These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the institutionalisation of prejudice; and charting movements of change and the resistance to change. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir, The Hate Race, tempers a tale of schoolyard trauma with gentle humour; Reni Eddo-Lodge’s debut, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, is a broadside, a roar of outrage; while Eula Biss’s elegantly structured essays in Notes from No Man’s Land are delivered with a deceptively quiet insistence that nevertheless leaves the reader shaken.
They focus, respectively, on Australia, Britain and the United States. ‘Racism is a shortcoming of the heart,’ Clarke writes in her introduction. ‘Racism is about the strategy of systemic power,’ Eddo-Lodge asserts, and ‘power never goes down without a fight’. Biss says, ‘race is a social function’.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the daughter of black British parents of Guyanese and Jamaican heritage who emigrated to Australia as newlyweds.
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