Why I Wish They’d Stop Talking to White People About Race

6,146 words

Reni Eddo-Lodge is a journalist and commentator about race and feminism. She – I hope I’m not assuming gender here – is of Nigerian ancestry and resides in Britain. The cover of her book seems like a promise. At first one might see “Why I’m No Longer Talking About Race” and shout, Al Hamd’ulIlah! Maybe underneath the cover it’s an empty notebook for doodling or journal entries, huh? On closer examination, one sees that there are also some nearly-invisible letters, and the full title actually is “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race.” Hey, I’m at peace with that too; haven’t we already heard more than enough skintellectuals sullenly speechifying?

Then the preface, reprinting a blog post of the same title which inspired the book, begins with another qualifier:

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 legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms.

So there’s indeed a book-length sermon ahead. My initial hopes were dashed! The author did make it pretty clear that I wasn’t the target audience, though.

On the other hand, white liberals ate it up like candy. The book came out in 2017 and posted to Amazon in 2019. This was just in time for the bonanza of ethnomasochism manuals during the Long Hot Summer of Floyd, a career-making moment for many up-and-coming skintellectuals. At the time of writing, there are 17,917 ratings at Amazon, of which 78% are five-star and 15% are four-star. The literary-industrial complex weighed in with oodles of praise, too. Even Emma Watson called it “The most important book for me this year.” Well, if Hermione recommends it, then obviously it must be solid gold!

The rest of the blog post inspiring the book is a familiar lament, and could be called Variations and Fugue on a Theme of “They Don’t Understand Us.” For instance:

I’ve written before about this white denial being the ubiquitous politics of race that operates on its inherent invisibility. So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?

I’ve heard more than enough of that kind of thing already from Robin DiAngelo, the High Priestess of White Guilt. Anyway, it seems some of us are getting sick of being badgered about our “privilege,” especially by the kind of people who receive preferential treatment from the government and are fawned over by the media. Then this:

It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. It stems from white people’s never-questioned entitlement, I suppose.

Ooh, how sassy! That remark alone is a solid 5 on the chutzpah meter. Even so, the post evokes the weariness of a door-to-door missionary who got nothing but slammed doors, and not a single discussion delivered, after pounding the pavement for hours: “The unbelievers – they just don’t believe!” Then after Reni Eddo-Lodge contemplated withholding her wisdom from the heartless honkies henceforth, a miracle happened. The preface then describes reactions to the blog post, for example:

‘I’m so damn sorry you have been made to feel like this,’ one commenter wrote. ‘As a white person I’m painfully embarrassed by the systemic privilege we deny and enjoy on a daily basis. And painfully embarrassed that I didn’t even realise it myself until about ten years ago.’

And so it came to pass that the author relented and decided to write a book about race relations.

Histories

The second chapter begins discussing how a college course in the transatlantic slave trade raised her consciousness. She was even inspired to undertake a side trip to Liverpool:

The Albert Dock opened four decades after Britain’s final slave ship, the Kitty’s Amelia, set sail from the city, but it was the closest I could get to staring out at the sea and imagining Britain’s complicity in the slave trade. Standing on the edge of the dock, I felt despair. Walking past the city’s oldest buildings, I felt sick. Everywhere I looked, I could see slavery’s legacy.

The ship’s fourth and final voyage as a négrier was in 1807. That was, therefore, about two hundred years prior to the author traumatizing herself about it. This would be more understandable if it were at least somewhere near living memory. Furthermore, she’s not a descendant of slaves. Neither does this seem simply a concern about the fate of the exploited of times past, since there’s nary a mention of the plight of indentured servants (they don’t count, since they weren’t black). Therefore, all this melodrama seems a bit overblown.

There’s a reason why there were no further slave ship voyages from Liverpool. Thanks to a spirited legislative battle motivated by humanitarian concerns for the rights and well-being of the woebegone Negroes, the British Navy began a blockade of West Africa until 1870. Well, isn’t that something the author can be happy about then?

Interdicting the transatlantic slave trade was tremendously costly, during which two thousand British sailors were lost at sea. Britain’s heroic efforts captured at least 1600 blockade-runners. Thereby, 150,000 spear-chuckers shanghaied by rival tribesmen were restored to freedom. (And they say we never do anything for them. . .) Surely the interdiction deterred countless négriers from setting sail in the first place. Also in 1807, the United States forbade the importation of slaves as soon as constitutionally possible, and eventually our Navy began assisting the blockade. If not for this international effort, our population of unassimilable malcontents would be much higher.

Reni Eddo-Lodge should know about all this, since she took a college class about the transatlantic slave trade. Curiously, though, this detail doesn’t make it into the book. (Or did the professor not mention that part?) Instead, the anguish goes on:

It’s easy to convince yourself that the past has no bearing on how we live today. But the Abolition of Slavery Act was introduced in the British Empire in 1833, less than two hundred years ago.

It’s the same in the USA; the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery long before living memory, but blacks complain more bitterly than ever about their cotton-picking ancestors of old times there, now long forgotten.

Entire lives sustaining constant brutality and violence, living in never-ending fear. Generation after generation of white wealth amassed from the profits of slavery, compounded, seeping into the fabric of British society.

Slavery was an international trade. White Europeans, including the British, bartered with African elites, exchanging products and goods for African people, what some white slave traders called ‘black cattle’.

The way she describes it, slavery produced something like a “trickle down” effect benefiting Britain for generations. Obviously it did produce economic activity, though the primary beneficiaries were a handful of merchants. It was hardly even a bonanza for sailors; a négrier was a bottom-of-the-barrel post, and their captains (hardly the magnanimous type) were notorious for failing to pay the crew. The slave trade certainly didn’t relieve Britain’s extremes of wealth. The author would have more of a point if she were discussing plantation owners overseas in the Caribbean and American colonies. Even then, slavery was overall a detriment to whites, since it eventually stood in the way of industrial progress, and throughout free farmers and laborers suffered from price-undercutting. By now, whatever surplus labor was extracted from the slaves has been exceeded greatly by the astronomical costs of the misguided effort to integrate their descendants into our society.

Since Reni Eddo-Lodge raised the topic, if the slave trade benefited the purchasing country as she says, then surely the transaction benefited the sellers as well, or there would’ve been no deal. Those African elites she mentioned got filthy rich by unloading a vast oversupply of slaves. The triangular trade provided the tribes with endless boatloads of cargo above their Iron Age tech level. Perhaps there were other “trickle down” effects as well. In fact, since the author is of Nigerian descent, then by that logic it’s entirely possible her forebears could’ve benefited either directly or indirectly from the enslavement and sale of their Volksgenossen. What bygone generations did is nobody’s fault, including her own. Still, since she’s brandishing the guilt-stick, then those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

The agony continues interminably, including much more about modern times. In any conflict with blacks, whites are always at fault. The massive race riots noted since the 1980s are always caused by egregious police misconduct against blacks who didn’t do anything. (My, how does this seem so familiar?) The provincial attitudes of police candidates are explored, though there’s no effort to distinguish between uninformed prejudice and what our leftist friends would call lived experiences.

The chapter takes up a fifth of the book, and I could keep going about the one-sided historiography, but I don’t have all night. Still, I did learn something interesting about Britain’s Black History Month, which began in 1987:

Linda Bellos was born in London to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and it was under her leadership that a British Black History Month came to exist. At the time, she was leader of south London’s Lambeth Council and chair of the London Strategic Policy Unit (part of the now defunct Greater London Council). The idea for Black History Month was put to her by Ansel Wong, chief officer of the Strategic Policy Unit’s race equality division.

Their first guest of honor was Sally Mugabe, who I’ll add was the wife of Zimbabwe’s illustrious Prime Minister. Sweet!

The System

This chapter continues the agony without a pause, opening with the death of Stephen Lawrence. (As our British readers know, this became one of those big causes célèbres, in which he was sort of the Horst Wessel of multiracialism.) The author complains that it took nineteen years to get convictions. Very well, then. I’ll add that Albert Marriner, a pensioner and veteran, was murdered by a mob of blacks in 1983, but none have been prosecuted yet. And what happened to the inquiry?

This segues into a discussion of “systemic racism.” Basically it’s the product of attitudes held by influential white people.

It doesn’t manifest itself in spitting at strangers in the street. Instead, it lies in an apologetic smile while explaining to an unlucky soul that they didn’t get the job. It manifests itself in the flick of a wrist that tosses a CV in the bin because the applicant has a foreign-sounding name.

A thought experiment follows about a black boy who faces the headwinds of prejudice from first entering school all the way through university, and then into the job market. This part is peppered with statistics, but as you might expect, no other explanations are offered for differences in outcome, such as average intelligence or hereditary temperament.

In short, Reni Eddo-Lodge really thinks The System is pro-white, and has no inkling how much it caters to non-whites. This is a perspicacious journalist? As we all well know, the way things work in America, Canada, and Britain is that discrimination is officially illegal, but racial minorities get preferential treatment. (To riff on Orwell, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) Moreover, minorities have a vast number of academic and professional associations for socializing, networking, scholarships, and career advancement. I don’t mind that they have their own institutions, but the problem is that it’s practically anathema for whites to do the same.

For that matter, our political advocacy organizations aren’t left alone to operate normally and without interference such as domestic spying, meddlesome NGOs, lawfare, deplatforming, two-tier policing, etc. All across the Western world’s allegedly democratic countries, the founding population doesn’t have a voice in its own destiny. So this is “structural racism” where minorities are held down? Yeah, Reni, keep telling me how the black man gets it tough.

With a bias this entrenched, in too many levels of society, our black man can try his hardest, but he is essentially playing a rigged game. He may be told by his parents and peers that if he works hard enough, he can overcome anything. But the evidence shows that that is not true, and that those who do are exceptional to be succeeding in an environment that is set up for them to fail. Some will even tell them that if they are successful enough to get on the radar of an affirmative action scheme, then it’s because of tokenism rather than talent.

Just let that last one sink in. More follows regarding quota systems, complaining that they’re not used enough. Come to think of it, could I go to China and demand preferential treatment because Asians are too successful in Chinese society? I bet that would go over great! More seriously, the weird thing is that Reni Eddo-Lodge apparently does believe that the government, the media, and other powerful institutions firmly side with whites and systemically hold back non-whites.

What Is White Privilege?

Early into the third chapter:

Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected.

So basically it’s like this. Imagine moving to Kampala, Uganda. Then at some point, it suddenly dawns on you. Hey, everyone around here is black, as if that’s part of being Ugandan by default. What’s up with that? And how come they’re looking at me like I’m a foreigner? The rest is commentary. So here’s the commentary:

You might be surprised to learn that it was a white man who first gave white privilege a name. Theodore W. Allen was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. In his adulthood he was active in the trade union movement. Deeply affected by the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, his reading of black writers like W. E. B. Du Bois led him to start exploring what he called ‘white-skin privilege’. His was an anti-capitalist perspective on race in the labour movement.

The book doesn’t explain it, other than these vague hints, but Theodore W. Allen was a communist. So was comrade DuBois.

When I talk about white privilege, I don’t mean that white people have it easy, that they’ve never struggled, or that they’ve never lived in poverty. But white privilege is the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.

White privilege is one of the reasons why I stopped talking to white people about race. Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me.

So, much like other ethnomasochism manuals have stated, “privilege” is this invisible knapsack of social advantages that you don’t even know is there because it’s, ya know, invisible. Although that seems like tautological silliness at first – much like debating spectral evidence at a 17th century witchcraft trial – maybe we should give it a bit of consideration.

Imagine, for example, being an out-group member in Britain, yet you get preferential treatment. For just one example, you have racial advocacy groups that always get good press, are never spied on by the government, are never smeared by NGOs, regularly get heaps of support from renegades, etc. Perhaps you wouldn’t even notice that the government is run by hostile elites who fear and hate Britain’s founding populations. Maybe you didn’t realize that your people were let into Britain not because of a pressing need for your extraordinary talents, but rather to serve as a sociopolitical counterweight against Britons, eventually (if all goes according to plan) to make them a minority in their own country. Then when the régime’s propaganda apparatus tells you that you’re being oppressed, you might actually believe it! The cherry on top is when you lecture British people about their “privilege” and you’re surprised when they react as if you just stepped out of a UFO.

Then came an illustrative anecdote. Looking it over made me realize how lucky I was that the criminal who tried to carjack me in 2004 didn’t instead try to sell me a second-rate plate of Jamaican jerk chicken!

Racism is often confused with prejudice, and is sometimes used interchangeably. It’s another retort wielded against anti-racists, who have to listen to those who wish to undermine the movement muster up outrage about discrimination against white people because they are white. [. . .] Years ago, buying myself a lunch of Caribbean food, I was greeted by a smiling owner behind the counter who waited until his white customers had left before confiding in me that he saves the best cuts of meat for ‘people like us’. Yes, that man was prejudiced. Yes, my lunch was delicious. No, the owner of the cafe couldn’t possibly affect the life chances of his white customers with his feelings against them. All he could affect in any terms was their lunch.

This is the difference between racism and prejudice. There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power.

You knew that one was coming, right? Yep, it’s the ol’ Trotsky Tautology. This is the special definition they use to say that only whites can be “racist.” By implication, it’s also a “get out of responsibility free” card for the precious minorities. I’ll also add that this “white privilege” baloney is hardly different from the “male privilege” rhetoric which falls apart upon examination.

Then she spends several paragraphs complaining about how perilous it is to discuss “white privilege,” for example:

You’re never sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.

Finally it looks like we have some common ground at last. Still, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which party in such a disagreement is more likely to suffer from an angry confrontation, an HR inquisition, or getting cancelled, and which party is more likely to get a lucrative book deal to write about her racial perspective.

Then buckets of ink are spilt over a social media furore prompted by a Twitter post from Diane Abbott, who is of Jamaican descent and yet a “British” Member of Parliament. This was: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism.”

The author was quite indignant that the resulting uproar over that one rained on the Stephen Lawrence martyrdom parade. Very well, then – imagine a white MP in Kenya saying something just as snotty about blacks, complete with a cute hashtag. Oh, wait a minute – Kenya doesn’t have any white MPs.

The backlash against Diane Abbott wasn’t about defending an embattled group of people who are constantly maligned in the media we consume every day. Instead, this reverse-racism row was about the British press closing ranks around what was in its interests to protect – whiteness as a faux neutral, objective power.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. Then the author indignantly complains about leftists wandering off the cultural Marxist plantation. For example, she illustrated this with an excerpt from the Weekly Worker – who’d have guessed that even pinkos would start to get fed up with all this special pleading?

‘As such,’ he wrote, ‘oppressed groups sit at the centre of every discussion, backed by the unquestionable moral weight of their subjective life experience, reinforced by an unaccountable structure of etiquette, which they can use to totally control the flow of discourse.’

He continued: ‘The total effect is to create an environment in which free discussion of ideas is impossible. Oppressed groups and individuals operate as a form of unassailable priesthood, basing their legitimacy on the doctrine of original sin. To extend the analogy, discussions become confessionals in which participants are encouraged to self-flagellate and prostrate themselves before the holy writ of self-awareness. Shame and self-deprecation are encouraged to keep non-oppressed groups in their place, and subvert the social pyramid of oppression, with oppressed groups at the top.’

Ooh, burn! This is even slightly encouraging; at least over here, there haven’t been any sensible pinkos for about a century.

The chapter starts winding down with a discussion about mixed race children finding it difficult to fit in. My take is, of course, much different. All the confusion they’re going through is unfortunate, and I don’t blame them for it; they’re not responsible for the circumstances into which they were born. However, Rassenschande is yet another avoidable problem caused by multiracialism. It didn’t have to be this way. If their parents had stuck with their own kind the way it was meant to be, rather than selfishly rejecting their own heritage, then their children wouldn’t have these problems.

Fear of a Black Planet

The fourth chapter begins halfway through the book. Whew! I hardly can wait to come up for air again! It’s titled after a 1990 rap album by Public Enemy (though uncredited in the text), and starts with a brief reference to Enoch Powell’s eminently naughty “Rivers of Blood” speech. Quickly she takes objection to the “whip hand” imagery, even though it was his constituent’s choice of words:

The only way he could envision power being maintained in Britain was by subjugation of a people, because that is how Britain has held and maintained its power in the past.

The projection of an ever-encroaching black doomsday is what I call ‘fear of a black planet’. It’s a fear that the alienated ‘other’ will take over. Enoch Powell’s fears of a flipped script have lived on in modern-day political rhetoric on immigration. When, in the run-up to the 2015 general election, the Labour Party released official merchandise which included a mug that read ‘controls on immigration’, they played into that fear.

Yeah, the Labour Party sure fixed that problem, now didn’t they? Other examples of naughty rhetoric follow. Then this snottiness:

For a long time now, far-right political groups have hijacked the anti-colonial struggles of native people in America and Australia to create a story of the embattled indigenous white British, under siege from immigration.

She’s shocked – shocked – that whites would have the temerity to argue for self-determination and the right to their own homelands like non-whites did. (The same principles should apply to everyone? Oh, perish the thought!) More seriously, it’s these crappy double standards that annoy me the most about today’s leftists.

This brings us to a very odd part of the book, in which she interviews Nick Griffin, former leader of the British National Party. She speaks of him as some kind of weird extremist, about as dismissively as she speaks of any white advocate here. She even prints it verbatim, citing the fear that she’d get sued otherwise – though I suspect she hoped his words would make it clear what a monster he is. Anyway, it’s nice to see some straight talk at last in the book, which he argued moderately and sensibly. Unfortunately for the sassy author, it went in one ear and out the other, unaffected by the vacuum occupying her cranium.

Nick Griffin is an extreme example, but he voices the same fears that are evident in the low-level grumblings and resentment of some British people who are resistant to change. They spend their time yearning for a nostalgic Britain that never was.

Yeah, just what are these extremists going on about anyway? Handing over power to non-whites worked great in Zimbabwe and South Africa, didn’t it? Next up was a long discussion of the effort to throw a Cecil Rhodes statue on Oxford’s campus down the memory hole. (Wokesters are, of course, tremendously offended when they find out that someone in the past didn’t have the same Current Year politically correct ideology. Different times have different values, and history is not going to be kind to the wokesters.) That produced this bon mot: “Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why.”

Once more, I couldn’t make up this stuff if I tried. Following that, somehow the discussion segues to several paragraphs defending race-swapping in casting decisions.

The Feminism Question

Ah, it’s time for the customary intersectionality chapter. I’ll editorialize a moment. Normally, feminism and race agitation are two different layers of the big cultural Marxism burrito. However, sometimes the special interests will clash. This chapter delves into the concern about why feminism isn’t racially inclusive enough. (One also could argue likewise, if one wished, that black advocacy isn’t feminist-friendly enough.) There are some efforts to bridge the gap. Feminism has several ethnic offshoots, including some for blacks, such as one called womanism. Still, it gets to be a thorny topic sometimes. Even so, cultural Marxists do a pretty good job of taking a wide group of special interests that have nothing to do with each other and then get them aiming for the same target – namely us.

The chapter opens in a flood of spilt ink: underrepresentation here, some brouhaha there, then another social media flame war. After that, the author discusses her history with feminism. Several excerpts follow concerning the relationship between black advocacy and feminism. (I still like flyin thunda cloud, rdoc’s take better; she’s surprisingly personable. Best of all, she has enough intersectionality points to outrank everyone.) Later, the discussion sometimes starts to seem catty. This is one of the parts of the book that looks like it’s about getting in the last word on some social media flame war that had sputtered out long before. According to her perspective, things are not as they should be. For example:

White feminism is a politics that engages itself with myths such as ‘I don’t see race’. It is a politics which insists that talking about race fuels racism – thereby denying people of colour the words to articulate our existence. It’s a politics that expects people of colour to quietly assimilate into institutionally racist structures without kicking up a fuss. It’s a politics where people of colour are never setting the agenda.

Then the subject of differential fertility rates comes up, and the rhetoric gets really precious. For example:

It looks like there is a subtle ethno-nationalism in this discussion, almost worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems to be a racialised misogyny that is preoccupied with wombs, and urges white British women to fuck for their country while accusing women who aren’t white British of breeding uncontrollably and destabilising the essence of Britain.

Despite this pernicious narrative, there are quarters of British society who maintain that misogyny is somehow the reserve of foreigners.

This is your brain on feminism. Any questions? Soon enough that leads to this:

Despite this truth, it was the idea that multiculturalism brings with it a corrosive sexism and misogyny that was touted after mass sexual assaults took place on New Year’s Eve of 2015 in Cologne, Germany. The same angle emerged when a child sexual exploitation ring run by Asian men was uncovered in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, in 2013. In 2012 and 2013, the phrase ‘Asian sex gang’ occupied what seemed like a million headlines. The far right loves this Asian sex-gang angle. To them, the women are their property, the women are ‘ours’. But the reality is that if every Asian man left the country, child sexual exploitation on British Isles would not go away.

The illogic is bad enough; the sheer effrontery is off the charts. Reni Eddo-Lodge should be ashamed of herself for writing something like that. (Remember also that she spent the last chapter pooh-poohing the idea that changing demographics might make things worse for whites.) Once upon a time, feminism really was about women’s rights. By now, the anti-Western agenda is the foremost consideration, overriding even dire threats to women’s safety and well-being, and the paragraph above says everything you need to know about it. Several other paragraphs follow, downplaying the racial angle. All that loathsomeness was the fault of the “patriarchy,” not uncivilized migrants who don’t belong or the authorities who looked the other way.

Race and Class

This begins with a discussion of how the notion of a three class system has become obsolete. Then various statistics are discussed about the racial angle of the new social classes. (Non-whites are getting the fuzzy side of the lollipop, of course. If things are so bad, though, I wonder why they moved to Britain.) Then comes a complaint about the gentrification of Tottenham, which wasn’t working to the benefit of blacks. I’m curious what the neighborhood’s British residents in earlier times thought when vibrant newcomers were arriving in droves, but the book doesn’t say. It does bring up some heresy though:

A seemingly innocuous phrase has become naturalised in British politics over the last decade. The phrase ‘white working class’ is supposed to describe a group of disadvantaged and under-represented people in Britain. When she threw her hat in the ring for the 2015 Labour Party leadership contest, Leicester West’s MP Liz Kendall explicitly let it be known that she was interested in supporting white working-class children. Setting out her stall for the leadership bid in a meeting with journalists, she said she wanted Labour to ‘be doing the best for kids, particularly in white, working-class communities’.

Making appeals to white identity politics like everyone else is permitted to do? Oh no! Then the sassy skintellectual documents more naughtiness. (This much does give me a twinkle of hope that Britain’s political culture isn’t entirely as pozzed as I fear it is. It would be unthinkable for a Democratic politician to discuss helping impoverished white children. Even mainstream Republicans abide by the “don’t say white” rule.) Then the rest of the chapter continues to assert that non-whites are getting the fuzzy side of the lollipop.

There’s No Justice, There’s Just Us

This chapter begins noting that it’s going to be a long haul. The author does have actionable advice for whites who’d like to help:

White support looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations. Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race. Yes, you may be written off as a radical, but you have much less to lose.

Talk to other white people who trust you. Talk to white people in the areas of your life where you have influence. If you feel burdened by your unearned privilege, try to use it for something, and use it where it counts. But don’t be anti-racist for the sake of an audience. Being white and anti-racist in your private or professional life, where there’s very little praise to be found, is much more difficult, but ultimately more meaningful.

Indeed, we need to do our part:

The perverse thing about our current racial structure is that it has always fallen on the shoulders of those at the bottom to change it. Yet racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve. You can only do so much from the outside.

You betcha – I’ll be right on it.

Analysis

Although each ethnomasochism manual I’ve reviewed here has its own angle, it’s striking how much they’re alike. In fact, they’re starting to blur together. Although this one comes from across the Atlantic, the talking points are the same as what I’ve already seen from Robin DiAngelo and others of that ilk. These ethnomasochism manuals are as predictable as a huckster’s patter. (For example, when a Nigerian barrister emails me announcing that he has $25 million he wants to share with me, I know where that one’s going.) We as a people – especially the soft-hearted liberals who are the most susceptible – need to start recognizing these spiels for what they are, which is manipulative agitprop cloaked in moral language.

There’s always a “shock and awe” carpet-bombing of guilt and blame. Whites are always the aggressors, and non-whites are always innocent lambs. Any non-white shortcoming (if acknowledged at all) is because of something we did. All this is driven home by cherry-picked statistics and factoids. Special definitions are made up to reach desired conclusions, and wrapped up into a ball of tautologies. Inconvenient facts get hand-waved or explained away, if they’re even mentioned. Then add a generous scoop of special pleading to top off the fragrant dish of cultural Marxism. So many smelly word games!

One thing is never explained – if white countries are truly a living hell for the precious minorities, then why haven’t they moved back to their ancestral homelands? There, they could be together with their kindred people, celebrating their common culture. Why are they swarming across our borders instead, where they know they’ll be oppressed so terribly? The truth slips out at one point in the book, which you’ll see at the end of the following:

It feels like a cliché to say, but if anyone feeling resentful about their immigrant neighbours took the time to talk to them and find out a bit about their lives, they would almost certainly find that these people do not have everything handed to them on a plate, but instead are living in poor, cramped conditions, likely having left even worse conditions from wherever they’ve moved from.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

The only saving grace is that these ethnomasochism manuals unintentionally subvert themselves. For those with eyes to see, the marathon of minoritist moaning shows that diversity is not our greatest strength, but instead is a huge mess. It’s impossible to make multiple races equally happy within one society. Attempting to do so becomes a matter of spreading the dissatisfaction around. May the day come soon when white liberals stop letting themselves be hypnotized by gaslighting tactics, word games, and disingenuous guff. As for this book in particular, normally I’d expect that the badly-concealed disrespect that permeates it would be a turn-off, except that the target audience tends to be gluttons for punishment.

As for the author, Reni Eddo-Lodge oddly reminds me of an “ugly American.” It’s the stereotype in which we go on holiday at some idyllic locale, expect everything to be done our way, treat the locals condescendingly, have no regard for their culture, and otherwise act like we own the place as soon as we step off the plane. Meanwhile, we’re cluelessly unaware that the locals think we’re overbearing jerks, and hope we damn tourists will go away soon. To bring the author’s hauteur closer to home, imagine a minor British Raj figure in 1946 or so writing a book for the increasingly restless natives of India, instructing them on proper deference towards their overlords. What a way to win hearts and minds!

Even so, as disagreeable as her unending sassiness is, I bet that deep down, Reni Eddo-Lodge is actually a nice lady. The whoppers she emitted in the book are understandable given the entitlement complex she’s absorbed from her leftist professors, the régime media bubble in which she now participates, and the overall anti-white cultural milieu. Thus, it’s embarrassing to see her uttering such astonishing effrontery and making such a complete ass of herself. She should feel remarkably lucky that she’s in Britain, yet she has the nerve to tell British people how they should relate to the hordes of non-whites crowding them out of their own country, invited against the public’s will by the treasonous government. When someone lacks enthusiasm about the arrangement, she interprets it as lèse majésté.

Finally, I wonder if she has any awareness that her present prominence comes from serving other people’s globalist initiatives. Or does she think she got into the media solely through her extraordinary talent? Whatever the case may be, at thirty five years young, she’s doing quite well at that gig; according to one estimate:

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s accumulated net worth is estimated to be around $5 million. However, it’s worth noting that she has never been one to focus on financial gain, and her activism and writing are driven by a passion for social justice rather than personal profit.

In fact, Reni Eddo-Lodge has been vocal about the need for greater economic equality and has criticized how capitalism perpetuates systemic inequality. Despite her success, she remains committed to using her platform to effect positive change.

Oh, of course. This is what it means to be a downtrodden minority, marginalized at every turn, bravely speaking truth to power in an unfeeling world. Who ever knew that being oppressed could be so profitable?