What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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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. 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! 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. I think this book was very well written and researched. It made me think about how I can get to the root of the problem to do better and it enforced how mutuality is so important. Mutuality rather than charity that is so often performed. Research your local prosecutors. Prosecutors have a lot of power to give fair sentences or Draconian ones, influence a judge’s decision to set bail or not, etc. In the past election, a many fair-minded prosecutors were elected. We need more.

A game-changing skewering of social-media discourse with a historically grounded analysis of anti-racism, collectivism, neoliberalism, and post-colonialism. Vogue UK 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. In truth, what the year of the pandemic, more so than any other, has taught me is that I have no expectations of any 'racial' group. How could millions of heterogeneous people live up to any one singular expectation of mine?" 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.’

Racialized Thinking and "White Guilt" Are Holding Us Back From Progress

Do deep canvassing about race and racial justice. Many SURJ groups are organizing them, so many people can do it through your local SURJ group. If they’re not already doing it, start it. Join your local Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) group. There is a lot of awesome work going on locally — Get involved in the projects that speak to you.

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.’ Dabiri is a frequent contributor to print and online media, including The Guardian, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Vice, and others. [7] She has also published in academic journals. Dabiri's outspokenness on issues of race and racism has caused her to have to deal with extreme "trollism" and racist abuse online. She says of this that "it's just words" and the racism she grew up with fortified her to deal with it. [8] She is the author of two books: Don't Touch My Hair (2019) and What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition (2021). Dabiri’s manifesto for radical change…marries historical context with contemporary commentary and analysis in a direct, accessible style. Time 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 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.Support that new apartment building proposed to be built in your neighborhood. Don’t participate in “ snob zoning,” which is opposing new builds of apartments because wealthy white folks are afraid the apartment building will “change the character of a community.” For more information on this, see #47.

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 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 Don’t buy from companies that use prison labor. Find a good list here. While Whole Foods is on that list, but pledged to stop using prison labor in 2016, they haven’t made amends for that abuse. You can’t pour gas on a burning building, decide to stop pouring the gas, then walk away like everything is fine. Until Whole Foods pays reparations, they stay on the boycott list. Find and join a local “ white space” to learn more about and talk out the conscious and unconscious biases us white folks have. If there’s not a group in your area, start one. Call or write to your state legislators and governor to support state-wide criminal justice reform including reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing sentences for non-violent drug crimes, passing “safety valve” law to allow judges to depart below a mandatory minimum sentence under certain conditions, creating alternatives to incarceration, and passing “second look” sentencing (for current legislation by state FAMM created this spreadsheet). Study after study shows that racism fuels racial disparities in imprisonment, and about 90% of the US prison population are at the state and local level.A wise former teacher once said, “The question isn’t: Was the act racist or not? The question is: How much racism was in play?” So maybe racism was 3% of the motivation or 30% or 95%. Interrogate the question “How much racism was in play?” as you think about an incident. Share this idea with the people in your life when they ask, “Was that racist?” 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.’ Stand outside of the stores from #17 with a sign that reads “[Company] uses prison labor” even if for 30 mins a few times a month. Not going to lie and say I did more than skim through the book. I stumbled across this in university [the only segment I read through was presented as a paper] hence that was on my reading list. Even my extremely left-leaning liberal professor was less than impressed and ripped the piece to shreds.

This led to poorer white people developing feelings of animosity and resentment towards the British Empire as capitalism byway of colonialism highlighted the class difference between the rich and the poor. 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. " 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.

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And finally, recognise this shit is killing you - ‘whiteness’ as a system is destructive for everyone Emma, explain why you say race is ‘a powerful, seductive and enduring myth created to cause division’ and ‘we’re all the products of centuries of conditioning’? Deftly and wittily deconstructs allyship and white saviour tropes to give an unblinkered takedown of what needs to happen next. Stylist (UK)