Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(53)

Passionate responses to the way this book looks have never really slowed down. I’ve heard stories from booksellers who have had the book on display in their window, and stories from readers who have read my book on their daily commute. In every instance, a white person tried to start an argument with them about what they were reading or selling. This was the scenario an east London bookseller relayed to me after I visited her shop to sign some books. An elderly white man had entered the shop, saw the book in the window, and, shaking with rage, proceeded to make a scene at the counter, angry because ‘it wouldn't be allowed the other way round’. ‘He was so angry, I couldn’t speak to him’, she told me. Then there was the young black man who, on reading the book in public, had to endure the displeasure of a white woman approaching him to let him know that the book he was reading ‘really didn’t help the conversation’. White middle class people can be particularly calculated with their discomfort. I have had a lot of people working on the periphery of the book – booksellers, photographers, producers – earnestly tell me that my work is provocative. ‘It’s very controversial, isn’t it?’ they’ll ask, over and over again, in the space of a thirty minute conversation. ‘Is it?’ I’ll respond. ‘Have you read it?’ ‘No’, they will inevitably say.

Beyond the public’s gut reaction to the cover, I was keen to see if the content of the book would have an impact on Britain’s discussion on race. It’s never not scary to present your ideas to the public, ready to be picked apart. But the initial reactions were positive. A day before the book published, a four-thousand-word extract was printed in the Guardian. My inbox filled with reader reactions, from heartfelt and reflective to the utterly confusing. One person recommended that I take up yogic flying, assuring me that once I learnt how to levitate, racism might not bother me anymore. But beyond the absurd was a trend. I watched white people reflect on the dynamics of their own lives, and start to consider how race had shaped it. I watched as the book dislodged a pressure valve for readers of colour, who told me that it had given them the confidence to give up on a belligerent friend, or have a difficult conversation with a boss.

The first event for the book took place at London’s Southbank centre, three months before publication – a conversation between myself and journalist Hannah Pool. My throat constricted in anxiety as I watched the queue to enter the venue snake down the stairs half an hour before it was due to begin. My friends in the audience told me afterwards that the atmosphere was ‘electric’. After forty-five minutes of me discussing my frustrations with white people centring their feelings, we opened up to questions. A white woman raised her hand, began to talk, and promptly burst into tears. I had seen it coming, had heard her voice begin to wobble. She felt terrible about all of this, she said. She had considered self-harm. She didn’t know what to do. Gritting my teeth, I cut her off mid-monologue and confidently asserted that wallowing in despair would not get us anywhere. As I felt the pressure mount on me to steer the atmosphere of the room, I realised I was about to become responsible for a lot of people’s feelings.

So much of touring this book has involved the regulating of other people’s feelings. At book events there have been happy tears, guilty tears, laughter and rage. There has been a tendency for audience frustration to be aimed at whatever heritage venue has been hosting me – legitimate anger at the fact that this is one of the few times these institutions have properly engaged with the topic. There have been inspiring children and teenagers in the audience, genuinely giving me hope for the future. There has been in-real-life trolling in the form of a man who turned up to an event alone, ignored everything I said, and proceeded to follow me around after the book signing was finished, not allowing me to sit quietly or eat in peace, hurling question after question until my publicist told him to go away.

This book arrived at a time when a lot of people were despairing about the political direction of the world. When I take the time to read back over it, I can’t help but dwell on the chapter on feminism. In it, I recalled an early 2014 blog post in which I lamented the lack of any discussion of race that wasn’t steeped in colour-blindness. ‘Think about the last time you heard a comprehensive discussion about the nature of structural racism in the mainstream media’, I had written. ‘...These issues just don’t get the kind of airtime that feminism does in the UK press.’ My assessment back then wasn’t wrong. Coverage in the mainstream was few and far between. Britain is a country that has a very poor record of investing in anti-racist journalists, and it is a country where black academics are numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands. I can count on one hand books of a similar tradition that have been published in Britain in the last three decades by publishing houses with the budget to increase their chances of success. We relied heavily on the American narrative as a tool to find ourselves.

I can’t believe how much has changed since then. There has been a renaissance of black critical thought and culture. Whether it has come from companies with big budgets or creative individuals using social media, it feels like the critical anti-racist perspective is on top of a wave, kept afloat by a groundswell of support. Fashion magazine British Vogue – an institution in itself – appointed its first ever black male editor. An interview given by Alexandra Shulman, then the magazine’s outgoing editor, involved a question asking why, under her leadership, the magazine had a diversity problem. She responded with an insistence that she was ‘against quotas’ and that her Vogue simply included the people she thought were ‘interesting’6 – who just happened to be overwhelmingly white. She hasn’t got a racist bone in her body, she said, plus her grandson had a relative who was a civil rights leader, so the suggestion was deeply offensive to her. On reception by the public and her fashion peers, her comments were widely panned, with fashion website Racked calling the interview ‘a case study in white privilege’.7 I’m convinced that this critical response wouldn’t have happened even as recently as five years ago. There was the success of Get Out, an American horror film detailing the subtleties of white, liberal, fetishising racism, and there was Lubaina Himid, the first black woman to win the Turner Prize with artwork addressing slavery and the legacy of colonialism. The Tate Modern put on an unstoppably successful exhibition on art in the age of black power. When both Prime Minister Theresa May and Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn spent a little bit of their 2017 expressing a commitment to ending race inequality, I understood that anti-racism was no longer on the margins – that public opinion was turning it into a political priority. My little book was longlisted and shortlisted for prestigious awards, and earned a spot on ‘best books of 2017’ lists. Jo Swinson MP, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, posted about it on social media, calling it a ‘brilliant read’.8 This dynamic of the conversation feels new to me. I’m proud to have contributed to a renewed sense of urgency. If anything, I hope that the success of this book means I become part of a contemporary British crowd, rather than a stand-alone voice.