risc book club: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race

By Reni Eddo-Lodge – UK.
Writing on black life in Britain has long been the poor relation of its African American equivalent, not least because, in the hierarchy of suffering, the daily slights endured by black Britons do not bear comparison to the existential threat to African American lives. She’s strong on the pervasive racial marginalisation of black people, for example in the depiction of the working class that still so often comes with the prefix “white”. It’s striking that the discourse on race today is stronger in tone than in the 70s suburban world in which I grew up, where British people were (usually) polite to the point of rudeness; the stakes are higher now. 288pp