What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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We all need racism to end, we are not doing people of color a favor. Victimizing them is really dehumanizing, and incredibly damaging. "We need policies, programs, and incentives.". These are the changes we need. Right now, the focus is on microagressions, that, yes, need to be eliminated as well, but the problem is bigger than that. Our online conversations today are being informed by this neoliberal, deeply competitive and individualistic energy. This is amplified by ‘ platform capitalism’ [the digital economic ecosystems that make money by enabling third parties to profit] through which people build their brands and activist identities. We live in a different historical moment and we should be alert to those tensions, yet we don’t seem to be.” In the book, you describe social media as a “poison chalice” and a space that “gamifies division”. What do you see as the problems with nominally “progressive” online discourses about race?

I recently read 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘦𝘹𝘵 by @emmadabiri and felt inspired to share my main takeaways from this insightful, radical essay. Bottom line at the beginning because I'm going to be rambling a lot: Don’t make whiteness the protagonist of your speech! Don’t be patronizing! Don’t just engage in social media activism! Read, read, read, and dance! The current moment is very historical but where’s the programme, the consistent set of demands characterising and unifying this current moment? We seem to have replaced doing anything with saying something, in a space where the word ‘conversation’ has achieved an obscenely inflated importance as a substitute for action. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of modern, liberal identity politics and online activism that digs up a lot of points I agree with. But it’s often co-opted to delegitimise the violence and discrimination people of colour (and minority and indigenous people in general) face, and how they can be cut off from resources and communities of care, whilst taking and truncating the most ‘cringe’ parts of ‘identity politics’ into the totality of people’s goals for change. Appropriating MLK Jr’s vision of colour-blindness whilst downplaying the scale of racism and exculpating external institutions and forces (whether it’s a carceral system or every day racism) of blame and responsibility. Criticising identity politics has also become a bit of an infantile, bad faith industry of its own. I think this book was able to challenge and hold both accountable, which we need more of. One of my hopes with the book is, I want people to join the dots and see connections between things that they might not have seen previously. I want different people experiencing different forms of oppression connecting. All these people joining those dots together and forming a coalition instead of being pitted against one another. That's what excites me and what my work is trying to do.”

Emma Dabiri: And vast swathes of people – I might even go so far to dare say the majority of people, perhaps – are not on board. This is clearly in the mold of 2020’s antiracist books, but Dabiri wouldn’t thank you for considering her under the same umbrella. She doesn’t like the concept of allyship because it reinforces unhelpful roles: people of colour as victims and white people as the ones with power who can come and save the day. Here, Emma Dabiri and Hazel Chu discuss why now is the time to move from allyship – supporting the cause of marginalised groups to which you do not belong – to coalition: working together to achieve a common goal If we're talking about it being opportunities and resources, then that's something that can't occur on an individual level, it has to be created through the cultivation of more equal societies. And that requires this analysis of class and capitalism that no one's engaging with.” What makes you hopeful that allyship will grow into a coalition of change? The book in question is, of course, What White People Can Do Next, which has become a smash hit since it first launched in April. After a year fraught with the reality of racism, it had felt to me like despite the abundant “discourse” about racism, there was still very little to actually be hopeful about in terms of real change. Dabiri’s book provides a tonic: a palette cleanser to the neo-liberal approach of dismantling racism we’ve grown accustomed to.

Emma Dabiri: I certainly feel like it's a trend as well, because if it wasn't a trend, there would be more enduring [change]. So much of the ways things are being framed now is stuff that just isn't sustainable, and is not going to bring about lasting change. It's all quite performative. It's all quite surface level. I don't want it to be a squandered opportunity, because the thing is, I've never experienced such a willingness for people to engage with these issues and have these conversations. Whilst capitalism as an economic system thrives on the exploitation of one group of people for the material gain of another – a definition that once lent itself entirely to racism – racism is now the bitter ex-wife that is separate to capitalism, but is still healing from the trauma of being wed. This was an intelligent, thought-provoking and educating essay. It looks at what white people need to actually do to create change in relation to racial justice. Vital and empowering What White People Can Do Nextteaches each of us how to be agents of change in the fight against racism and the establishment of a more just and equitable world. In this affecting and inspiring collection of essays, Emma Dabiri draws on both academic discipline and lived experience to probe the ways many of us are complacent and complicit—and can therefore combat—white supremacy. She outlines the actions we must take, including:Emma Dabiri: Absolutely, that's so brilliant to hear. That's exactly what's needed. That's how change happens.

Das Buch ist so wichtig. Und wirklich gut zu lesen, es ist verständlich und es gibt einen mit Zitaten aus anderen Werken, mit Fußnoten, einfach die Möglichkeit noch tiefer in das Thema und die verschiedenen Sichtweisen einzutauchen, so viele Quellen, die man auch noch lesen kann. He was assassinated shortly after that, so the rainbow coalition never came to fruition. Same with Martin Luther King. He was building the poor people’s campaign. He was advocating for universal basic income for all working and poor Americans across the racial divide. Again, that never came to fruition because he was assassinated within a year. Another big problem is the mixed messages. On the one hand, ‘silence is violence’, but then on the other hand, it’s ‘you can never understand this, so you shouldn't be in this conversation’. In the past, there wasn’t this demanding of obsequious language from people. No matter what you do, it's not the right thing. I despair at the demands of allyship that exists today, like the online pile ons. It often never gets past this very gladiatorial accusatory space online. The real work of coalition building never happens, because it's just grounded in this toxic language and the bigger picture is obscured. It doesn't feel very strategic, it feels more like interpersonal grievances being expressed and settled." Do you see the rise of nationalism a threat to coalition and dismantling racism? Frankly, there’s a huge gap in terms of what comes next. While we need to identify what to do, it’s important not to fixate on an endpoint or a final destination; such thinking is part of the problem. Rather we have to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions. " Emma Dabiri: Whiteness is a colonial construct. It's invented by the English in the colonial Caribbean and the English Americas. One of the questions that I pose in the book is: who were white people before they were racialised as white? People who are now racialised as white have quite a short history of being racialised as white. Who were Irish people before they were racialised as white? What have Irish people lost through being racialised as white?

TIME magazine described Dabiri's 2021 book " What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition as It's necessary to realize that whether or not you are on the "right" side of history, most of us have been guilty of painting a broad brush over any one group of people with expectations of how they should behave or what they would think. Much like people of color differ in their thinking, so do white people in their responses to each other. Understanding this idea and stepping outside of our echo chamber is crucial to bridging the gap between progressive peoples and harmful political movements like #AllLivesMatter or #NotAllMen. We Haven't Been Taught to Work Together, but Now Is the Time to Learn This is jumping on the bandwagon behind DeAngelo and Kendhi and the other con artists praying on people's good intentions, leveraging tragedies and historical unfairness [too the tune of original sin, martyrdom, self-flagellation, repentance confession, hail maries, and all the trappings of a new inquisitory religion]. It seems to be so easy to complain about “the system” and its “permanent or structural” problems while profiting from those systems. I doubt these authors have forsaken their phones, laptops, cars, clothes, etc. All proceeds from these books should HAVE to be donated to other non-published authors. After all, that’s how collective works right? the few work for the many? Equal in everything (mostly poverty but whatever right?) The nature of social media is such that the performance of saying something often trumps doing anything, the tendency to police language, to shame and to say the right thing, often outweighs more substantive efforts. " Emma Dabiri FRSL (born 25 March 1979) is an Irish author, academic, and broadcaster. Her debut book, Don't Touch My Hair, was published in 2019. [3] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. [4] Biography [ edit ]