Top 70 Reni Eddo-Lodge Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Solidarity is nothing but self-satisfying if it is solely performative.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

2. “We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in willful ignorance.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

3. “Faced with the collective forgetting, we must strive to remember.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

4. “When I was four, I asked my mum when I would turn white, because all the good people on TV were white, and all the villains were black and brown. I considered myself to be a good person, so I thought that I would turn white eventually. My mum still remembers the crestfallen look on my face when she told me the bad news.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

5. “After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don’t wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all negative assumptions that my characteristics bring.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

6. “The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

7. “Some start boycotting halal meat on cruelty grounds, as though there are varying degrees of acceptable animal death they’ll withstand for the benefit of eating their burgers.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

8. “Being constantly looked at like an alien in the country you were born in requires true tolerance.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

9. “The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

10. “Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can’t afford to stay silent.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

11. “There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

12. “Over the course of the slave trade, an estimated 11,000,000 black African people were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work unpaid on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas and West Indies.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

13. “Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don’t.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

14. “To be white is to be human; to be white is universal. I only know this because I am not.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

15. “This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin color is the norm and all others deviate from it.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

16. “On 1 November 2008, at an event marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Race Relations, the institute’s director Ambalavaner Sivanandan told his audience: ‘we are here because you were there’.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

17. “The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments. If free speech, as so many insist, includes being prepared to hear opinions that you don’t like, then let’s open up the parameters of what we consider acceptable debate.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

18. “Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

19. “In her report, Muriel Fletcher organised the white women who chose to have relationships with black men into four categories: the mentally weak, the prostitutes, the young and reckless, and those who felt forced into marriage because of illegitimate children.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

20. “At best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are ‘different’ in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

21. “The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

22. “Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address. The question is: who do we want to be equal to?”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

23. “Feminism is not about equality, and certainly not about silently slipping into a world of work created by and for men. Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalized by an ideological system that has been deigned for them to fail.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

24. “White people are so used to seeing a reflection of themselves in all representations of humanity at all times, that they only notice it when it’s taken away from them.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

25. “Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

26. “Structural racism amounts collective effects of bias. It’s the kind of racism that has the power to drastically impact people’s life chances.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

27. “The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency. It is par for the course in a world in which drastic race inequality is responded to with a shoulder shrug, considered just the norm.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

28. “For so long, the bar of racism has been set by the easily condemnable activity of white extremists and white nationalism.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

29. “I think we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don’t see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

30. “Instead of asking about high heels and lipstick, the pressing questions we have always needed to ask are: Can you be a feminist and be anti-choice? Can you be a feminist and be wilfully ignorant on racism?”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

31. “This institutional racism, the report explained, is ’the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

32. “If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it’s important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

33. “Combing through the literature on clashes between black people and the police, I noticed another clash – one of perspective. While some people called what happened in Tottenham and Brixton a riot, others called it an uprising – a rebellion of otherwise unheard people. I think there’s truth in both perspectives, and that the extremity of a riot only ever reflects the extremity of the living conditions of said rioters.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

34. “I don’t want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don’t wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it’s the world around me...”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

35. “Throughout the 1950s, the government was reluctant to recognise that the country had a problem with racism. But there was some movement. In 1960, backbench Labour MP Archibald Fenner Brockway repeatedly tried to bring forward a Race Discrimination Bill with the aim of outlawing ‘discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.28 Every single one of the nine times he tabled the Bill, it was defeated.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

36. “After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, we were told reported hate crimes drastically grew in number, and that racism was on the rise in Britain again. But looking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It’s in the very core of how the state is set up. It’s not external. It’s in the system.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

37. “The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

38. “We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

39. “White children are taught not to ‘see’ race, whereas children of colour are taught – often with no explanation – that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

40. “We should be rethinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it’s a black woman pushing a pram.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

41. “The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisal, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

42. “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.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

43. “I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

44. “The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

45. “It’s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisals, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

46. “Thinking about power made me realize that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

47. “But when you are used to white being the default, black isn’t black unless it is clearly pointed out as such.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

48. “White middle class people can be particularly calculated with their discomfort.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

49. “If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it’s up to you. You don’t have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn’t access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

50. “It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism.”

— Reni Eddo-Lodge