Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(23)

I was naive. We had resonated beforehand, so I had good faith in her humanity, I thought she might be able to accept the structural conditions that allowed a situation like this one to happen. So I tried to encourage her to consider the suspicion and anger of a person who has suffered racism their entire lives. I thought I might be able to persuade her to think outside of herself and question the wider context, but then every sentence she said sounded like every word I’ve ever heard from people defending whiteness. It’s like they all learn the lines from the same sheet.

Then I considered the social implications of the logical outcome of our exchange, where the consensus would be that I am wrong, because that’s how the white status quo maintains itself. If I’d argued with her, I would put myself at risk of no longer being welcome in that particular houseshare, because I would have ‘created an atmosphere’. I would be considered a ‘reverse racist’, an angry, unreasonable troublemaker, maybe even a violence sympathiser. This kind of social exclusion did not seem worth it. So I said nothing.

White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. Challenging it can have real social implications. Because it’s a many-headed hydra, you have to be careful about the white people you trust when it comes to discussing race and racism. You don’t have the privilege of approaching conversations about racism with the assumption that the other participants will be on the same plane as you. Raising racism in a conversation is like flicking a switch. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person you’ve just met, or a person you’ve always felt safe and comfortable with. You’re never sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.

White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day. It’s brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don’t get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences. I have spent a lot of time biting my tongue so hard it might fall off.

And of course, challenging it can have implications on your quality of life. You might lose out on job offers because you’ve spoken openly and honestly about your experiences and perception of racism online. Interviewing for an admin job a few years ago, I was confronted by a potential colleague about something I’d tweeted about race. Considering it was such a low-ranking position, I didn’t think such an intervention was necessary. White privilege is deviously, throat-stranglingly clever, because it owns the companies that recruit you, owns the industries you want to enter, so that if you need money to live you’re forced to appease its needs (I locked my Twitter account after that incident, and didn’t let any conversations go beyond small talk in all other jobs). It eases you into letting your guard down with white people, assured that you’ll be taken seriously, but simultaneously not being surprised when a conversation highlights your difference against your white peers. White privilege is the perverse situation of feeling more comfortable with openly racist, far-right extremists, because at least you know where you stand with them; the boundaries are clear.

The insidious stuff is much harder. You come to expect it, but you can never come to accept it. You learn to be careful about your battles, because otherwise people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. A troublemaker, not worth taking seriously, an angry black woman obsessed with race.

Back in January 2012 – a mere two days after two of Stephen Lawrence’s killers had been sentenced to life imprisonment – somewhat of a Twitter storm was circling around one of Britain’s few black female Members of Parliament. In a conversation on Twitter, Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, was exchanging thoughts on media coverage around the verdict with journalist Bim Adewunmi. It took just one tweet to inadvertently spark one of the biggest furores regarding racism against white people in the UK’s recent history. Writing in the Guardian, Bim explained the situation.2 ‘In the course of tweeting the events around the trial, conviction and sentencing of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, I wrote: “I do wish everyone would stop saying ‘the black community’ though.” I expanded in a follow-up: “Clarifying my ‘black community’ tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for ‘black community leaders’.” This led to a reply from my local MP Diane Abbott, in which she said: “I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a ‘divide and rule’ agenda.” We went back and forth for a few tweets more and then Abbott sent out the tweet that caused the furore: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism.”’

At this point, all hell broke loose. The news agenda swiftly changed. No longer were the newspaper editorials, radio packages and TV newspeople discussing Stephen Lawrence, the nuances of institutional racism, or the realities and fears of growing up black in the UK. Now the news story was about racism against white people. Racism goes both ways, Abbott’s detractors insisted. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, journalist Toby Young wrote: ‘imagine the uproar if an equally prominent white Conservative MP said something similar about black people on Twitter?’3 Even Diane’s Labour Party allies while defending her couldn’t help but describe her tone as ‘robust and combative’,4 as if their problem was with the tone of her tweet, rather than the injustice it was confronting. And while Britain’s white conservatives were insisting that this was ‘reverse racism’ that was as unforgivable as murdering an unarmed black teenager, Britain’s white liberals were terribly concerned that Abbott’s harsh phrasing might undo all of her hard work, insisting that adding the word ‘some’ to her tweet might have softened the impact of it.