This is a fairly short book inspired by a shorter blog post of the same name, written by the author in 2014. The blog post went viral, and changed the author's life, ironically ensuring a lot of white people DID want her to talk to them about race, and so her life since then and this book are in fact now quite full of talking to white people about race. Whether or not you're white people, it's a very thoughtful and intelligent book that will hopefully make you think deeply about things in ways you may not have considered.

Eddo-Lodge lives in England and speaks about racism from the point of view of a native-born Brit; this leads to different discussions and different emphasis from the racism in the USA that most people reading about racism are probably more accustomed to. She goes into the history of racism in England, which is not well taught in schools and less known than the US history; and she also dedicates a chapter to discussion race and class and why they're not interchangeable. The class system in England is so much more visible and openly understood than in the US that this makes the conversations around race different, and she points to phrases like "white working class" to break down both what they actually mean and how they're intended to implicitly blame the non-white working class for all the ills of the white working class, and the larger structure of racism behind these terms.

There's also an excellent section on feminism; Eddo-Lodge started out learning about feminism and then from there started to realize that Black feminism is a slightly different thing, and she has a lot to say about the inherently white-orientation of most feminism particularly in England, and how important understanding intersectionality is.

The discussions of white privilege are also useful. I still remember exactly when and how I became aware of my white privilege, which was in about 2005, and I'd like to think I've been pretty conscious of it ever since, but even so EddoLodge gave some eye-opening examples of situations that wouldn't necessarily have occurred to me, where she's been forced to choose between shutting up and smiling at a white person or experiencing some tangible disadvantage in a way that was probably completely invisible to the white person in that conversation. Examples like that both illustrate the phenomenon very clearly, and also illustrate why she later describes white privilege as a suffocating blanket, and how oppressive that must feel all the time to those who don't have it:

“White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know...It's brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don't get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences...challenging it can have implications on your quality of life.”

Anyway, a thought-provoking read and probably one worth rereading a few times with more to be learned each time.