After George Floyd’s death, Uwagba began to think about white ‘allyship’ and why support often felt performative. She discusses why her new book offers a break from the ‘black reading list’
Otegha Uwagba wants to get some things off her chest. From her home in south London, where she grew up, she tells me that her new short book Whites is a culmination of not just the past few months or even year, but a work that is the fruit of a decade of thoughts, experiences and epiphanies.
“I have been making notes for the past four or five years,” Uwagba tells me. When she was working at a place that felt hostile, she “started making observations about feelings and incidents and anecdotes that happened to me that were racist or had troubling dynamics”. With the death of George Floyd and the deluge of white “allyship” that followed, Uwagba felt that white people’s solidarity was insufficient, performative, even narcissistic. For black people to experience racial discrimination and yet be surrounded by white people ostensibly on their side, but continuing to add injury by being passively complicit, was to suffer twice.
