In 2014, journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a widely shared blog post expressing her frustration with the inability of most white people to listen to what people of color like herself have to say about racism. Since she wrote that post, paradoxically, "I now spend most of my time talking to white people about race." She wrote this book out of "five years of agitation, frustration, exhausting explanations, and paragraph-long Facebook comments" in order to continue the conversation.
Eddo-Lodge is British, and speaks from that perspective. But it turns out that the British experience of race and racism is not so different from that in the U.S., or in many other places. She covers an enormous amount of ground with clarity and concision, starting with a historical survey of British slavery, abolition and the ongoing fight for equal rights. Other topics include the casting of black actors in iconic roles, white feminism, class, immigration and what white people can do to fight racism. "We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything." --Sara Catterall