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"we find ourselves at the dawn of a civilization ready to be remade anew."

First of all, if you haven’t read this book, go read it.

Antiracist narratives have gained popularity in the last few years, mostly due to the brutal murder of George Floyd; which led to outpouring displays of solidarity and far more visibility to the Black Lives Matter movement. During these circumstances Emma Dabiri created an online resource called What White People Can Do Next, which this book is an expanded version of. Despite its title, which is meant to be a provocation, the purpose of this book is to stop making whiteness the protagonist when race is being discussed. Dabiri manages to pack really important information in this tiny book in a way that is accessible to everyone. For a really insightful review on this book read ²õ.²õ±è±ð²Ô°ì±ð±¹¾±³¦³óâ€�

I can’t stress enough how much impact this book’s had on me, I’ll definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more on how race has shaped our lives and what to do to change it.

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!

Capitalism controls every aspect of our lives, and as the author points out while providing historical context, the invention of 'race as social construct' came about to "justify the exploitation of one group of people for the material benefit of another". It’s common to see microagressions in the spotlight, but is also necessary to see the bigger picture. Class is often downplayed when discussing race despite being an important factor. White people even though they don’t experience racism, often have diminished life opportunities, which the author claims it serves a possibility to build coalition. Many of the ways of dividing people is by making them fight and making them feel one is a threat to the wellbeing of the other, and unless you’re a wealthy white cisgender heterosexual male (see how many unless) you’re bound to be a part of one or more 'marginalized' group(s), and it should be in your interest to liberate yourself from that. The word privilege is widely used, but the author proposes to use power instead, since most of the people talking about privilege don’t have it, because of their class struggles. The idea is not that privilege doesn’t exist, but if we want people to unite as equals, constantly pointing out a privilege narrative does little good since it continues to perpetrate the idea that we are inherently different.

"Like all human beings, black people are motivated by the whole range of human emotion, and not all of these motivations will be altruistic."

No one is inherently good, or bad, or anything really, people are molded by a lot of different things, and skin color is not one of them. However, we have adopted the image of Black people that has been laid out for centuries, where Black women were made for service, are submissive, selfless, narrow-minded, suited for domestic work only, and Black men are angry, animalistic, hypersexual, violent criminals.

It’s common to hear that someone is 'not being black enough.' All over the media, there are examples of how Black people should act, because being Black comes with these set pre-assumptions that being white does not. It’s natural to hear people commenting on someone, and making emphasis on the fact that the person they’re talking about is Black, as if you’re supposed to know what that means, to understand what is not being said, and when you called them out on it, they get defensive and say that they use the term 'white' when they’re talking about white people, but let’s be honest, they don’t; and what’s worse is they probably don’t realize they’re doing it, because they never interrogate their whiteness.

"Whiteness as a truth and as an unnamed system of knowledge remained unchallenged. White perspectives continued to be seen not as “white perspectives� but as objective truths, while black perspectives continued to be perceived as just that: deviations from the norm. Whiteness was not named and it was certainly not questioned."

One of the most common tropes when discussing racism is the white savior. Stories of people of color that center around the benevolent white person, who is not afraid to face backslash from their conservatives societies because they’re fighting for the 'greater good', might be well intended, but tend to eclipse narratives told by actual people of color, making them passive observers to their own stories.

Little to no mainstream antiracist literature actually questions 'whiteness', it is assessed as an undeniable truth, and all we can do is aim for white people to be more 'considerate'. Wanting to abolish whiteness is not meant to be an attack on white people, we should be wanting to scape that concept that was created to divide us as well. We need to question everything, rather than accepting what has been passed down to us, because it clearly isn’t working. "The White Savior can only exist because of the power imbalance generated by white supremacy, so it’s paradoxical."

Recently online activism has become the mean to do any kind of activism, replacing actually doing something with, well, a performance. The need to follow what’s 'trending' in social media plataforms is somewhat counterproductive, because these hollow, worthless gestures become the standard thing to do, and even if people argue it gives 'visibility', what's the use if no work is actually being done in the real world.

"The internet has often facilitated dissemination of information rather than knowledge." Being fed what to think is easier than actually putting in the work to think for themselves, so people accept whatever comes their way without a doubt, and even if that's not the case, and you want to help or know more about what can be done, it’s easy to fall for fake news and clickbaits.

The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 became huge on social media with a lot of supporting messages to the cause, but the author speaks about how it made many of her pears angry since it felt like a trend. "Isn’t that the substance (or lack thereof) of online activism more generally? As a representational tool, isn’t it by its very nature performative?"

Is necessary to actually do something in real life, social media should be the place where people share what possitive things are being done in order to change the system and be inspired by other people rather than the place to post something to calm their conscience.

"What type of movement encourages you to build others up by diminishing yourself?"

The system we’re currently living in depends on exploitation and inequality, so any cry for unity threatens that, and because of this, the people who benefit from it want to accentuate our differences.
"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.
"Capitalism has colonized the most intimate quarters of human experience." Capitalism evolved into a competitive, highly individualistic system, and that defines the way we interact with each other, the environment and it motivates the way activism is being made. Interpersonal privilege over equality.

So we’re forced to define ourselves, "insert race/gender/sexuality/class/disability." and as a consequence we are divided, and each fighting for their groups rights when, in the end we’re all fighting for the same reason: Collective Liberation.

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.
"we need to move away from thinking about individual “good people� to developing just systems."

The author proposes coalition over allyship as a way to achieve this, defining the latter as an individualistic process that would only separate us more. Instead "coalition is about mutuality. It reframes the task as identifying common ground—while attending to the specificities of racism—that all can strive for and that all will benefit from." It’s solidarity as opposed to charity. She bases this, on coalition building that have work in the past.

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.

"Racism continues to affect people emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of both access to and denial of opportunity. It continues to be responsible for the death and diminished life opportunities of more black people than we will ever be able to name. As the most basic starting point we need to acknowledge that before we can move on. And move on we must, because “whiteness� as a system is destructive, not just of racialized others, but of everything that it envelops; and while we’re busy trying to survive and to overcome racial oppression, we remain distracted from what is possibly the biggest threat we face—the destruction of our very biosphere."