Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

The first chapter, Histories, is one that I found highly enlightening. The book is comprised of a total of seven chapters Histories, The System, What is White Privilege, Fear of a Black Planet, The Feminism Question, Race and Class, and There’s No Justice, There’s Just Us. And while I do agree with that, Reni’s decision to do the exact opposite in certain contexts was one that I could relate to and understand as a Black woman myself. Conversations on race are ones that we repeatedly keep on hearing are imperative to instigate.

With a title that I found so ingeniously blunt, yet bearing so much eloquence, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race became one of my must reads.

I was instantly intrigued by the book and more than ready to get my hands on it. My introduction to both Reni Eddo-Lodge and her book came in the from of Our Shared Shelf an intersectional feminist book club. The decision to revamp her original blog post into a book is one that Reni Eddo-Lodge made to “continue the conversation” one that has been eluded throughout the course of history, and has only just recently been revitalised with newfound vigour. She describes it as taking on a “life of it’s own,” read by a multitude of people all over the globe, eliciting a myriad of reactions. Reni’s post flourished across the Web instantaneously and unanticipated. She began with the potent, unvarnished paragraph shown above, which ironically, I too have chosen as my opening to this post. More than five years ago, Reni Eddo-Lodge published a post on her blog titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.

It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms. “I’m no longer talking to white people on the topic of race.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge