Please excuse the mess in the background!
I have recently read Mandoa,
Mandoa!, by Winifred Holtby. I loved South Riding, and I enjoyed Vera
Brittain’s Testament of Friendship,
which was a sort of biography of Holtby, with whom she was close friends. I suppose it was because Brittain relies so
heavily on Mandoa, Mandoa! that I
wanted to read it. Possibly though, the
frequent references were due less to the quality of the writing and more to the
fact that there is apparently a lot of Holtby’s own personality in the book. The main female character is a young(ish),
politically-aware journalist and she has a sort of unrequited love for one of
the male characters – which was apparently much the way Holtby lived her own life.
It’s probably clear that I was not a big fan of this book. It did pick up halfway through, with all the
explanatory information out of the way, but sadly the satire went right over my
head; it was wasted on me.
Also, Wolf Hall, by Hilary
Mantel. I’ve
had this sitting around for ages. It’s
on The Guardian’s ‘best books of the
century so far’ list (in fact, it was no.1), and I saw the TV series, which was
brilliant, so I was determined to give it a go.
It’s such a tome though… Much
like the Winifred Holtby – like any novel, for that matter – there was a bit at
the beginning where I struggled with characters and titles. And it has one of those enormous cast lists
at the front, like Elena Ferrante’s My
Brilliant Friend, which is intimidating just in itself.
Mantel
also has something strange she does with Cromwell’s character – she’ll be
talking about someone else, and then she’ll say ‘he thought about this’ or ‘he
did that’, and you assume the ‘he’ refers to the last character mentioned, but
actually she means Cromwell. She also
writes in the present tense and sometimes seems to switch into the first
person(?) It is quite effective at
entrenching the reader within the mind of Cromwell, but it took me a while to
get used to.
Anyway,
after I got over all that, the book just sort of took off. It must be the first time I’ve read such an
enormous book without continually thinking ‘am I near the end?’, ‘how much
longer?’, ‘are we there yet?’ I’d have
been quite happy if it had gone on for another 600 pages, which is lucky
because there is a sequel, Bring up the
Bodies, then another one after that.
And finally, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. I
feel like anything I say about this book will already have been anticipated and
despaired of by its author. Indeed, if Reni
Eddo-Lodge had wanted everyone to stop talking about race, she could have done
worse. She seems to be in two minds
about this – insisting that ‘messy conversations’ [213] need to take place, but
at the same time that white people need to just listen and learn. [xii] She has the various white responses already snippily
pre-categorized: mine, for example, is skating precariously close to ‘Nice
White [Person] feeling silenced by conversations about race’ [xi-xii]. I’ll move on.
The
chapter on ‘Histories’, and the following one which covered Stephen Lawrence’s
murder, were particularly good, and I wish they had been longer. There has been some discussion recently about
changing school curriculums to ensure they reflect the experience of different
ethnicities. Ironically, when I was a
child, I remember arguments about history curriculums in schools: Margaret
Thatcher wanted the focus to be on British history; other, more left-leaning
opinion wanted a European, even an international, focus. Now it seems that perhaps the Tories had the
right idea – we ought to be teaching British history, particularly the damage
done by slavery and British colonialism.
There
were other things I took Eddo-Lodge’s point on.
That racism isn’t just about discrimination, for example, but
discrimination with power behind it – so the idea of reverse racism against
white people in the UK is a nonsense.
That colour blindness is a ‘stunted analysis’ of race, which does little
to assist in fighting against racism.
That removing statues of people who directly contributed to and profited
from slavery is not erasing history (these people still appear in museums and
history books), but changing who, as a society, we choose to celebrate.
Furthermore,
the book often made me feel that I hadn’t grasped the reality of the problem,
where it described instances of casually expressed, non-violent racism,
revealing how often such attitudes emerge in ordinary conversation among people
who do not apparently consider themselves to be racist. There’s the reaction to the idea of a black
Hermione Granger [136-139]; and MP Liz Kendall’s election campaign statement
that she wanted to support white working-class children. [201] Another of these instances arises in relation
to Jessica – an interviewee who’s father is black, and her mother white. Jessica’s mother talks approvingly of the
stereotype of black men being better endowed, [105] and some of her mixed race
friends have white mothers who believe it’s acceptable for them to use ‘the N
word’ because they have black children. [106]
One of the things that surprised me the most was how much overt racism
actually exists in the UK outside the extremes of the BNP, UKIP and Louise
Mensch.
So
there are important points to be made about overt racism. But the author is most concerned about what
she calls ‘structural racism’ [64] – like institutional racism but wider,
concerned with large numbers of people rather than institutions, and existing
as an often unspoken political ideology.
Indeed, a large part of the reason for the persistence of structural
racism is its invisibility. ‘Most white
people,’ she says, ‘move through the world blissfully unaware of their own race
until its dominance is called into question,’ [xvii] and, in their ignorance,
lend their tacit support to a discriminatory system.
The
way she deals with this is by effectively opting us all into racism from the
outset, by default as it were, so if a person feels that doesn’t reflect their
own views, they have to expressly opt out. Except that, of course, it isn’t as simple as
that: they might verbally opt out, then continue to enjoy their white privilege
without troubling themselves any further.
‘Opting out’, to be meaningful, has to be an ongoing process. I did feel a bit sorry for the boyfriend of
Jessica, the lady referred to earlier.
Her partner, she said, was different from other white people: ‘he is the
kind of white person who will do that unlearning and unpicking’. [107] Presumably, he doesn’t win many arguments in
that relationship.
Nonetheless,
this idea that society is weighted towards white people, and that by failing to
address that and challenge it, white people collude in it – I doubt that’s very far
wide of the mark.
Eddo-Lodge
defines ‘white privilege’ as ‘an absence of the negative consequences of
racism.’ [86] ‘When I talk about white
privilege,’ she says, ‘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.’ [87] I would
question the way she moves from ‘absence of negative consequences’ to ‘positive
impact’, and then onto ‘benefit’. Are
they all the same thing? I suppose one
could argue that not having a detriment is the same thing as having a benefit;
that it’s a question of emphasis; that emphasizing the benefit to white people
rather than the detriment to ethnic minorities shifts the burden of
responsibility and draws attention to the fact that white people need to be
proactive against racism.
Perhaps
then, this flexibility of language is unremarkable. I think though, that the shift in emphasis
draws attention to the fact that Eddo-Lodge is arguing a ‘position’ as much as
anyone else; she brings her own cultural baggage to the table; just as she
ascribes particular prejudices and blind spots to white people, so as a black
person, she may have her own. ‘It must
be a strange life,’ she writes, ‘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.’
[xii] But whilst all white people in
this country may have white privilege, not all white people have ‘permission to
speak’. There are ‘intersectional’
problems there too – but Eddo-Lodge does not seem to recognize them if they do
not relate to race.
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