God Is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations
CHINE McDONALD
(HODDER & STOUGHTON, 256 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £14.99 • tel 020 7799 4064

I am, in some ways, the wrong person to review Black author Chine McDonald’s (inset) autobiographical evisceration of the normative whiteness that underpins British society. It is a raw, honest journey through her own experiences of racism – some structural and some bitterly casual. What could my “white gaze” – McDonald’s term – do, except distort it?

At the same time, I might be exactly the right person. McDonald and I lived parallel lives as theology undergraduates at Cambridge University. A few years apart, we sat in the same lecture halls, browsed the same library and worked on the same student newspaper. But while my memories of Matriculation Dinner blur after the port, McDonald can still remember, “paralysed and ashamed”, the moment an academic leant over and said, “I bet you’re not used to eating this kind of food at home. I suppose it will be quite hard to find three other Nigerians to live with.”

Of the 3,000 students in McDonald’s year at Cambridge, 11 were Black. I remember wondering what to wear to college bops; McDonald remembers navigating “Colonials and Natives” night. I remember grappling with Kant. I don’t remember how it felt to learn he believed Black people were “lower in their mental capacities than all other races”. I remember some sociology of religion: I didn’t notice that the only Black philosophy I encountered was communicated by white anthropologists.