Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People - (Very) Rough Notes

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Bloomsbury published it in Britain in 2017, it became a bit of a trans-Atlantic phenomenon, I read it because it was mentioned in Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club, and now it has come out in a German-language translation. To celebrate, the German publisher Tropen Verlag held a book presentation event here in Berlin. I attended it on Wednesday, March 27th. The book is about racial bias in Britain and about how difficult it is for a black person to speak about racism, even with liberal people, because she or he will encounter so much resistance and misplaced guilt.

Apologies for the postmodernist presentation of these notes. In the end, I felt that it was the most direct and truthful representation of the event that I could muster; any attempt to string them together seemed to dump in more after-the-fact analysis that I can't be sure is accurate.

***
- 7 p.m.
- Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, Friedrichstraße 90, in Berlin Mitte
- Friedrichstraße overground S-Bahn station, restaurants with glass façades, tourists, lights, after dark
- people milling about around islands of books segmented into genres, with stairs leading between 4 levels (5 including the café)
- stage in basement café (Kulturbühne?): capacity 200, overfilled
- overspill crowd in front of large video screen with good sound waiting to be let into basement, then realizing that we'd just be watching the screen, as previously announced on Facebook
- a portly older man in a suit grumbling that the high number of attendees was not good for security
- at least 2 ushers
- people sitting on the floor or standing in front of the screen
- young woman apologizing to friends for not joining them on time - she'd needed to finish work
- plurality of demographic likely young women, but plenty of young men and older men and women; no children except perhaps a baby that occasionally wailed
- at elevators and entrance to the English language books section, with vertical garden behind the screen

Image from Tropen Verlag [Klett-Cotta]

- Reni Eddo-Lodge sitting down with an elderly white German lady for the interview
- interviewer lists all the prizes the author had won, mentions that she had written a blog post and that it had gone viral (author later mentions that her blog was linked to Twitter, and it was the Twitter post that went viral and led to many people thanking her for saying what they'd been thinking)
- asks what was the conversation that was the breaking point and led to the book
- author replies that if one reads the chapter about all the frustrating conversations she had while being active in feminist circles, one would understand what led her to write it

- interviewer mentions that back in 1995 there was already a discussion about the repression of black voices in the feminist discourse (around a certain prize?)
- mention of author never having been taught about the British slave trade in school, just hearing about it in an elective course at university
- interviewer asks about author feeling isolated at university (a characterization the author takes issue with but that the interviewer insists is in the book) and wonders where the other black women were - they both talk about the bias that leads to there being very few black women in teaching roles at universities ('Let's say they shouldn't all get on the same airplane,' joked Reni Eddo-Lodge, before saying that there are about 20 [if I heard correctly])

- author stresses that she is not calling individual white people racists; she is saying that black people are disadvantaged by a system that people may not be conscious of. Black schoolchildren may be marked down by their teachers, for example, but this does not mean that the teachers are evil. It just means that they have a subconscious bias

- interviewer asks whether author felt frustrated that she had to use such violent language in her blog post to get her point across - author says that she does not feel her language was violent, perhaps "striking" [Note: reminded me of 'Angry Black Woman' stereotype, criticized e.g. by Audre Lorde in her 1981 speech "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism".]

Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

***

In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.