“Just don’t talk about it” — Why we have to talk about race

Apparently the cure to racism is to not talk about it (Morgan Freeman said it so it must be true!).

I’d genuinely love to live in a race free world like that but to ignore race is to ignore one of the most important factors which steered human history alongside gender, class, nationality etc. which we all agree we should talk about but somehow with race there is a debate. 400 years of slavery happened in the current global superpower based entirely on race.

It affects the vast majority of the people in the world to this day. European colonialists, the creators of race science, imposed these ideas on to every virtually every country in the world in some form during colonialism and none of that has gone away. Even if they aren’t racist, most people living in the world today are race conscious; they know what ‘white’ or ‘black’ is, despite being made up concepts.

Slavery wasn’t dismantled due to a sudden consciousness of racism. It had to be fought for directly. Ignoring is never the answer.

Racists will talk about race. If the rest of us are silent we will let them dominate the politics of race.

We are all human of course but to eradicate racism the only way is to talk about it and fight back.