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

“I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don’t.”

This passage explains why Eddo-Lodge wrote Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. In contrast to extreme acts of racism, structural racism is more difficult to pinpoint, which leads many White people to deny its existence. Eddo-Lodge argues that it is impossible to have productive conversations about racism with people who refuse to admit structural racism exists.

“I write—and read—to assure myself that other people have felt what I'm feeling too, that it isn't just me, that this is real, and valid, and true.”

Questioning someone’s reality, judgments, and experiences is called gaslighting. Eddo-Lodge reads and writes about racism to combat the gaslighting people of color experience when white people deny the existence of structural racism.

“To be white is to be human; to be white is universal.”

White people assume whiteness is the norm in all social spaces. This explains why white feminists failed to see the problem with the all-white cast of Girls, even though the show was set in New York, one of the most racially diverse cities in the US.