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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (view source)
Revision as of 12:04, 9 June 2017
, 12:04, 9 June 2017no edit summary
See, here's the thing. If I can clearly understand that patriarchy exists as a political and cultural system that discriminates against women even when many individual men don't, why would I ''not'' clearly understand that concept when applied to whiteness or white supremacy, call it what you will? I honestly don't understand the resistance. Patriarchy isn't limited to builders cat-calling female passers-by or comedians making mother-in-law jokes. And racism isn't limited to people who use the N word. It really isn't hard to grasp, is it? Yet it seems so, because Eddo-Lodge needed to write this book.
I'm grateful to Eddo-Lodge for ''Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race''. I hope I learned something. You should read it too, even if you don't think you have anything to learn. Eddo-Lodge might surprise you. Inequality in the UK isn't some big hierarchy of oppression in which special interest groups fight for some kind of preferential top spot, you know. It's a Venn diagram. And if people would only imagine it that way instead of being constantly vigilant not to lose their place on the non-existent hierarchy ladder, they might see that understanding structural racism in the UK and how white people - even the female ones, even the working class ones, even the gay ones - benefit from it without doesn't mean they're having anything about them and their own struggles erased.
If Eddo-Lodge gets you thinking, why not get curious about that thinking? You could read the essays in the [[The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) by Deirdre Osborne (Editor)|The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature]], which see the literary contribution of black and Asian communities as central to the British cultural landscape, not an adjunct to it. Or even take a trip to [http://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/ Our Migration Story] to flesh out some of the narratives that Eddo-Lodge summarises in her fabulous book.