Against Color-Blindness: Anglo-American Trajectories of Racism inWhy I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and White Rage

Abstract

Topics relating to race and experiences of racism are made visible through literary texts such as Carol Anderson’s White Rage and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. This paper examines the ways in which the two texts address historical trajectories of racism and how they suggest these histories should be dealt with in the present, drawing on Michael Rothberg’s theory of implication in oppressive and unjust pasts. The paper engages with these notions while also exploring Eddo-Lodge’s and Anderson’s critique of color-blindness and post-racialism. The two texts provide an opportunity to examine potential avenues for and ways of dealing with legacies of racial inequality; legacies that inevitably persist in the present moment, taking new shapes and forms.