What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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Emma Dabiri: I don't think they automatically do. I feel that they've been conditioned to. That's why race exists. That's why these things exist, because it takes the heat off the real source of the inequality and the deprivation and the pain and the suffering and the oppression that people are actually experiencing… It's a very effective mythology.

Naming whiteness is necessary; it is the ‘invisibility’ of white people, who are presented just as ‘people’, the default norm from which everyone else deviates.” Stop vehemently denying you are racist. What makes you immune to centuries of socialisation? "It's a system we've been born into, of which you have no control. What you DO have control over is what you do next." Not good enough. What we need is coalition. A collective commitment to empathy and change based on the foundations of both self-examination and grounded critical thought, aimed at the mechanisms of exploitation, which is capitalism.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.’ Creamer, Ella (12 July 2023). "Royal Society of Literature aims to broaden representation as it announces 62 new fellows". The Guardian.

Hazel Chu: But there are certain things that need discussion. Perfect example: [the publication of] the white paper for Direct Provision. That requires discussion. Instead what happened was rhetoric being pushed on one, then the defence being pushed on the other side. Then what happens is, you don't have a middle conversation. You don't actually look at what needs to be done. I think in society, we're all about compromise on some things. We're all trying to reach some kind of "medium". I get the feeling it's become more and more [about] extremes rather than middle of the road.I would recommend this book as it offers clear points that cause you to question your behaviour and provides you with new ways of thinking without conforming to the terms and advice of online discourse surrounding anti-racism. This rigid concept of race also deliberately prevented coalitions forming between poorer white people, and the enslaved, she continues. “The people who came to be known as white and were also exploited, were taught not to see the humanity in other exploited racialised groups and to see their fate and fortune more in alignment with other white people — even if those white people were also oppressing them. The potential for class solidarity become completely eclipsed by the imposition of racialised identities. … Capitalism was very present in all of those decisions.”

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. Before 1661, the idea of “white people” as a foundational “truth” did not exist. The Barbados Slave Code, officially known as An Act for the Better Ordaining and Governing of Negroes, announced the beginning of a legal system in which race and racism were codified into law, and is where our understanding of “White” and “Negro”—as separate and distinct “races”—finds its earliest expression.’ we should try to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions" as opposed to the rigid identity norms that have been imposed by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Emma Dabiri: I completely agree. I think there are people that could be otherwise persuaded, probably quite easily, that end up being swept up in a far more extreme position than they would be otherwise if there was more scope and capacity for conversation, rather than this –exactly as you describe – you're "for" or you're "against". This is in relation to everything at the moment, far beyond race. So I'd be completely inclined to agree. The internet has often facilitated dissemination of information rather than knowledge; as such, even in cases that aren't quite 'fake news,' online commentary skews to the reductive. It tells you what to think, rather than teaching you how to think!" Any Racialized Group of People Have Very Different Responses to Each Other

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Dabiri lives in London, where she is completing her PhD in visual sociology at Goldsmiths while also teaching at SOAS and continuing her broadcast work. [10] [11] She is married and has two children. [5] Both grew up in Dublin in the 1990s, a decade up until which emigration still exceeded immigration, and Ireland remained a largely white, culturally homogenous society. Dabiri’s Irish childhood is rooted in Rialto, and Chu grew up in Firhouse and Celbridge.

This has captured the problems I have with allyship and anti-racist discourse and how patronising it can be, and how it’s devoid of the collation building thinkers like Fred Hampton and Audre Lorde mobilised behind some 50 years ago.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. Yes, predating t’internet, when 'I’ll fax you' was grunted down a phone with a cord attached to it; when Glastonbury was still accessible by casually going under or over a flimsy fence; when gatecrashing a Foo Fightersaftershow party was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy and tapping Dave Grohl on the shoulder was... oh sorry I like to ramble.