What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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Many of the cherished categories of the intersectional mantra—originally starting with race, class, gender, now including sexuality, nation, religion, age, and disability—are the products of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence, operative through a Western/Euro-American formation through which the notion of discrete identity has emerged.’ 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. a b Ganatra, Shilpa (27 April 2019). "Emma Dabiri: 'I wouldn't want my children to experience what I did in Ireland' ". Irish Times . Retrieved 29 April 2019. White people may find the interrogation of their own race an alien concept but the fact that most have lived their whole life without considering racial identity is a unique advantage, allocated solely to the default. Whiteness is the un-othered. It’s important for that to be investigated by everyone. 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!

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.

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: 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?

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. What interests me is thinking about the ways in which a vast array of oppressions or forms of disadvantage might have a common origin.’ I felt it lent an accessibility to the topics that put the reader somewhat at ease and more open to contemplating the questions she is posing. Dabiri urges us to outright refuse the options of social change we have been presented with and begin the discussion on a new way of being. Right now it feels like you have to identify yourself before giving your opinion about something, and according to the way you describe yourself you’ll be judged regardless of the actual value of your words. It’s like people don’t care to listen.

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. 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.