Why I’m no longer talking to black people about race

I’m no longer talking to Black people about race — and I’m not alone.

Despite the slogan on the child-like cardboard placards held above the heads of Black Lives Matter protesters, the silence of us lower-case whites is not violence. For a while it was something considered as objectionable as racism — indifference.

We neither canonised nor fetishised black men and women as our experience of them was too diverse to classify them as a placid victim or an exotic rara avis. They were ultimately as dull and workaday as the rest of us, harbouring similar hopes and grudges. That’s how it is when you move from society’s margins to the mainstream. (This is the price of equality, at least the equality — it’s an amorphous creature — Britain was trudging towards before identity politics became the pub bore that emptied the bar.)

The upside is you’re not solely knife-wielding, drug-dealing absent fathers (the classical view of the far right); the downside: you’re not simply the carnival-loving soul man in fear of the policeman’s knee and the neighbour’s noose (the current view of the left).

The black people I’m not talking to about race are not those from the past, those I’ve liked or loved, laughed, cried and climaxed with, or those I’ve yet to meet that share a similar outlook on evidential prejudice in whatever race, faith or shape it comes.

I’m talking about the profiteering race-baiters, charlatans and grifters controlling the narrative; the beneficiaries of the billion-pound equalities industry that, paradoxically, swelled as racism in society diminished. Remits therefore widened; goalposts shifted. This monolith needs the “racism” it seeks