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Recommended read for Black History Month!

If you are involved in organizing or theorizing on progressive avenues through society, particularly regarding racism and economic inequality, Emma Dabiri has a condensed course you need to check out. Despite the title, What White People Can Do Next is a rallying cry to decenter whiteness and disconnect it from its economic implications in an attempt for a more efficient and inclusive movement towards social and economic equity, environmentally sustainable society, and a more just socioeconomic system. While Dabiri doesn’t deny it is an arduous process, she outlines a course of action to combat white supremacy and inequalities that is highly based in the theories of James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis among others, that centers on coalition building and economic class solidarity. ��I just need you to recognize this shit is killing you, too,�� she writes in a bold cry for unity across racial lines she details as socially constructed hierarchies of power. Fresh, sharp and very forward thinking, Emma Dabiri untangles many aspects of antiracist theory to reexamine and reapply racial politics and anti-capitalist theory in a very well argued pathway towards tangible change.

��What interests me is thinking about the ways in which a vast array of oppressions or forms of disadvantage might have a common origin.��

There are endless reasons to love your public library. I’m lucky to be able to be a part of one, which also means I’m lucky to know people who dedicate themselves to informational freedom and the betterment of their community. These truly are the people to learn from, which is how I had this book recommended from a friend with an incredible ability of societal analysis and always has helpful insights (and our discussion of the book really helped me shape my understanding of it, so my presentation of it here is the result of our collective conversations). We both sit on the library inclusivity committee so we get to devote a lot of energy to these topics, which I love. Anyways, this book was one of the most engaging lessons in social theory that scratched many cerebral itches but also felt highly applicable to everyday life. This is one of the best aspects of Dabiri’s ideas because they can be applied to anyone in any aspect of their lives as a way to more clearly identify and subvert oppressive social constructs. If anything, this is one of the most productive angles of activism that manage to reach across the aisle without feeling like you are compromising your beliefs. Dabiri’s book is a punch up at white supremacy and is a ��call to abolish a concept, an idea, an ideology, ne that was unambiguously created to divide people, a tool with which to manipulate the exploited to keep them from acting in their own long-term interests.��

But where to start? ��Instead of organizing to create substantive change, we are squabbling with each other over words,�� Dabiri writes. You may have seen this, as it seems much of our antiracist or racially aware literature is centered on testimonies and analytics over and over to once again prove that racism exists, is systemic and is emotionally damaging. The opposition stalemates much progress by refusal to admit or accept this is true, causing us to continuously try new angle and analyse society more efficiently. We tend to stay stuck reassessing terms and finding more marketable representation, but, as Dabiri points out Black people can be represented while still doing poorly (the publishing industry, for example, has slightly increased employee inclusivity but the growth was almost entirely and not administrative, decision making positions with financial security.) While we seem to have a general idea of what we don’t want and want to fight against, ��we find it much harder to articulate what we do want.�� This book is about finding what we want and moving forward with it because ��until we can come up with a convincing counternarrative we are unlikely to achieve the antiracist world we claim to desire.��

While Dabiri’s book could very well function as an entry point into antiracist and abolitionist thought, it does help to come with a bit of background reading (So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo tends to be my favorite and most encompassing book to recommend when at my bookstore or library jobs). In what feels akin to the idea of writing rules where you need to learn and understand them in order to progressively break them, Dabiri critiques and reassesses the recent increased output of antiracist literature in ways that speaks to opposition points by finding common ground but then showing them a more productive way to approach their criticisms. Allyship or activism centered on righting wrongs or undoing guilt, she argues, is counterproductive and if the goal is removal of guilt ��the action runs the risk of being useless, if not detrimental,�� as goes many of the criticisms of using White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism in organizational learning about racism due to its centering of white feelings. ��My fear is that much of the antiracist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness,�� she writes, and opens the book with a discussion on how concepts of allyship tend to inherently violate this as well.

��With its reliance on information rather than knowledge, its fetishizing of privilege without any clear means of transfereal, as well as the ways in which it actively reinforces whiteness, allyship is not only not up to the task, it is in many ways counterproductive.��

A major reason, she argues, is that ��a commitment to allyship with black people doesn’t automatically mean you don’t think black people are somehow inferior: it means you don’t think they should be treated discriminatorily as a result.�� She talks about how so much of antiracist literature seems to be offputting for white people because they see it as having to give something up, and she argues we should work on messaging that draws them in on class lines. Because, as she will unpack, whiteness is ��is an erasure, a generic term that collapses crucial distinctions in order to consolidate capital,�� and even those who identify as white are often othered and ousted from the elite circle that uses whiteness, power, and economic mobility to keep poor whites down as collateral damage in their system to oppress minoritized groups.

��[T]he sense of superiority encoded into whiteness remains a very effective ruse to distract “white people�� from the oppression many of them experience keenly; the pressure of financial precariousness, the unaffordability of a home, the erosion of healthcare and education, or any of the other countless deprivations endured while trying to “make a living�� in a world that has become increasingly unlivable.��

Dabiri argues that if people can realize they too are being destroyed in their complicity with this system, we can chart a more unified course forward that addresses systemic issues of capitalism in order to achieve greater liberty and standards of living for all.

On this note, I’m curious of the discourse of this book with other women activists of color. Dabiri calls for coalition building—highly influenced by centered around a socialist movement that united many groups—that has meet with scrutiny and arguments in other books that white groups tend to co-opt the movement and push out their Black partners. Ijeoma Oluo, for instance, has a chapter in her book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America that criticizes Senator Bernie Sander’s (as she does in ) for what she says is inflating class struggle over racial struggle and details how this is a frequent setback when trying to coalition build with white socialists. Dabiri herself argues the two are inextricably linked and need to be addressed as so, though I’m interested in reading and thinking more on how to productively coalition build with these potential issues in mind (as well as issues of patriarchy and women or quer activists being sidelined and silenced by cishet men, as Audre Lorde wrote about). ��Of course,�� Dabiri writes, ��it is vital to remember while coalition building that we cannot subsume everything under one single structure, but that is exactly why we need coalitions of shared interests…far more persuasive to be presented with a clear vision of the type of society we want to create because we all stand to benefit from it.�� However, she does caution that ��not everyone “calling out�� the system wants to create a more just one. There are plenty who merely seek access to the levers of power for themselves.��

��Stripping humans of meaning in their lives, beyond their racial identity, creates a fertile breeding ground for violent forms of nationalism--state,racial, and ethnic--to grow.��

In order to understand how to subvert white supremacy, Dabiri steps into history to show how racial categories became an economic construct to divide and oppress. This is an important aspect as it identifies all the ways whiteness has become a dominant feature upheld by laws such as Jim Crow and . This also nudges towards ideas of Critical Race Theory and how when there is legal progress ��the breakthrough is quietly cut back by narrow interpretation, administrative obstruction, or delay�� as writes in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. The codification of racial categories into law, she argues, began in 1661:

��Before 1661, the idea of “white people�� as a foundational “truth�� did not exist. The , 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.��

Her brief yet effective historical context, that even addresses how our concepts of self-improvement sprouted from the linguistic soils of capitalism, leads to her conclusion that ��racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy,�� and in order to destroy white supremacy we must delegitimize it by not centering it as a binary in antiracist work as well as simultaneously addressing capitalism.

��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.��
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If most of our language and scope of addressing racism is couched in the rhetoric and worldviews of colonialism and capitalism, how can we properly undo it from within? Or, as poet Audre Lorde says, ��The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.�� Dabiri calls for thinking and acting from outside these limitations and that activism must also be committed to decolonizing our ideas of activism. While she understands the purpose of capitalizing the B in Black, she also argues that it is legitimizing racial boundaries that remove nuance in a way similar to how whiteness flattened cultures into one category for economic power at the expense of individuality and heritage (Dabiri does point out how antiracist ideas vary country to country due to the racial politics and landscapes of each and admits in America there is less emphasis on individual culture already due to melting pot ideas which makes the 'melting' into a general category of “whiteness�� even easier, making 'whiteness' what people mean when they say a melting pot culture in order to exclude anyone who doesn't internalize these standards). This is also based, she says, in how immigrants such as the Irish or Polish were considered non-white until they gained enough collective capital to be “accepted�� into whiteness in the US. It's like finding a cheat code in a video game so everyone you decide should have an advantage can all play as the same more powerful character while everyone else has to use ones that don't have the same advantages. Dabiri uses bell hooks’s argument against the capitalization of her own name as an example as well because hooks ��uncapitalized her name to focus on her ideas rather than her personality�� and Dabiri's argument is we should focus on individual culture's instead of an umbrella term that, while it may offer collective unity, is based in the same theories that oppress them in the consolidation of whiteness.

Another major aspect of this book is the criticisms of social media and the commercialization of activism. She talks about how so much of social media is just posturing and sharing information but rarely knowledge, while often being more concerned with who is more marketable than who is actually making progress.

��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.��

She also argues that simply “calling people out�� is not as helpful as taking action in movements against those actions, but adds ��do both if you must, but certainly don’t let the latter distract you from the former.�� Much is to be said about the ways we play into capitalism algorithms that market our ideas for profit by participating in them, and she expands on this in interesting ways.

��What if we reject all of the options on offer and create our own terms of engagement.��

Emma Dabiri’s What White People Can Do Next is a refreshing step forward that is able to eloquently and accessibly address complex systemic issues in order to affect change in the world. While fairly short and quickly readable, this is an essential resource that covers a vast range of topics and shows how they are all interlaced. The rejection of Eurocentric thought and colonialist frameworks (quite well represented in Natasha Brown’s novel Assembly), helpful rebuttals to common criticisms (��Lots of groups have prejudicial attitudes; the damage is done when these are shored up by power��) and the call for coalition building is an empowering and inclusive plea that we should all listen to. This book makes the information understandable and applicable to everyone and is an essential read for those working towards progress.

5/5

��Exploitation and inequality are the operating logic of capitalism.��