Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is an extended discussion about anti-black racism systems of oppression. I would class it as part of a similar network of books, including but not limited to:

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Disorientation: Being Black in the World by Ian Williams
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
What sets Reni Eddo-Lodge’s text apart is the context. Most of the books above are from an American and Canadian context; Eddo-Lodge focuses on the British experience of race. It’s a short volume that offers a clear introduction to the experience of anti-black racism.

The book has a discussion of history, systems of oppression, white privilege, feminism, race, and class. The discussion of history was pretty illuminating and even more engaging were the specific examples of how laws had been designed to target Black folk in the UK. It was as disheartening as it was predictable that Britain’s playbook runs so parallel to that of the U.S. and how simply being Black in the street became a crime. 

Eddo-Lodge is not nearly as confrontational as the title may suggest. The personal touches she offers throughout the book strike a good balance with the objective-factual accounts. Hearing about the ire her writing ignited from white people was also, unfortunately, not surprising, but effectively narrated. It picks up on the same kinds of conversations from Ijeoma Oluo, Mikki Kendall, and Robin Diangelo’s work, where being called a racist somehow becomes more offensive than actually being racist.

I’m not doing the book justice; I have to admit I’ve been behind in my reviews and my notes on this one are pretty minimal. I think overall the book suffers from being ‘late to the party’---or at least my party. Because I’ve read similar books, this one didn’t really grip me as much as I might have expected; its discussion of white privilege didn’t shatter me in the way other books have, but if you’re getting started in your research, Eddo-Lodge is an uncommonly inviting, accessible experience.

Happy reading!

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix

       On November 24th, 2021, twenty-seven migrants died when their dinghy capsized in French waters on their way to the UK. The victims were a mix of Kurdish Iraqis and Iranians, Afghani people, Ethiopian people, Somali people, Vietnamese people, and Egyptian people.

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat documents that night.

Small Boat is my penultimate read in my quest to read all of the International Booker Prize shortlist for 2025 and, once again, it offers something different from the other nominees. (Almost) the whole book is an extended inner monologue from the CROSS employee that opted not to save the migrants as the repeated calls for help came in. [For reference, CROSS is centres régionaux opérationnels de surveillance et de sauvetage].

One of the most interesting aspects of the book, from a structural perspective, is that, following the incident, the employee narrates her interrogation for approximately 70 pages. Then, we get a brief break from the repetitive philosophizing. That break comes in the form of 15 pages of the actual incident—a flashback meant to humanize the migrants as they experience the terror and dread of knowing their ship is sinking and desperately seeking support. The remaining thirty pages or so are about the CROSS employee following her suspension from work.

Stylistically, Delecroix’s narrator has sprawling sentences, replete with subordinate clauses, spiralling into the depths (with drowning puns sometimes intended) and grasping fleeting tangents as she, in the wake of tragedy, presents herself as a victim. The sentences reflect the lengths she’ll go to defend herself from judgment. These claims often come across as callous. She comes back to the phrase a few times: “I didn’t ask them to leave.” How can she be faulted? She didn’t ask them to leave their countries. They were almost in British waters, anyway. They had other people to save; they can’t respond to every call. If you’re finding it hard to stomach this justification, I don’t blame you. The main character is distasteful to me and the first half of the book especially feels like a failed seduction. Presenting her self-justifying monologue is an attempt to lure us in, to make us accept her position and empathize, yet it feels repulsive.

That said, the interrogation surfaces ethical questions that are hard to grapple with. Namely, the book asks us who is guilty in situations like this? Sure, the CROSS employee didn’t ask them to leave, but we could make the case that our ways of life have far-reaching impacts in places we’ve never been. The narrator reflects on the idea of killing someone directly and letting them die. One of the narrator’s most compelling justifications is a strange twist on the banality of evil. The police treat her with special disdain because she let the migrants drown. She justifies it by saying that they help everyone without discrimination—that’s the whole point. Whether it’s a multimillionaire’s yacht or a group of migrants on an inflatable dinghy, the narrator is meant to save everyone equally. She uses that to justify that she doesn’t hold particular disdain for migrants—but all of that kind of falls apart when you remember that there was an available boat to save them and the employee didn’t send it.

There’s one aspect of the interrogation that Delecroix hits a little too hard. He really emphasizes the physical resemblance between the CROSS worker and the police officer. It’s pretty obvious, I think, that it’s symbolic of the CROSS worker’s self-interrogation. The Kafkaesque resonances and Beckettian doubling are pretty clear, but Delecroix really makes it unambiguous and explicit:

Again [the police officer] interrupted me with a gesture of irritation, placing both hands palm down on either side of the computer, looking me straight in the eye. I was struck at that moment by the really quite astonishing resemblance between her and me, not just the hair pulled back off her face, the straight back, the same tension in her jaw that I have, the slightly pointed nose and beauty spot on her hairline, her sharp, inscrutable face, obstinate, completely objective, I thought to myself, but also the way of placing her hands face down on either side of the computer, and above all her expression, which is also my expression—I mean my professional expression, the one I put on to stare at screens, check positions, follow lines of travel—which goes with the clenched jaw and especially with my professional voice when responding to idiots panicking and thrashing about in the water. All of which enables me to become exactly what I should be, that is, a function, not an individual or a person but a function—about as personal, or individual, as a mathematical unit or a mass-produced tin-opener. If I was behind a counter I would wear exactly the same expression, the appropriate one, a sort of universal expression, and it was as though I felt I was looking at myself, and consequently as though I felt I was questioning myself, as though I was looking at myself in a mirror and saying to myself: // Do you not think that’s rather an easy way to… (40-41)

Despite the narrator’s protestations, some of the language she uses to describe people in distress (like the use of the word “idiots” in the quotation above) exposes her inner thoughts. In interacting with the police officer, she also sees herself to be liberated to be a mass-produced tin-opener. She hides behind her function, refusing to take personal accountability. All this to say, we see the banality of evil at work trying to disguise itself by saying that not discriminating particular circumstances is the whole bureaucratic point. This probably says more about me than anything else, but I couldn’t help but genderswap the narrator. Even as I was writing this review, I felt tempted to write his. It has that resonance.

The refusal of personal accountability and the mirroring between the narrator and the police officer hold a broader philosophical point: that none of us are unique. It’s an uncomfortable truth that the narrator successfully exposes: the home countries of the migrants are guilty, the people who smuggled them in uncertain conditions are guilty, the countries they’re traveling to are guilty, she herself is guilty for not saving them, but so too is England for not responding to the call either—everyone is linked in this horrible mess and not one of us is innocent. 

Throughout the book, there’s an allusion to something the narrator said on the call. In the final pages it is revealed what she said on the last call to the migrant in the water holding a phone as everyone drowns. She tells them the truth. Here’s a lengthy passage from the final pages that really hit the nail on the head of the guilt-innocence discussion:

I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue. Not because I’d done what you’re meant to do. They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words. That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place. The voice of the whole of humanity reassured to hear itself saying, uttering the words: I will save you; you will not die—not actually saving, no one cares about that, not acting, not even helping. But at least saying it, because to fail to say those words is to be less than human. In the end, whether they drowned or not didn’t matter; what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them.
But I said: You will not be saved.
And if, listening to the recording, the investigator turns her gaze away, unable to look at me, with that sad, devastated look in her eyes, it’s because it’s not me she’ll hear, but herself and everyone along with her, saying: I will not save you, while she wanted to hear me say the opposite – wanted it for herself, for everyone, so humanity could be reassured about itself, so humanity need not doubt its humanity, and so she would not have to fear what she’d become, that is to say, a woman like me, like the one I’ve become. (120-121)

In these pages, we see the crux of the novel. Nobody is actually taking action to save the migrants in the current crisis, but everyone wants their empathy to absolve them. Here, we have a narrator that refuses to give everyone the absolution they want. We all want to believe we’re saving people, but it’s our own comfort we’re trying to save. It reminds me of the Bo Burnham song “Sad” where he talks about the power of laughter to solve all the sadness in the world: “not for the people that are actually sad, but for the people like us who’ve gotta fucking deal with ‘em all the time.” Delecroix won’t let us be comfortable.

In addition to the discomfort, I would add shock into the mix. For your own good, don’t read the introduction to the book before you start. The introduction gives a true account of what happened on November 24th and it’s shocking how much of the book is non-fiction. The real-life details of the fallout from the tragedy and the failure of people to act is despicable, and Delecroix is maybe right in suggesting that the words are even worse. The real recording of the annoyed operator has her saying “Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved. ‘I’m up to my feet in water’? It wasn’t me who told you to leave.’” They denied to send a ship because it was supposedly helping other small boats in French waters. As stated in the introduction, “No reliable media source in France could confirm this” (10).

As I mentioned, this book is challenging. It forces us to confront the worst parts of ourselves, our individual and collective failure to act on behalf of others, and all those frustrations we feel in place of empathy. The book doesn’t explain why these issues are so pervasive, but I can’t really fault Delecroix for that—where would he even begin?

I can’t exactly say ‘happy reading’ for this one. But you should probably still read it.

On Tyranny: Expanded Audio Edition by Timothy Snyder

  I imagine many of you are already familiar with Timothy Snyder’s thin volume On Tyranny. As Snyder offers twenty lessons to help resist encroaching tyranny, it feels more than coincidental that the book was released just a month after the first inauguration of Donald Trump. Oh, timely. That’s the word. Timely.

Many of the lessons that Snyder offers are pretty straightforward. For instance, the first lesson is “do not obey in advance” and the second one is “defend institutions.” These are explicitly, obviously, political. Others are more surprising, and actually the reason that I read the book. A friend and colleague of mine pointed me towards the chapter “Make Eye Contact and Small Talk,” in which Snyder recognizes that engaging with our neighbours and community members in a casual way also offers us a way of disrupting tyranny by humanizing ourselves to one another and offering solidarity as we navigate the world.

Of the other chapters, one that stood out in particular was “Be Wary of Paramilitaries.” I’ll offer a quotation from the book here. See if you can spot any parallels to real lice. I mean life. Sorry, messed up IFE and ICE there for a second:

“When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle the end has come.”

The chapter discusses how government wants to retain exclusive right over the use of violence. If other groups can use violence, it gets in the way of official government business. So, tyranny operates by creating and funding violent organizations that involve themselves in politics: “such groups can take the form of a paramilitary wing of a political party, the personal body guard of a particular politician, or apparently spontaneous citizens’ initiatives, which usually turn out to have been organized by a party or its leader.” I can’t help but think of all the people that have been emboldened to, say, storm the capital. Or, say, the “lone wolves” that are encouraged to take action against Democrats like Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Or, say, the private security details that removed Trumps’ opponents from rallies and all of the willing audience members who became part of the mob. Or, say, bringing in ICE and the National Guard against citizens without concern over due process. Encouraging the use of the 2nd amendment almost certainly enables the right to solidify their authoritarianism, rather than its supposed intent to resist tyrannical government.

Another lesson I found resonant was “Believe in Truth.” Criticizing power relies on having a basis of truth and it’s no wonder that the Trump administration, along with technogiant capitalists, want us to reject ideas of truth. If we don’t have a common understanding of truth, it prevents us from mobilizing against tyranny and exploitation. Snyder documents different ways that truth erodes:

1. “The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” I think we see this process everywhere. When talking to MAGA supporters, how many times have we watched the facts been declared as “fake news”? How many times have blatantly wrong views been supported by “do your own research” (i.e. don’t listen to the experts, listen to the random unaccredited people that I trust)? Snyder notes that on the campaign trail, 78% of Trump’s factual claims were false. But that’s not the point. The point is to destabilize what even counts as truth because that makes it easier for tyrants to exploit people. They have the freedom to pretend reality is false.

2. “Shamanistic incantation.” Snyder notes that the “fascist style depends on endless repetition designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.” He refers to how Trump’s nicknames for his enemies displace his negative qualities elsewhere, but I’d argue that his slogans (“make America great again”) are repeated without true understanding of the true implications, or a lack of concern for nuance in any case. We see it in the talking points the press secretary refuses to deviate from. Repeat it enough, and it becomes true.

3. “Magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.” Snyder gives the example of the campaign promises to cut taxes while increasing spending for social policy and national defence. There’s a blasé attitude that things will just work themselves out and people have to accept that all is possible. I would also point to all of the nonsense comedians-on-the-street point out to people at Trump rallies. For example, they’ll openly embrace the contradiction that Leftists are weak and effeminate and yet also the biggest threat to the state.

4. “Misplaced faith.” Need we even comment on the AI-generated images of a Godlike Trump? 

One area that I would maybe push back on Snyder a little bit is his assertion that one way of resisting tyranny is to be a patriot. I understand where he’s coming from—you’re a true patriot if you defend the place you’re from and your community. I think my sense of ‘patriotism’ has just been eroded through all the people that claim patriotism as a character trait. To me, patriotism as it is is primarily servant to the state, and the state is too often aligned with tyranny. But I get what he’s saying.

Of course, this edition of On Tyranny is also the expanded audio edition. While the initial book was maybe only a hundred pages, Snyder’s expanded edition goes on for hours more. It’s compelling that he applies the lessons of On Tyranny to the history of Ukraine and Russia. The specifics of the history were informative but I’m more interested in the ‘big picture’ concepts. In particular, the totalizing views of history. Tyranny relies on both the “politics of inevitability” and the “politics of eternity.” The latter is more immediately obvious with respect to Russia: Putin relies on Russia’s foundational myth, a myth for a moment in time that never really existed but nonetheless establishes the justification for invading Ukraine. The corollary is that all of history is inevitable. Everything must be that way and therefore all suffering and displacement of Ukrainians is necessary.

If you’re interested in politics and history, On Tyranny is worth a read. The original text is definitely insightful from a political standpoint and the expanded one is a better fit for history enthusiasts. Both are accessible to a general audience, so don’t be intimidated—and also, smile at your neighbours.

Happy reading!