Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(2)

After I pressed publish, the blog post took on a life of its own. Years later, I still meet new people, in different countries and different situations, who tell me that they’ve read it. In 2014, as the post was being linked to all over the Internet, I braced myself for the usual slew of racist comments. But the response was markedly different, so much so that it surprised me.

There was a clear racial split in how the post was received. I got lots of messages from black and brown people. There were many ‘thank you’s and lots of ‘you’ve articulated my experience’. There were reports of tears, and a little bit of debate about how to approach the problem, with education being rated highly as a solution to bridge the communication gap. Reading these messages was a relief. I knew how difficult it was to put that feeling of frustration into words, so when people got in contact and thanked me for explaining something they’d always struggled to, I was glad that it had served them. I knew that if I was feeling less alone, then they were feeling less alone too.

What I wasn’t expecting was an outpouring of emotion from white people who felt that by deciding to stop talking to white people about race, I was taking something away from the world, and that this was an absolute tragedy. ‘Heartbreaking’ seemed to be the word that best described this sentiment.

‘I’m so damn sorry you have been made to feel like this,’ one commenter wrote. ‘As a white person I’m painfully embarrassed by the systemic privilege we deny and enjoy on a daily basis. And painfully embarrassed that I didn’t even realise it myself until about ten years ago.’

Another commenter pleaded: ‘Don’t stop talking to white people, your voice is clear and important, and there are ways of getting through.’ Another one, this time from a black commenter, read: ‘It would be such a painstaking task to persuade people, but we should not stop.’ And a final, definitive comment read simply: ‘Please don’t give up on white people.’

Although these responses were sympathetic, they were evidence of the same communication gap I’d written about in the blog post. There seemed to be a misunderstanding of who this piece of writing was for. It was never written with the intention of prompting guilt in white people, or to provoke any kind of epiphany. I didn’t know at the time that I had inadvertently written a break-up letter to whiteness. And I didn’t expect white readers to do the Internet equivalent of standing outside my bedroom window with a boom box and a bunch of flowers, confessing their flaws and mistakes, begging me not to leave. This all seemed strange and slightly uncomfortable to me. Because, in writing that blog post, all I had felt I was saying was that I had had enough. It wasn’t a cry for help, or a grovelling plea for white people’s understanding and compassion. It wasn’t an invitation for white people to indulge in self-flagellation. I stopped talking to white people about race because I don’t think giving up is a sign of weakness. Sometimes it’s about self-preservation.

I’ve turned ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ into a book – paradoxically – to continue the conversation. Since I set my boundary, I’ve done almost nothing but speak about race – at music festivals and in TV studios, to secondary-school pupils and political party conferences – and the demand for this conversation shows no signs of subsiding. People want to talk about it. This book is the product of five years of agitation, frustration, exhausting explanations, and paragraph-long Facebook comments. It’s about not just the explicit side, but the slippery side of racism – the bits that are hard to define, and the bits that make you doubt yourself. Britain is still profoundly uncomfortable with race and difference.

Since I wrote that blog post in 2014, things have changed a lot for me. I now spend most of my time talking to white people about race. The publishing industry is very white, so there’s no way I could have got this book published without talking to at least some white people about race. And in my research, I’ve had to talk to white people I never thought I’d ever exchange words with, including former British National Party leader Nick Griffin. I know a lot of people think he shouldn’t be given a platform for his views to be aired unchallenged, and I agonised over the interview here. I’m not the first person with a platform to give Nick Griffin airtime, but I hope I’ve handled his words responsibly.

A quick word on definitions. In this book, the phrase ‘people of colour’ is used to define anyone of any race that isn’t white. I’ve used it because it’s an infinitely better definition than simply ‘non-white’ – a moniker that brings with it a suggestion of something lacking, and of a deficiency. I use the word black in this book to describe people of African and Caribbean heritage, including mixed-race people. I quote a lot of research, so you will occasionally read the phrase black and minority ethnic (or BME). It’s not a term I like very much, because it conjures thoughts of clinical diversity monitoring forms, but in the interests of interpreting the research as accurately as possible, I have chosen to stick to it.

I write – and read – to assure myself that other people have felt what I’m feeling too, that it isn’t just me, that this is real, and valid, and true. I am only acutely aware of race because I’ve been rigorously marked out as different by the world I know for as long as I can remember. Although I analyse invisible whiteness and ponder its exclusionary nature often, I watch as an outsider. I understand that this isn’t the case for most white people, who move through the world blissfully unaware of their own race until its dominance is called into question. When white people pick up a magazine, scroll through the Internet, read a newspaper or switch on the TV, it is never rare or odd to see people who look like them in positions of power or exerting authority. In culture particularly, the positive affirmations of whiteness are so widespread that the average white person doesn’t even notice them. Instead, these affirmations are placidly consumed. To be white is to be human; to be white is universal. I only know this because I am not.