WHY I'M NO LONGER TALKING TO WHITE PEOPLE ABOUT RACE

261pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2017) 2018

Winner of the British Book Awards Non-fiction Narrative Book of the Year 2018 and the 2018 Jhalak Prize.

British journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge on race relations in Britain.

“I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us. This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it." Reni Eddo-Lodge, from her 2014 blog

Reni Eddo-Lodge has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She lives in London.