Posted: Jun 15, 2020 9:39 am
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Now there’s a title bound to raise hackles. Reni does qualify it though:
‘.........just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and it’s 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.’
I immediately identified with this, remembering the times, in a new workplace, when people find my wife is not white and they pause and their eyes glaze while trying to think what they might have said that might have upset me. And from then on all racism is of the subtle sort.
In 2014 Reni wrote a blogpost with this title which caused something of an international stir and it is reproduced here as the introduction to this short book.
She argues that structural racism is about how Britain’s relationship with race infects and distorts equal opportunity, that we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we don’t see race and this makes us feel progressive. I was reminded of a salesman who once happily told me that middle management in Manchester was run by Masons and/or Manchester Grammar School ex pupils.
‘...to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance’. She argues that opposing positive discrimination reveals what you think talent looks like.
Reni talks about feminism and how it’s integral to the fight for equal opportunities for black people and how white feminists argue that it’s a distraction. She says she is not a feminist but is passionate about women’s liberation.
This book is so stuffed with quotable material I could have bookmarked every page. A couple of historical facts I didn’t know:
During ww1 I knew that a grand house In Brighton was used as a hospital for wounded Indian soldiers but I didn’t know that it was surrounded by barbed wire to stop Indians walking out into the local population.
After that war and with a shortage of work gangs of Liverpudlians went on a rampage attacking black and coloured people. One black guy was thrown into a dock and when he tried to swim was pelted with bricks and rocks. Reni says it might have been the first British ‘lynching’.