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

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was released in 2017 amid a flurry of publications addressing race and racism in Europe and North America. The book is based on a 2014 blog by the same title, which Eddo-Lodge reproduces in its entirety in the Preface. The blog conveys Eddo-Lodge’s frustration with white people who refuse to believe structural racism exists in Britain. Rather than continue to exhaust herself emotionally, Eddo-Lodge announced she would no longer discuss race with white people. The blog did not have the effect Eddo-Lodge intended. Instead of preventing conversations with white people, it sparked more discussion and resulted in a book deal, which in turn led to more conversations.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race relates thematically to several roughly contemporary publications. Similar titles include Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race (2018), a New York Times Bestseller that provides readers with the tools they need to have frank conversations about racism within their social circles. Like Eddo-Lodge, Oluo tackles difficult subjects in a clear and succinct manner, notably structural racism, intersectionality, and white privilege. Vilna Bashi Treitler’s The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions (2013) explores the history of immigration in the US as it relates to current racial hierarchies and discrimination, a topic Eddo-Lodge addresses from a British perspective in her opening chapter. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) addresses structural racism, focusing on the American criminal justice system, the mass incarceration of Black men, and the problem of colorblindness, a subject that appears in Chapter 5 of Eddo-Lodge’s book. Another key publication is Robin DiAngelo’s 2011 article, “White Fragility,” which focuses on the defense mechanisms white people employ when challenged about their beliefs and assumptions about race. Influential theorists laid the groundwork for these publications, including Kimberlé Crenshaw (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” 1989) and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 2003).

Police brutality against Black people and Black Lives Matter (BLM) provide further context for Eddo-Lodge’s book. BLM is a decentralized political movement that began in the US after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black student. The movement began on social media with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Activists then used the hashtag to protest the killing of other Black men, including Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; and Eric Garner, who died after a white New York City policeman put him in an illegal chokehold in 2014. As BLM grew in the US, it gained a foothold abroad. The movement emerged in the UK in 2016 during a protest against police racism in Manchester. The same year, BLM activists protested the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2011 shooting death of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham, among other things. BLM grew exponentially in the US and Britain in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. The incident sparked one of the largest protests in US history. British activists seized upon the moment, staging protests across the UK in solidarity with the US.