Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(50)

This sudden interest in the unbearable whiteness of politics seemed utterly disingenuous to me. This was an example of how the language of liberation causes can be used for political football. When these political commentators discovered anti-racism solely to oppose Jeremy Corbyn, there was no real interest in disrupting the overwhelmingly white political landscape. There was no interest shown in unpacking the race and class standards that marginalise people of colour in the political professions. It was anti-racism for the show of it.

And online, the performative nature of social media anti-racism couldn’t have been more apparent than in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. In mid-November 2015, suicide bombers detonated their explosive vests in densely populated areas of Paris, while gunmen walked into two restaurants, a bar and the Bataclan Concert Hall, injuring hundreds and leaving 130 people dead.

The Paris attacks saw an outpouring of grief on social media. Facebook designed a specific statement for its users in Paris to mark themselves as safe from danger. The outpouring of grief led some to ask not just Facebook, but also their peers, why they grieved for some, yet not for others. The answers invariably led to factors like race, development and location – to who does and who doesn’t make a ‘relatable’ victim of terror. And then something very peculiar happened. As the rolling coverage of the Paris attacks continued on traditional news media, the seven-month-old story of terrorist attacks on Kenya’s Garissa University was being shared all over Facebook and Twitter. Two days after the Paris attacks, the Garissa University attack had become the most read on the BBC news website. The news organisation’s trending team reported, ‘About three-quarters of the hits on the story came from social media, rather than from the front page of the BBC news website.’ The report on the phenomenon continued, ‘Around half of the hits on the story came from North America, with another quarter from the UK. In total, the story attracted more than 10 million page views over two days – or about four times as many as it did when the attack actually happened in April.’2

Here, it seemed, was a warped attempt at solidarity with Kenyan people, clumsily wielded to make a point about empathy, race and sympathy after the Paris attacks. It was telling the BBC trending team noted that when the attack happened in April of that year, the reception of social media was utterly lacklustre. The resurfacing of this story in order to elicit grief – or to guilt others who were already grieving – in order to make a point, was nothing but shallow, performative anti-racism. To put it bluntly, Kenyans needed that solidarity, and those social-media shares, back in April. They didn’t need it seven months later, in November, as an act of self-important ‘proof’ that people in the UK and US cared deeply about black and brown countries affected by terrorism in light of press coverage of the Paris attacks. The events in Kenya were cynically used so that people in the UK and US could prove to themselves and to their friends that they were socially aware. That they were one of the good ones. That they believed that black lives matter.

Solidarity is nothing but self-satisfying if it is solely performative. A safety pin stuck to your lapel after a referendum about the EU that turned into a referendum on immigration is symbolic, but it won’t stop someone from getting deported. We really need to be honest with ourselves, and recognise our own inherent biases, before we think about performing anti-racism for an audience.

The perverse thing about our current racial structure is that it has always fallen on the shoulders of those at the bottom to change it. Yet racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve. You can only do so much from the outside.

After I declared that I no longer wanted to talk to white people about race in 2014, I noticed a sudden upswing in people, white and otherwise, who wanted to hear me talk about race. Everyone wanted to know what I had to say once I had said what I’d always been discouraged from saying. Setting my boundaries had given me a renewed permission to speak.

One thing is consistently clear to me: writing about race taps into a desperate thirst for discussion from those who are affected by the issues. In a way, I can understand that desperation, that feeling of thirst. It’s why I started writing. I got into political commentary because I wanted to change that consensus, to widen the narrow confines of political ideas that were deemed acceptable. But over the years I have realised both the necessity and futility of this job. Attempting to challenge the racism deemed acceptable in political discussion is tacitly tolerated, but making white people feel uncomfortable is impermissible.

If you keep up with news and current affairs, you’ll find that every day there’s a new reason to justify no longer talking to white people about race. There is so much injustice, and there are so many reasons to keep your despair about it to yourself. You might see it, but you won’t dare speak it, for fear of social sanctions. Since I wrote a blog post declaring that I no longer wanted to talk to white people about race, I have come to realise that I’m not alone in my despair. I have come to realise that there are thousands fighting this battle every day. People who want to dismantle racism don’t need to be persuaded or cajoled.

I know that, at first, talking about race is uncomfortable, because too many white people are angry and in denial. And I understand that after white people begin to get it, it’s even more uncomfortable for them to think about how their whiteness has silently aided them in life. A lifetime learning to empathise with white people’s stories means that I get it. But I don’t want white guilt. Neither do I want to see white people wasting precious time profusely apologising rather than actively doing things. No useful movements for change have ever sprung out of fervent guilt.