards me and I'll start that by stopping the conversation the balance is too fast long in their favor their intent is often not to listen or learn but to exert their power to prove me wrong to emotionally drained me and to rebalance the status quo I'm not talking to white people about race unless I absolutely have to if there's something like a media or a conference appearance that means that someone might hear what I'm saying and feel less alone then I'll participate but I'm no longer dealing with people who don't want to hear it wish to ridicule it and frankly don't deserve it now I've got a little bit of time left and I went totally off grips so I'm going to tell you some interesting things about history and I think that when I was in school I was taught to about Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King and the Underground Railroad but I didn't learn very much at all about Black Britain and the civil rights struggle in fact I think part of this sort of willful ignorance and denial is a Hong Phau belief that there was never a race problem in Britain that there wasn't a civil rights struggle in Britain and that um and then it and in that you know you don't really understand the past you can't understand today so I'm going to tell you about one really interesting person Paul Stevenson and the Bristol bus boycott so in nineteen sixty three Jamaican guy Bailey he was Jamaican he was nineteen years old he went to a job interview and this was in Bristol had about three thousand strong black community at the time but nobody was employed by the buses and a lot of people in Bristol thought the dish was very suspicious and so a group of young men buoyed by a youth walk at work are called Paul Stevenson decided to club together and put it to the test so they arranged a interview third guy over the phone and it was like yeah yeah cool there's there's definitely vacancies come down but one guy turned up for the interview he was told there are no vacancies and this is when this group of young men who later call themselves the West Indian Development Council they got to work they immediately organized a press conference they did a photo shoot putting guy at the back of the baths like like Rosa Parks they were very media savvy and they made they kicked up a stink about it they won local and national press coverage and and what people in Bristol did I'm going to call them Brazilians at this point what the Brazilians did was they were sponsored amazingly everybody started to boycott the bus service it got so bad that around the same time that Martin Luther King jr. was delivering his I have a dream speech the bus bus company backed down and this and they you know got rid of it on official color blah Calabar and said that we will employ people on merit alone now this is something that happened in many people's a living memory it's something that I didn't learn about until I was working for a race equality think-tank and I actually met Paul Stevenson it was such an honor to meet him and I wondered to myself why was deficit history being celebrated on a local level in Bristol but not a national level in the same way that we would you know celebrate Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks and I think I realized that that was part the problem I saw I suppose if you go away from today feeling wild up by what I've said then that's one thing that I would ask you all to do which is shout about these heroes shout about the fact that not only do they exist but that the legacy of what they were fighting against still exists today and I think it's very good to feel like you are a progressive person and you're you're doing the work but but actually I fear that there's been a level of complacency and a feeling that battles have already been won and if the last you know year and a half has shown us anything it's that that actually we all need to sort of get to work on this and one one line that I have in the book is that you know racism is something that has been foisted onto the shoulders of people who are affected by it but actually if you feel that you are not affected by racism then it's even more of your duty to speak up against it so thanks very much [Applause]

Channel: 5x15 Stories

Views: 20,807

Rating: 3.5291181 out of 5

Keywords: Race, Racism, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Literature, diversity, author, Public Speaking

Id: HplKCcy34JE

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2017

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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. 'Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race' is her first book.