Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, January 2019

Something special happened in Oxford on a warm day in June 2018. Reni Eddo-Lodge was in conversation with Rebecca Surender, and spoke about her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. The event, organised by TORCH and chaired by Prof. Elleke Boehmer, was taking place at the Sheldonian Theatre, full to the brim for the occasion. Never before had I seen such a colourful audience at this venue, not even when Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka gave the University’s annual African Studies lecture there in May 2014.

Reni Eddo-Lodge read the watershed essay which gave the book its title. I had read it before, but hearing it from the author’s confident voice brought it to life. Like many other black readers, I thought she captured perfectly what it felt like to be compelled to stop talking when confronted with many people’s reluctance to ‘see’ race, and to acknowledge its workings in contemporary European societies.

As a black woman of mixed heritage (French-Senegalese) raised in France and in Côte d’Ivoire, and being from a different generation, I had expected my experience to be very different from hers. And yet, Reni’s reflections resonated with a life-long experience of self-censorship.

Despite some changes since the mid-2000s, France remains a nation where the Republican discourse according to which all citizens are equal, regardless of race, ethnicity, class or gender, is so hegemonic that it is almost impossible to have an open debate about race. Before moving to the UK in 1999, I had assumed that this was a nation that had gone further in confronting its colonial past and its legacy. I have since learned that this is in fact not so much the case (Afua Hirsch’s book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, discusses this question brilliantly), but I was still surprised by the shared nature of the lived experience of blackness.

Listening to Reni, I remembered the times when my younger self had awkwardly attempted conversations with white friends about race, only to give up when faced with blank stares, or with a sudden shift towards a safer topic. I did not want to be the party killer, the friend who brought everyone down. I remembered the feeling of isolation that this silence caused. I remembered the feeling of being watched closely by sales assistants in Parisian shops while browsing through clothes. I remembered fellow French students making jokes about how they imagined me running through the Savannah (in Africa, presumably), and finding me uptight when I didn’t laugh. I remembered finding comfort in spending time with black friends, not so much because we could talk about race, but because we knew exactly what we were keeping silent. I remembered, only a few years ago, sitting at a formal dinner at one of Oxford’s old colleges, and remarking to the white man sitting next to me that I was the only black person among more than 200 guests. My neighbour looked puzzled at first, then shifted uncomfortably in his seat before declaring that it didn’t matter anyway since we all came from Africa if only one went far enough back in time… I remembered all these moments and many more as I sat listening to Reni Eddo-Lodge. I wondered whether, in the wake of student movements in recent years, Reni’s presence at the Sheldonian Theatre and the enthusiastic response of the audience could be a sign that elite British universities were finally willing to engage in a constructive conversation on race. There are signs that this might be the case, and there is genuine commitment from many individuals at these institutions; but it remains to be seen whether real change is underway, or whether the energy that was palpable at Reni’s event will be captured and put into a (ticked) box.

Reni’s book lifts the lid on what it feels like to be black in contemporary Britain, and on the myriad ways in which structural racism shapes interpersonal relations. The book also includes a well-researched chapter on the history of black populations in the UK. But others have written about these aspects, too, and it is really in her ability to capture the impact of ‘systems’ on everyday lived experience that the book stands out. Of course, one could critique it for disregarding intersectionality, the many other lines along which people can be discriminated against. But in my view, this would be missing the point: Reni is not denying that these lines are important, too.

Where much remains to be said, in my view, is on the predicament of those who do not fit squarely within any category, whether racial or defined in other ways. A significant proportion of today’s European populations connect with multiple identities, but little space is made for the multiple and the in-between to be legitimate. States still treat multiplicity as a threat to the integrity of the nation, and ‘dual nationals’ or those who identify as ‘mixed’ in some ways are often suspected of having conflicting loyalties. But they, too, can feel silenced, and feel that their in-betweenness undermines their claim to full citizenship.

My 17-year old daughter was the one who drew my attention to Reni’s book, and she loved the original essay. But her problem is somewhat different from mine. She identifies as mixed-race, or at least not as white since she has a black mum with whom she identifies very strongly; but because she is light-skinned with blue eyes and straight hair, she feels that she often gets ridiculed for wanting to be anything other than white. Why, she asks, am I am not allowed to identify as someone of Senegalese descent? Colourism, at times, produces unexpected effects. But my hope is that Reni’s intervention will encourage younger generations to keep talking about race, for boundaries must be acknowledged before they can be broken down.

Cite this: Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène. “Why Reni-Eddo Lodge is inspiring me to keep talking about race”. Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

The post ‘Why Reni-Eddo Lodge is inspiring me to keep talking about race’ by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach appeared first on writers make worlds.

Reni Eddo-Lodge (author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and winner of the Jhalak Prize 2018), in conversation with Dr Rebecca Surender (Pro Vice-Chancellor and Advocate for Diversity, University of Oxford) at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.

The post Great Writers Inspire at Home: Reni Eddo-Lodge in conversation with Rebecca Surender appeared first on writers make worlds.

Reni Eddo-Lodge in conversation with Rebecca Surender, Oxford, 14 June 2018

Biography

Writing

Reni Eddo-Lodge reading in Oxford, 14 June 2018 (photo: Stuart Bebb)

Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James hailed Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race as a book that was “begging to be written.” The book was borne out of the thoughts she shared on her blog in 2014, and sparked a national conversation in the UK about the blinkered view of race and privilege held by many white people. In the blog post, reproduced in the book, Eddo-Lodge asks the fundamental question of race and class politics in the twenty-first century: “Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?” (6).

She notes in the book that the responses to the post revealed the continued demand by white people that black people articulate their experiences so that white people might better understand them, even by those white people who purport to be aware of their privilege. Despite her desire to quit talking to white people about race, subsequent to the blog post’s viral dissemination Eddo-Lodge has become an icon of intersectional race debates.

In 2018 her book was named the most influential book ever written by a woman, beating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. In an article in 2017, Eddo-Lodge notes that race-related violence had inflected her life long before she became politically active, referring to the racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Her book charts the history of race in the UK, and her own engagement with it through independent research, moving through systemic racism, white privilege and the concomitant fear of the loss of that privilege, through to black feminism, and intersectional concerns of the imbrication of class with race. Eddo-Lodge’s concern with intersectionality reflects a belief that race and class are not distinct systems of oppression, but rather work in tandem.

Before the publication of her award-winning debut, Eddo-Lodge worked as a freelance journalist. She concentrated on questions like cultural appropriation in yoga, and housing inequality in London’s property market, and produced a guide to being a black feminist. Subsequently, she has launched a popular podcast, titled About Race. In it, she further explores the themes she addressed in her book, locating them in contemporary debates, such as Brexit and the Calais refugee camps. In her podcast Eddo-Lodge talks with activists working in refugee camps such as Road to Freedom’s Ra’ed Khan as well as the first black woman to hold a seat in the House of Commons, Shadow Home Secretary MP Diane Abbott, and the actor and rapper Riz Ahmed. Her progressive view of race and intersectional resistance imbues her work with political urgency while her writing and podcasting remain accessible and non-academic, appealing to diverse audiences.

—Chelsea Haith, 2019

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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