Literary Friction - RE-RUN: Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge and Kishani Widyaratna

We're in the midst of an international protest movement, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police. As a result, it didn’t feel right to put out a new show, so instead we wanted to re-run a show from 2017 during which we talked about race with Reni Eddo-Lodge, the author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Kishani Widyaratna, an editor at Picador Books in London. In her now best selling book, Reni takes a thorough and passionate look at the UK's long and complicated relationship with structural racism.

This show comes with the caveat that we recorded this conversation three years ago. Our thinking has evolved since then as we’ve all continued to read and listen and learn about race. For white people in particular, anti-racist work is an ongoing journey. However, it’s sad and frustrating that most of the issues we were discussing then remain the same. It’s important to point out that we were talking about race generally on this show, whereas the current protests are for Black Lives Matter, focussing on anti-blackness, which is connected but a more specific issue.

Recommendations on the theme, race:

Octavia: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/288/288167/citizen/9780141981772.html

Kish: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/243/24381/wide-sargasso-sea/9780241951552.html

Carrie: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/190696/the-warmth-of-other-suns-by-isabel-wilkerson/

General Recommendations:

Octavia: Mislaid by Nell Zink https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062364777/mislaid/

Kish: Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life

Reni: Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde https://www.silverpress.org/your-silence-will-not-protect-you

Carrie: First Love by Gwendoline Riley https://pagesofhackney.co.uk/lockdown/product/first-love-gwendoline-riley/

Further Reading:

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race-9781408870587/

Reni's podcast, About Race: https://www.aboutracepodcast.com/

Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad https://www.meandwhitesupremacybook.com/

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566247/white-fragility-by-robin-diangelo/

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213837/are-prisons-obsolete-by-angela-y-davis/

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/ijeoma-oluo/so-you-want-to-talk-about-race/9781541647435/

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