Talking about Race in 2020...

As I am a firm believer that street protests aren´t for me, I think that the discussion about race, on both sides - from minority to majority, no matter the color - is more than necessary. I am talking from the position of a priviledged white person. I cannot change my skin colour and my family, and I cannot put myself into other people´s skin, including fellow white peers. 

My everyday personal, professional and academic experience offered me the opportunity to critically assess various concepts including those applied on my own cultural bias.

A discussion about race is so necessary nowadays, especially in the media and academic circles because this is where the representations and mentalities are actually built. Based on those representations systems of power are created that will eventually reproduce the categories projected.

Everything should start, in my opinion, with a historical approach. Understanding how a certain idea originated and how affected the everyday life of a specific category is the most important gateway to countering its eventual effects. 

In Why I´m Not Longing Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge prefers to abandon the self-explanatory discourse for a white audience. Instead, she is sharing her experiences and the researches into the deep roots of racism within the British society. A historical account of race, including the slavery episodes put the problem into context. The journalistic research reveals the race-biased institutional pattern, the pro-Brexit politicians replicated at a great extent.

Reni Eddo-Lodge is going beyond the everyday discourse and complains about race in relation with institutions, but reveals the persistence of ´whiteness´ in areas assigned intellectually as space of free exchange of ideas, no matter the colour. In fact, she rejects with few clear examples, the ´whiteness´ of feminism, self-centered and irrelevant for many of the minorities living in Britain and elsewhere.

Only those few points and it is enough to give a full list of topics to research and discuss about...The current political turmoil in America is a good opportunity to continue the conversation, but at a level that encompasses race approaches in general. Europe does not do it better, from all the wrong points of view.

Time for academics to take more seriously the challenge of accepting the voice of minority intellectuals as part of the dialogue as it offers not only a historical perspective, but an everyday experience that should be the basis of any further theoretical evaluations, especially when it comes to intellectual constructions about race.

Rating: 4 stars