Home > Author > Reni Eddo-Lodge
1 " It's clear that equality doesn't quite cut it. Asking for a sliver of disproportionate power is too polite a request. I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. "
― Reni Eddo-Lodge , Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
2 " White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost. "
3 " Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. "
4 " Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address. "
5 " Waiting for unity is just inviting inertia. "
6 " It [feminism] needs to recognise that disabled people aren’t inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. "
7 " But rather than deeming the current situation an absolute tragedy, we should seize it as an opportunity to move towards a collective responsibility for a better society, taking account of the internal hierarchies and intersections along the way. "
8 " The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. "
9 " Whiteness in the press had positioned itself for too long as the self-appointed, self-referential arbiter of racial problems, in which it pondered why these black and brown communities were so prone to violence and poverty, without a shred of self-awareness. "
10 " Not displaying anger wasn’t going to stop me being labelled as angry, so I thought: fuck it. I decided to speak my mind. The more politically assertive I became, the more men shouted at me. "
11 " No useful movements for change have ever sprung out of fervent guilt.Instead, get angry. Anger is useful. Use it for good. "
12 " 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. "
13 " It is not right to suggest that every win for race equality results in a loss for white working-class people "
14 " I write - and read - to assure myself that other people have felt what I'm feeling too, that it isn't just me, that this is real, and valid, and true. "
15 " We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in willful ignorance. "
16 " Being constantly looked at like an alien in the country you were born in requires true tolerance. "
17 " What history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth? "
18 " We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. "
19 " I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me.. "
20 " Faced with the collective forgetting, we must strive to remember "
