Reni Eddo-Lodge's Blog

Last May, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I noticed an uptick in book sales. At the time, I made a donation to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organisation paying bail funds for those who might be arrested protesting the murder. I also committed to making another donation once I received my royalty payment for that time period.

MFF received over 30 million dollars from supporters during the black lives matter protests. Although I continue to support their vital work, the phenomenal amount of donations they received has allowed me to place my second donation elsewhere.

I’m happy to announce I’ve made a donation of £15,000 in total to both the feminist organisation Level Up and the migrant rights charity We Belong. Level Up campaign against gendered injustice, and embody the kind of feminist action I think the world needs more of. We Belong is an inspiring charity, led by young people who have had their access to education blocked by British government’s hostile environment immigration policies.

In a just world, we wouldn’t need philanthropy. But for now, while I have the means, I feel compelled to put back into the movement.

R x

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I feel like I have lost the entire month of July. Things had ground to a halt. I have been so tired, so sluggish, that during the past month, mustering up the energy to respond to a few emails felt like an insurmountable task.  We all have those odd days that we need to take to recharge, to lie on the sofa, watch Netflix, and be very still; so we can wake up refreshed the next day feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world. My problem was that those days took up the majority of the month of July, and the much anticipated recharged feeling the next day never arrived. Instead I was struck with dizziness and headaches as soon as I woke up. If I stood up too quickly, I’d end up floored, exhausted for the next half an hour. I was so tired that every day felt like swimming through treacle, and I was seriously struggling with keeping up with the demands that people were making of me.

I’m self-employed so I don’t have one boss to apologise to, more like dozens of separate people with whom I make commitments with.  As a self-employed person, your income is tied to your productivity. Over the past month I’ve not been good at responding to requests for my work or labour. I’ve done radio and TV appearances this month which weren’t my best. I have barely done any work, and the work I have done has been completed through a process of forcing and dragging myself, fighting myself from slipping into unscheduled sleeps and battling the overwhelming need to lie on the sofa and give up. There have been Sundays where I’ve looked at a busy schedule for the upcoming week and wondered how I would be able to get through it.

Underlying this all was a vague sense of personal failure, especially living under a well-established political rhetoric of strivers vs skivers. In July I spent far too much time pushing myself further than was advisable health wise, whilst chastising myself for being lazy. Generic supplements gave me some good days though, days where I had enough energy to get stuff done, and to go out and socialise rather than lie around the house feeling exhausted.

This Friday it all came to a head. I’ve been diagnosed as severely anaemic, having been discharged yesterday from my local hospital, pumped with three bags of blood and a ziplock bag bursting full with various boxes of medication. After the blood transfusion, I feel much better and full of gratitude towards anyone I know who’d ever donated pints of theirs at a blood bank. Cumulatively, you’ve all saved my life. I’m feeling ten times more alive thanks to the new blood coursing through my veins at the mercy of lots of generous strangers. In about 12 hours I should be feeling the full effects of the transfusion and will be back to my normal, productive self. And though I’m quietly resentful that I have to take a fistful of pills three times a day for the foreseeable, there’s still a whole month of summer left that I’m determined to enjoy, emails to catch up on, and a book to get stuck into.

Thanks for bearing with me.

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Happy spring! After a cold and long winter, here’s a round up of some of the online work I’ve done over the last few months:

After women organised a protest run in Manchester in the wake of a series of assaults against women joggers, I spoke to the organiser for the Telegraph.

I wrote a piece on the BBC’s new drama focusing on the secrets and lies of an extraordinary black family for Refinery 29 UK

Here’s something for Grazia magazine on afro hair making it into the mainstream

When Stanley Nelson’s documentary on the Black Panthers was released, I had the opportunity to speak to an original Black Panther for Broadly.

And finally- a slight deviation from my usual output, I spoke to beauty website Brown Beauty Talk about one of the unending loves of my life- skincare.

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Hello! I’m back to work, considerably healthier than I was when I last wrote here. Here’s a round up of what I’ve been writing recently:

I joined direct action group Sisters Uncut in the run up to them crashing the red carpet at the Suffragette premiere

I wrote about the illness that kept me sofa bound to for two months.

In light of David Cameron’s visit to Jamaica, I discussed whether Britain’s government should pay reparations for Slavery.

Video of the panel event I chaired at Glastonbury 2015 – Feminism Without Borders– is now online.

Also! I found this interview that I did with Oxford’s student newspaper, Cherwell, earlier this year.

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Last month, I was honoured to win the £1000 Jhalak Prize for my debut book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

Like every other Londoner, I’ve been disturbed by the recent spate of violent youth crime. I’ve spent most of my life in north east London, so I’m sad to say that I’m not a stranger to youth violence. I spent my teenage years hearing stories about friends of friends being slain on the streets of London, and it is simply pure luck that it hasn’t affected anyone close to me.

I am in awe of the work of Temi Mwale and her youth-led advocacy project 4Front. Too often initiatives to tackle youth crime are led by men with punitive and paternalistic solutions. My heart lifts when I hear Temi talking about public health, mental health, trauma counselling, empathy and combating alienation.  I believe that only a truly caring society can combat systemic violence.

The 4Front Project’s work should be funded by the government. In the meantime, since I have received some unexpected cash, I wanted contribute financially.

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At openDemocracy, I spoke to comedian Aamer Rahman about race, politics and power.

Last month, I wrote at Feminist Times on the erasure of black women from the beauty industry.

Finally, I wrote an obituary for Maya Angelou at Dazed and Confused magazine.

Also- if you’re a tumblr user, I’ve recently joined! Find me at renireni.tumblr.com.

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I wrote about the street harassment women experience in the summer at openDemocracy- Women everywhere have their movement limited by the male gaze.

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A lot of people read and enjoy my work- a readership I’m grateful for. But there’s one loaded compliment that jars me more than a thousand racial slurs.  It’s being told I’m eloquent.

This comment does not mean the same thing when directed to me as when directed to my white counterparts. Eloquence is loaded with racial implications. If you are a first, second or (like me) a third generation immigrant, you’ll be all too familiar with the coded compliment of ‘you speak so well’. Eloquence is the arbiter of British assimilation, with compliments such as ‘you speak so well’ offered to us immigrants as a marker of reluctant acceptance. If we’re not speaking ‘well’- perhaps with the thick, lilting accent of my grandparents- our intelligence is called into question. Complementing eloquence is part and parcel of the big British colour blindness project, with its efforts to ‘not see race’ by erasing our difference and heritage by demanding us to assimilate.

During London’s riots of 2011, BBC Newsnight held a discussion on the causes of the riots with novelist Dreda Say Mitchell, author Owen Jones, and historian David Starkey.  After expressing admiration for Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech and likening black culture to a contagious disease, Starkey earnestly said: ‘listen to David Lammy.  An archetypical, successful black man. If you turn the screen off, so you were listening to him on the radio, you’d think he was white.’

You speak so well. You’re very eloquent. You have a good grasp of our language. You’re an acceptable immigrant. You sound like you belong here!

The flip side of being deemed as acceptable or respectable is that the line has been drawn on who is an acceptable immigrant, and who is not. David Starkey made that point clear.I’m not interested in being some kind of model minority. Until none of us are unacceptable, we are all unacceptable.

I’m aiming to deconstruct and decolonise destructive constructions of race in the same language that created them and enforced linguistic violence on my home continent. There is a bittersweet compliment in being told that I have a great grasp of the English language.  Tell me that my work changed your mind. Tell me that it altered your world view. But don’t call me eloquent.

FURTHER READING: “You Speak Good English.”

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It’s been a while since I did one of these posts, but here’s a collection of some of the writing I’ve done over the past few months:

Calling for a women’s strike on housework in the Telegraph

An interview with Dr Ola Orekunrin, CEO of Nigeria’s Flying Doctors service, in the Guardian

In the Telegraph, on YouTube’s sexual harassment problem

Reviewing Assata Shakur’s autobiography at OpenDemocracy

Challenging racist, sexist stereotypes on TV in the Telegraph

On interracial relationships and prejudice 

Defending N Dubz’ Tulisa in Vice

An interview with the American Journalism Review on twittering

On being femme and hairy

Why we need socially conscious pop stars 

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I had the honour of interviewing Dr Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw last week whilst she was in London- her work has been instrumental in pioneering and honing black feminist intersectional thought, filling in the gaps where black women have been forgotten.

You can read some of that interview over at The Voice Newspaper, and the rest of it over at Feminist Times.

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