broadly, fine
3 stars
Content warning racism
Truly, I was content to miss Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race, until someone included it in this month’s home library service bag. I appreciated the opportunity to read exactly what Eddo‐Lodge had had to say, although the book mainly echoes things that countless others already had.
The presentation is a hybrid of personal essay and long‐form journalism, which is fine. The standard of writing wobbles a bit, but it’s never inadequate. As a treatment of race and racism, it takes on a soft, popular quality — also fine.
Even necessary. The literature needed it, these sorts of things in this kind of combination. Five stars for canon‐readiness, though that says far more about public discourse of the time than any individual contribution.
There is an underlying sense of urgency siphoning precedence. The book in different respects dilutes and fortifies the blog post from which it begins.
While the extremely simple models of structural racism and white privilege that Eddo‐Lodge sketches out probably leave chunks of genuinely troublesome misconception among the assumptions of those freshest to methodically developing these concepts, presumably such an approach has plenty to offer overall.
Yet there is danger in the avoidance of delving into racism’s construction, and leaning too heavily on summation of its various façades and foyers. This becomes especially evident when Eddo‐Lodge braves a telephone call with Nick Griffin, former leader of the far‐right British National Party. Across the transcript, each participant holds a fairly cogent but almost completely unrelated interview (pp. 123–129). Again — Eddo‐Lodge’s approach to this delicate, treacherous engagement (through which Griffin learns her private contact details) — absolutely fine! Griffin’s — ghastly. Still, it is easy enough to imagine a reader (a variety of readers!) picking up this title, thirsty for an explanatory model of racialised politics, only to find in Griffin’s slime their charismatic first.
Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race is not a book of why is racism. That’s fine! It is more a book of racism is why, and racism is here, and racism is suffocating us.