Here to Learn Book Club: Education on Race in America discussion

I tend to think about race only in the familiar context of American race relations and rhetoric, which is why I was glad to read a book written by an author who is black and British, writing about what's going in the U.K. and often relating it to America. I found that the issues seem to be largely the same; what do you think?

Eddo-Lodge brings up a few things that really resonated with me. First, that I have a race. This may sound ridiculous, as of course I have one, right? But, because I'm white, I've never thought of myself as a racialized individual. My default mode of thinking is that any person of color has a race - therefore they have the "race issue", the problem - while I am simply the default, raceless. They have the burden of race on their identities, while I'm apparently free and clear. I never realized before how subjugating that is.

And of course only when I start thinking about it in terms of myself do I realize how nuanced the word 'race' is. I suppose I am of the white race, but that doesn't really seem to fit somehow. I haven't ever bothered to learn about my personal history (I never felt the need to; to be white was enough I suppose) besides knowing that there's German and British and Irish in my blood. Am I also, then, of the German race? The American race? Something else? What about you?

I also found Eddo-Lodge's discussion of the 'Fear of a Black Planet' very compelling:

"At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn't represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western Civilization."

As if the Earth has always been white; as if we've been ordained the chosen ones since the dawn of time and people of other races are frustratingly and dangerously ignorant of that fact. It's easy for white people to believe that without really thinking about it, especially if you ever went to Sunday School like I did as a child. Adam and Eve, and God or course, were white. So there you have it; it's quite obvious to us from an early age that we are the default, the correct, the blameless.

White people take it even further, says the author, by appropriating anti-colonial rhetoric, as if we are the "embattled indigenous" of the country. I never thought about it like this: We've even taken their struggle from them. Apparently that old trope that Americans don't understand irony is true after all.

I loved the quote from Martin Luther King she included in the book and know how directly it implicates me, my family, and the vast majority of white people I know:

"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes' great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advise the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

As we are all readers here, I think Eddo-Lodge's discussion of empathy in media is a teachable one as well. It's the idea that so many people of color have always had to empathize with white people because the vast majority of main (and other) characters are white or assumed to be white, but we largely have never been forced to empathize with anyone of color because we do not see characters of color who are not stereotypes, who are not cast as 'other'.

There are many other engaging topics addressed in this book; what stood out to you? What made you think about yourself, your fellow humans, the idea of race or of anything else, differently? What made you uncomfortable?