Reni Eddo-Lodge was born and raised in London, and although she was familiar with the stories of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., they always seemed so far removed from her own reality. When she took a university course on slavery, however, it completely changed her perspective, and the history of colonialism and slavery suddenly hit home.
Slavery was a very lucrative form of international trade, in which wealthy British and European classes did business with the African elite, trading people as if they were mere goods. Slavery officially came to an end thanks to an almost 50-year campaign by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in London in 1787 by Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. When the British Parliament declared the end of slavery in the Empire in 1833, over 46,000 slave-owning British citizens received cheques to compensate them for their financial losses, but it goes without saying that there was no such compensation for the former black slaves.
Much later, countless black people and other minorities, such as Indians, fought under the British flag in the two world wars, but even this was not enough to earn them equal treatment. According to the author, from the end of WW11, almost up to the present day, white people continued to harbour hatred and racial prejudice against blacks even though, to all intents and purposes, they were British. She adds that the United Kingdom demanded help from colonial populations and immigrants during times of need, such as the world wars, but then failed to uphold much of the responsibility that colonisation should entail.
The very first racial legislation in Britain, the Race Relations Acts, was passed in 1965, but it only punished racial discrimination if it took place in public places. Although the law was given a wider reach just three years later, it was never properly enforced. Nationalist sentiments and policies grew during the 1970s, at a time when the British police had the power to stop, search, and arrest anyone they deemed suspicious, and their suspicions were almost always based purely on race: the black population and crime became increasingly interconnected, and according to 2015 research, blacks were 17 times more likely to be stopped by the police than whites.
The author talks about various incidents of discrimination, which help to bring home just how many innocent people lost their lives, how many homes were searched without the slightest evidence of criminal activity, and how many black children and adults were victims of a collective ritual of humiliation. When we look back at history, we realise that racism did not simply appear out of nowhere, and in fact Eddo-Lodge suggests that it resides in the very core of British society, and that it is intrinsic to the system itself.