in Público, July 2021

Almost all progressive whites will have one or two reasons to believe they are not racist. Considering myself a progressive, my reasons are that I was born in Angola, that I feel Angolan even though I left there 48 years ago, and that even my parents were already anti-racist. Progressives like myself seem compelled to communicate an exceptional regime to black people: white racists are the others; we are the non-racists, the good ones.

Superior to our countrymen, we are so anti-racist and have been for so long that the likelihood that an ancestor of ours took part in maritime expansion is slim. We hold racism exists and is systemic; the responsibility rests with successive governments and bad social policies. The need for atonement is grand, and we can spend long hours discoursing on our exceptionality. It doesn’t occur to us that these black people we meet and whom we annoy might prefer to spend the time of the meeting talking about other things, ordinary or not, but other things.

Why does skin colour have to convene conversations about it? The trouble is that if a black person talks back, if she gets into a dialogue with us, we are not so open to what is being said: we notice a certain exaggeration, a tone of anger, a resentful and angry human being. Above all, we hear radicalism. Now, progressives are moderate, sophisticated people who trust diplomacy, even though it may take 500 years to correct evils. Still, progressives wonder: why are black people so angry, so impatient with us? Why don’t they buy into this solidarity version we’ve just sold them? How dare they identify our belonging to the system, thus questioning our status as free-thinkers? When the word comes back to us, it is already only to defend ourselves from identified breaches we have enormous difficulty seeing. We may even leave there convinced we’ve been victims of reverse racism.

This type of dynamic led British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge to blog a text entitled ‘Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Race’. The text went viral, and Eddo-Lodge expanded it into a book where she identifies the wall that white people put up when they find themselves implicated in an equation from which they wish themselves exempt. Eddo-Lodge is not only referring to her confrontations with the extreme right but also with liberal and moderate people she meets daily.

Racism, both overtly and unabashedly, robs the right to dullness; it robs peace of mind, tranquillity and security. States and attributes that we know well since they are part of the existential luxuries of white people. A black actress, an activist, once told me she was tired of having to help white people – liberals and conservatives – to figure out their own racism, to realize the seriousness of the problem. Tired, too, of seeing people like me, who, espousing the cause, incur the white saviour figure, as in certain Hollywood movies. “It’s not enough that they were the slavers; now they want to be the liberators,” she accuses me, and I stick my shoe in as best I can. She tells me she dreams of a trivial life and wishes to be an actress in a love movie one day: “Kissing at sunset and stuff like that.” That day, splendidly banal, is long overdue, I admit.