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    Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods
    Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods
    Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods
    Ebook49 pages40 minutes

    Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods

    By Otegha Uwagba

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    About this ebook

    ‘An important, timely personal essay’ OBSERVER BEST BOOKS OF 2020

    ‘Not taking any bullshit…sharp and stylish…brutal’ GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

    In this powerful and timely personal essay, best-selling author Otegha Uwagba reflects on racism, whiteness, and the mental labour required of Black people to navigate the two.

    Presented as a record of Uwagba’s observations on this era-defining moment in history – that is, George Floyd’s brutal murder and the subsequent protests and scrutiny of institutional racism – Whites explores the colossal burden of whiteness, as told by someone who is in her own words, ‘a reluctant expert’.

    What is it like to endure both racism and white efforts at anti-racism, sometimes from the very same people? How do Black people navigate the gap between what they know to be true, and the version of events that white society can bring itself to tolerate? What does true allyship actually look like – and is it even possible?

    Addressing complex interracial dynamics and longstanding tensions with characteristically unflinching honesty, Uwagba deftly interrogates the status quo, and in doing so provides an intimate and deeply compelling portrayal of an unavoidable facet of the Black experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateNov 12, 2020
    ISBN9780008440435

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    • 4/5
      Very interesting, much to think about. Quite approachable at the end of it

    Book preview

    Whites - Otegha Uwagba

    PREAMBLE

    This essay was written in the throes of an unthinkable summer, one where it seemed as though the entire world was teetering on the brink of collapse, and where I often imagined I could physically feel the shift from one era to another happening beneath my feet, could actually point at the fault line separating one period of time from the next and say, ‘There. That’s where it happened.’

    And then, in the middle of that already strange season, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black American man from Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed by a white police officer – a death that Floyd’s brother would later describe as a ‘modern-day lynching’ – and the world burst into flames.

    The days and weeks that followed brought to a head countless tensions and unspoken grievances, at both the civic and personal levels, and it was the ripple effect of those events that prompted me to finally begin writing this essay. The thoughts that follow are largely constructed from notes I started making around five years ago: a collection of miscellaneous observations and emotions piling up day by day, lost memories abruptly making themselves known again and taking on new significance when arranged on a shelf alongside twenty others.

    Sifting through them, a very clear unifying theme quickly became obvious: not just ‘racism’ in a general sense – which is what I had thought I was writing about – but white people, and what is required to coexist with them if you yourself are not white. The colossal burden of that requirement.

    Already, my first hurdle: I didn’t particularly want to write an essay about being Black that placed white people at its centre. I felt – still feel – deeply confronted by that prospect, wary of falling into the easy trap of evaluating Black experiences solely in relation to whiteness. As I weighed this up, an interview with the New York-based artist Rashid Johnson caught my eye. Part of a larger feature focusing on contemporary Black artists actively resisting the expectation to create work catering to the white gaze (as is often the unspoken mandate in creative fields), [1] Johnson noted that society consistently finds new ways ‘to position the work of Black artists as inherently being in response to the obstacles presented by a white world.’ That was the very opposite of what I wanted to do – produce something angled toward the white gaze, or write an essay that might become an emblem for progressive white people wanting to prove their credentials, wallowing in their guilt about the existence of a system that works to their advantage while doing nothing to divest from it.

    All this to say that although I didn’t want to write an essay where white people took centre stage, as you’ll discover, that’s exactly what I’ve done. This essay is very much ‘a response to the obstacles presented by a white world’. It became clear to me that

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