Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(52)

These politicians grasped at public opinion amid the backdrop of the catastrophic migrant crisis, reaching its worst in 2015. A vicious civil war in Syria saw almost five and a half million of the country’s population registering abroad as refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency. But across Europe, governments were largely ambivalent to their needs. Some helped. Germany took in a million refugees in 2015. Other countries were less giving. Rather than extending an arm of compassion, in 2016, Hungary’s government published a booklet suggesting that allowing migrants to settle would endanger the country’s culture and traditions.2 Angela Merkel was harshly criticised for her compassion by far right political party Alternative for Germany, and their berating of her helped them climb in the polls.

It felt like everywhere, public opinion was veering towards hostility. The drawbridges came up and the atmosphere turned sharp. Every country was full, and every country had to look after their own. The world had turned inward. Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous. Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched. And how desperate could they really be if some of them had mobile phones?

Racism has always been on my mind, but I recognise that that’s not always been the case for other people of colour in Britain. That changed after the Brexit vote. British citizens were told to ‘go home’, while visitors on visas were told by sneering ill-wishers that their time here was up. Nigel Farage of UKIP seemed to be on the television constantly, pretending to be representative of the average Brit while clutching a pint in a pub, or standing in front of a campaign bus declaring Britain had reached breaking point because of migration. In the United States, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement had gone global, with the new technology of smartphones shining a harsh light on long running injustices inflicted by law enforcement onto black communities, the blurry footage posted on social media, igniting the righteous rage of a new generation of activists. America was barely impacted by the refugee crisis, but it didn’t stop Donald Trump describing Mexicans as the creeping ‘black threat’ I’d discussed in chapter 4, using his presidential campaign to call for building a wall to keep them out (the infamous quote: ‘They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’3). Meanwhile, fringe hate website Breitbart settled into the heart of global power when Trump appointed executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist shortly after Trump was elected president. Nigel Farage boasted about meeting with Trump4, and Marine Le Pen was spotted in Trump Tower5. Not only was the malignant political force of the far right – considered defeated after World War Two – making a triumphant comeback, but it appeared to be forming allegiances.

The whole thing was a horror show. The same ideologies I had taken to task in the book were happening in real life. White genocide theory, inherent to the ideology of the far right, was back. Every far right electoral gain was paired with ethno-nationalism and accusations that migrants and refugees were threats to national unity. In chapter 4, I’d written about fear of a black planet and the inherent misogyny of white nationalism – then Finland’s far right swept into power with their eyes on white women’s wombs. I’d written about multiculturalism becoming a dirty word, of scaremongering and white victimhood – and suddenly these political strategies were all a part of our politics, enveloping our everyday chat. Brexit and Trump were two electoral blows to progressive politics that loosely sandwiched two years of despair.

In chapter 6, I had analysed how a council in north east London had de-prioritised the needs of social housing tenants as an example of how race and class were intricately linked. Just two weeks after the publication of this book, I, and the rest of the country, watched in hopelessness and mourning as seventy-one residents of Grenfell Tower were incinerated in their own homes. Survivors of the fire lost family members and everything they owned. It was a sickening case study of some of the most marginalised people in Britain: working class people, immigrant families, white pensioners with disabilities, foreigners, school children, recent migrants, people who had made England their home for decades. The death toll took so long to determine that the country identified the victims from the makeshift missing person posters plastered across west London. Transfixed by 24-hour rolling news, I wondered how local government could have failed these people so catastrophically. It was eerie to have made an analysis of race, class and social housing so close to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to watch the de-prioritising of human lives that I identified in the book play out on television in a burning high rise building. I feel guilty even now drawing links to it, an overtly political tragedy that I want to be wary of politicising lest I trample insensitively over heartbreak.

All of the above: this was the climate that the book entered the world into. My thinking on race had remained consistent for half a decade, and was considered wildly radical back in 2012. But by 2017, the politics of the western world had changed drastically. People were looking for answers – a balm to soothe, or an antidote to fight back.

My initial aim with this book was simple. I wanted to change the national conversation about race. By the time the book was published, the stars had aligned in such a way that people were ready for it. At the turn of 2017, I was full of apprehension about how it would be received. I had decided, with encouragement from my editor, to stick to the same title as the original blog post. It was important to me to be totally honest with readers about that initial flash point of frustration and despair. I knew things were about to get real when I saw the draft book cover. Greg Heinemann, Bloomsbury’s design wizard, had, on reading the blog post, translated the words into an image that couldn’t be more suited. When I posted the cover to social media, roughly a year before publication, the shares were out of control, and the anticipation was palpable. Much of this response was thanks to that cardinal sin – judging a book by its cover. At the very least it says ‘this has not been written by a white person’. At the very most, it says to white audiences ‘this is not for you’. And, like a red rag to a bull, the attention came in droves. It enthralled some, and sent others into a rage. In amongst the praise were early signs of ire from white people; some lectured me about segregation, or told me that Martin Luther King Junior would never approve of my work. Others admonished me for my prejudice.