The Blindboy Podcast - The return of Emma Dabiri

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

I chat with academic and author Emma Dabiri about her new book "What white people can do next" From allyship to coalition. We speak about Racism, Anti Colonialism and Anti Capitalism Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, you juvenile hoolahans. It is the first day of April and I gotta say yesterday, I really really enjoyed yesterday because the clocks went back at the weekend so the evening was longer and it properly felt like spring. There was warmth in the sun, Genuine warmth in the sun. T-shirt warmth. And there was the promise of that smell of new growth. It's probably my favourite smell of the year.

Now it hasn't kicked in yet. It tends to kick in end of April. The general smell in the air when every single plant is just putting out those growth hormones and are sprouting new leaves it's it's a floral smell

but it's not flowers it's like flowers cousin so I got a little bang of that and I had the little bang of that and I had the warmth of the sun and the length of the evening and it was like a fucking tonic

it really gave me a lovely sense of optimism and an appreciation for the present moment and I'm just so fucking grateful I'm really grateful for nature, to just give me a little hug,

and a pat on the back, because I needed it, because, winter, winter's tough going sometimes, there's beauty in winter, there is beauty in winter, but,

sometimes it's tough going, and I needed something, and the sun gave me a loving headbutt so for this week's podcast I have a chat I'm going to give you a little chat that I did very recently with someone who was previously a guest on this podcast Emma Dabbery who she's an academic and an author and I had her on the podcast back in 2018 or 2019 to speak about the she so I had her on the podcast about two years ago and she'd just written a book called Don't Touch My Hair which was like a history and discourse on African hair because Emma is she teaches African studies that's her area of expertise and since

that time like the book became massive it was released in America under the name of Twisted and Emma's become huge Emma's become really really well known we worked together on my BBC series Blind Boy Undestroyed in particular on the episode about modern slavery. And Emma has a brand new book. Which is actually out today. Which is fantastic. Because I got an early read of it. And the book is called.

What White People Can Do Next. From Allyship to Coalition. Now when I announced the title of this book on my Instagram. When I said I was going to be chatting to Emma. I got quite a few annoyed direct messages from people. Who were kind of pissed off at the title of the book on my Instagram when I said I was going to be chatting to Emma I got quite a few annoyed direct messages from people who were kind of pissed off at the title of the book going what do you mean what is this some type of instruction manual for white people why are you promoting this and as Emma explains in the chat that we're going to have like the title of the book is it's deliberately provocative it's a deliberately provocative title the book itself

is fucking fantastic it's a wonderfully concise deconstruction of race of race and racism it's also an anti-colonial book it's an anti-capitalist book you'll know that a frequent theme on this podcast is i'd like to look at at Irish history from a decolonial perspective because I'm fascinated with Irish history and why do I do this? because it's helpful to me and I'd like to think it's helpful to other people that if we can understand our history in Ireland

from a decolonial perspective that this allows us to have a sense of empathy solidarity and coalition with anyone who is suffering under similar power structures today so that we can actually help to fight it rather than perpetuate it and a central tenet of the book is emma is challenging the the inherent power dynamics in the concept of allyship arguing instead for coalition when it comes to how people can confront the structures of racism I was actually taken aback when I was reading the forward of the book where emma describes why she wrote this book because she references the her appearance on my podcast which we we did in vicar street like two years ago she said recently i recall having a public discussion in which we touched on afrofuturism philosophy ancestral veneration

and its relationship to african of time, as well as the trajectory between the blues and trap music. I enjoyed it immensely and found the interviewer's questions refreshing. But apparently not everyone felt the same way. At the end of the event I was approached by a woman who worked in development somewhere in Africa. She said she enjoyed the conversation but felt it was a wasted opportunity she wanted us to discuss allyship my heart sank so the book it's

it's anti-capitalism it explains what racism is and it's like a road map to racial justice where it's transforming demonstrations of support to racial justice where it's transforming demonstrations of support

into real and meaningful change and I do strongly recommend you go and get it because it's a fantastic book and Emma is a brilliant writer and she's an expert in her field she's an expert in her field and not only

when you read Emma's book it's the type of book that you then want to read 10 other books from the people she quotes in it if you get me before i get into the chat i want to get the ocarina pause out of the way early so that i'm not interrupting our conversation so here's the ocarina. That's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil.

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leave a review, you know the crack so the book is called What White People Can Do Next it's out today it's written by emma dabbery and here's the conversation we had and then i'm gonna i want to take it just by chapter by chapter if i can yeah all right regarding the book so the book is called what white people can do next and like what why did you why did you write this book what's the why did you write this book a combination of things um but probably primarily like frustration and a fear not fear but frustration and a concern

that we're being presented with a historic opportunity for change that we're squandering because the right questions aren't being asked and the right frameworks frameworks aren't being used did you feel kind of reluctant to write a book like this because your last book you're you're an academic in african history and you're an academic in art and like you weren't necessarily speaking about race you were just speaking about or writing about the history of africa and african cultures and african hair and now is it fair to say this is a political book um yeah i think i think that would be a fair i think that would be a fair assessment I mean like my yeah absolutely I um more what I teach is um you know history and kind of cultural

production across various different mediums um my PhD is actually in sociology and I look at the construction of racial categories but with my kind of output in terms of like public facing work um I've been far less interested in conversations about racism per se and I've been far more inspired by you know African knowledge systems and uh black black cultures and their diversity um different forms of cultural production but I do have um like a strong I have like kind of years of scholarship looking at how racial categories, how and why they came into being, what the effects of that and what the effects of that are. climate I felt compelled to actually speak more directly about racism because it just seemed to me like a lot of the discourse seemed untethered from theory around race which could really which could really help I think form the form the direction that we go in. Like a lot of it just feels untethered from a lot of the current discourse

and anti-racism seems untethered from theory and ahistoric. And in many ways, I see a lot of inaccuracies and I see a lot of reinvestment, actually, in the in the categories of race that we should understand as really fictitious and that we should be trying our best to kind of dissolve rather than reinvest it. Could you give us a little history of the construct of racism? Because I've seen you speak about it before online and you place it at the foot of the British Empire, of British colonialism. Yeah. Could you give us a little, just speak about that? Yeah, absolutely. So the racial categories, black and white, that we understand ourselves and each other through today are a colonial construct. They're an English innovation. I have to point out that it's the English in the colonial Caribbean

and what will become the United States rather than the English in England. And the invention of the white race and the quote-unquote Negro race, as it's referred to at the time, is a reaction, is a response to this environment, is a response to what's happening in Barbados. So the English people have gone to Barbados, So the English people have gone to Barbados. They have stolen the land from the indigenous people. They have started these kind of huge plantations and farms and brought over initially, actually, lots of indentured Irish and lots of people who have been taken there from Ireland from Cromwell's activities

in Ireland at the time and these are Irish people who are they're not slaves they're not enslaved but they are indentured laborers who were there in pretty grueling and shitty circumstances quite rapidly the English landlords and some Scottish landlords as well um the two main the two main groups there realize they need like a lot more labor and they start bringing in like loads of Africans from from West Africa it's a it's a history that I feel like uniquely kind of connected to being both Irish and Nigerian I'm like wow I'm on both sides um both sides of my heritage are the two groups of people that were that were used or that race was invented because of the way they were being used so basically what you have is Irish indentured laborers and enslaved

Africans and I specifically don't say like white and black because that hasn't that concept isn't hasn't been popularized yet. But you have indentured Irish and enslaved Africans working on these plantations. And then you have them like basically coming together. And there's a series of uprisings in Barbados where they come together and attack their landlords. And this is deeply threatening to the power system, because there's more of them than there is of this like small, small elite. And it's as a reaction to those uprisings that you see the first introduction of the idea of white people and black people as racialized categories. And you see it codified into law in these slave codes that bring in like really draconian laws against how black people will be treated and handled. There's two things going on. One of these is one of the motivations behind this new concept of white people and black people is to justify the enslavement of Africans that, you know, these economies, these individuals and ultimately these economies and the Western world will become

incredibly dependent on because this system of capitalist slave exploited labor, chattel slave labor is generating a hell of a lot of money. So in order to justify the exploitation of Africans, this notion of race is introduced saying, you know, these people aren't fully human. And it's when we start to see the introduction of or the association of blackness with lots of negative characteristics and this concept of inferiority. And by the the same token we see whiteness with this inherent kind of belief in the superiority so these two groups one is superior and one is inferior according to this new logic so it does that but another thing it does is that the indentured laborers start to be taught that their interests lie,

their allegiances are more with people that share the same newly racialised identity as them, rather than the people who share far more of a class identity with them and the circumstances of whose lives are actually more similar to. and the circumstances of whose lives are actually more similar to. So it shuts down these nascent solidarities that are emerging between European indentured labor and enslaved Africans. Then from Barbados, we see it in Jamaica. We see it in Jamaica. And then the next time we see, excuse me, where we see it in what will become North America is in colonial Virginia, where again, there is an uprising and what was called a union of commoners where indentured English and enslaved Africans came together for a rebellion called Bacon's Revolt. And again, that was deeply threatening to the power system. And after that, the response was to start to introduce this concept of black and white and to codify it into law so whiteness was dangled as a little a carrot in front of the indentured servants to say that you should not be joining with these people because this system says that you are better

it says you're better and then it gave them it gave those indentured servants um it put them in a hierarchy where they were no longer um where they were very very distinct from enslaved african and they had the kind of power of life and death over the kind of newly minted black race you had a situation whereby um like black people people of african descent couldn't give evidence against white people so even a very materially poor white person could essentially do anything they wanted to a black person, and that person would never be able to give evidence against them. They also kind of degraded black people to the extent where in,

and gave, yes, relative advantages to the indentured laborers, and they could now, they could also see their rights enshrined in contract law, whereas black people became this category where there were no rights. So that's one of the big differences. There's no rights. You have no human rights. You have no recourse to justice. You are just an object. whereas the indentured laborers while not while having kind of poor material conditions in contrast to the rich had the opportunity to join that class at some point if they could kind of acquire enough wealth and you do see instances of people of of white people who start off um you know poor and kind of are able to able to become quite

wealthy in this new uh yes in this new context because uh that's something like you know we have that phrase in ireland taking the soup i don't know it you've never heard of taking the soup or if i have i've forgotten taking the soup is uh it's a bit of a silly silly enough term but it's what we say when so apparently during the irish famine when irish catholics were starving and couldn't have food protestant organizations would offer soup to catholics if they were willing to convert to protestantism so it means like a traitor to your people but what I prefer to say is that the Irish diaspora

wherever the Irish went around the world whether it be the Caribbean or up as far as New York we essentially took the soup by committing acts of violence towards Africans or African Americans so that we could climb

the ladder of whiteness yeah or anywhere like that that's such a great analogy actually yeah that that makes a lot of sense i'd like to hear i'd like to hear irish people speak about it more because when i speak about race on my podcast and I'm addressing a white Irish audience, I always try and bring it back to colonialism. I always try and say, we were colonized. We don't have an excuse. We're able to,

and it didn't happen to me, but we're able to look at our own history and see things like the penal laws, things like the famine and go, well, places like nigeria were colonized too why can't we look at our own history and then have a common ground or a shared empathy with people from those countries rather than identifying with the system of oppression yeah so i would say it's whiteness that does that that's the thing that so the the history of colonization um between

the irish and you know africa asia the americas there are so many like there are so many parallels but the one thing that is distinctly different is the irish come to be racialized as white in a way that none of those other groups do. The process in the United States is slightly different in terms of when the Irish come, when the, you know, kind of millions of Irish come from the 1840s, like fleeing the famine. They're not immediately, as I'm sure I've heard you talking about before, they're not immediately identified as white, you know,

but they distinguish themselves from the kind of, they distinguish themselves often through quite an investment in white in white supremacy you know and to really clearly delineate themselves from black americans who you might think there would be a natural sympathy uh towards or a sense of kind of parallel struggle in what the Irish have experienced as a result of British colonialism and as a result of what the black people have experienced as a result of enslavement and something I write about in the book as well which I find so interesting is you know when Daniel O'Connell was going to America and trying to drum up support O'Connell was going to America and trying to drum up support for the,

because he was, you know, like a, I guess the kind of, he could see those type of coalitions that I'm talking about in the book that are so important and the kind of shared struggle that exists between so many oppressed people. And so while he was like, you know, kind of a great Irish freedom fighter, he was also like a committed uh slavery abolitionist yeah and when he went to the united states to when he went to america to try and drum up support for abolition amongst irish americans he was kind of met with contempt actually and this was these were irish americans who saw the who saw uh emancipation for black people as a direct threat to um to labor you know they were like well these people will be in

competition with us for jobs it's better that they're that they're enslaved so there was actually like a very pro-slavery irish lobby and then the other thing that was going on was at this time in the States, immigrants were being looked at, you know, with suspicion. And there was this idea that they were bringing the politics from their own countries into America, that they had anti-American values. So for the Irish Americans, rather than align themselves with a cause that might be seen as the result of their anger towards kind of colonialism and the English, they were like, no, we'll distance ourselves from that and kind of invest in this american institution of of slavery

so where there should have been solidarity there was quite quite the opposite and you can see too there as well this they kind of stop identifying as irish because in the 1700s in new york the first ever street gang in new york were called the Kerryonians and they were exclusively made up of people from Kerry in New York and all they wanted to do was rob English people and that was it which means that even then they still considered themselves Irish

but then something happens where they start to identify as American, white or Irish American and that's when you see all that shit happen like the New York draft riots of the 1860s where the Irish population of New York committed unbelievable acts of violence towards their African-American neighbors and there's a lovely quote in your book about capitalism where you say capitalism like whiteness is a pervasive organism it infiltrates the

innermost aspects of human experience and transforms our understanding of the world our relationships with ourselves and with others you have a nice old lash off capitalism in the book which is fantastic do you want to talk a bit about that yes so one of my frustrations with the current anti-racist movement is the kind of absence of discussion or analysis of both class and capitalism in which have been replaced instead with this kind of almost fetishization of interpersonal privilege um and you know sometimes people are like oh well what are we dealing with are we dealing with racism or capitalism? Like just kind of give us, we're just focusing on one. And that is exactly the kind of atomized approach to issues that leads us to not connecting the dots that need to be connected and creates inadequate responses to the, to the oppressions that we desire, that we claim to desire to, to desire to want to overcome. In this period where we see the kind of invention of the white race and the black race,

it's no coincidence that this is happening, as I was explaining, part of that origin story is to justify the exploitation of labor for this new system of capitalism, you know, that the kind of plantation economies are completely dependent on so capitalism is you know like a system a system of production in which inequality inequality you know needs to exist within it like capitalism requires inequality to exist so talking about kind of like achieving equality within a system that requires inequality to exist just about kind of like achieving equality within a system that requires inequality to exist just seems kind of like like wasted energy uh to me so i think that needs that needs to be identified but also when i say it's colonized like i can't remember what it is that i say but

it's colonized are uh you said capitalism like whiteness is a pervasive organism that infiltrates the innermost aspects of human experience yeah so it's not only that um it's not only that the capitalism and race and by extension racism and race is invented to create racism. So that's, I think that's really key to remember. Race and capitalism, you know, are siblings, and we see their kind of genesis and origin at the same historical period with the same kind of intention and purpose. So there's that. But then there's also the fact that now the form of neoliberalism, which is, you know, like a permutation of capitalism that we've been bequeathed from the kind of late 1970s, is one that, you know, has completely transformed our ideas around collectivism. And as an ideology, it it's one that is like it's one that is

completely reliant on individualism and we we it fosters a sense of competition between people whereby in order to survive thrive like i can't say thrive in order to survive and be successful under the terms of that system we have to have this like inherent uh competition and sense of individualism and i can see that individualism at the expense of a collectivism as really animating this current form of activism. So even the form of activism that is kind of predominant in this moment is one that is deeply neoliberal and deeply individualist. is deeply neoliberal and deeply individualist so even our responses to these forms of oppression actually kind of reproduce the norms of of that oppression so i'm just like oh man we're fucked you know another thing emma right and do you ever get suspicious i don't know it's suspicious the word but one thing that makes me feel uneasy is so much discourse happens in particular on a place

like twitter and you're not a fan of twitter neither am i i can see your head is fucking melted on twitter yeah yeah and but what makes me upset is for some reason twitter has become a place where very very important conversations are happening not just about race but about many things very important conversations are happening consistently but twitter i view it it's a video game where people are given points for kind of having the best complaint or for having the most the response that elicits the strongest emotions and reactions so now and twitter is also one of the richest companies in the world and the resources that it extracts are the data and data is just a word for our behavior so now this giant corporation has decided here is a playground where everyone can have their discussions but we set the rules

and the rules are you must have these discussions in a limited amount of words that lack nuance. And the fucking comments that get rewarded are the ones not that make the most sense or that elicit compassion, but the ones that make people most angry or most afraid. And that to me, the more and more I look at Twitter, the more I go, something's not right i don't think social media is the correct forum for a lot of these discussions that we're having because all it seems to do is make people really angry and when we get really angry companies like twitter make huge amounts of money i mean you just hit the nail on the head like i i i completely agree and the the the nature of the platform is to gamify division and to reward outrage and to reward the reduction of complexity.

And to reward performatism yeah absolutely absolutely and i think it's like really fucking sinister high arousal emotions is what they actually call it in twitter at the highest levels they're looking for yeah so they have designed this to reward high arousal emotions so high arousal emotions tend to be around where one group feels subjugated and another group disagrees well that's that's that landscape you know that's exactly what it is and so i you see people with the the shallowest and most divisive call it the shallow politics and divisive tendencies really um accumulating likes retweets followers and therefore power and influence clout clout exactly and clout rage is is is the thing um where there are people who have you know know, far more considered, complex,

not even complex, you know, because I actually just considered and nuanced explanations of things. But that gets lost, that gets lost in the fray, you know, and drowned out by those reductive reactive forms of outrage and the fact that kind of um you know conversations about um race and racism that this is one of the major arenas where people are getting educated and having these conversations is a fucking disaster actually you know like i think there's a lot of utility in social media in terms of if we saw it as a starting point you know like i've learned so much yeah emma but like

before twitter my understanding of racism was basically uh don't hate people who are a different color and that was it and i knew nothing about microaggressions i knew nothing about systemic racism a lot of things i learned first on twitter i'm a bit fatigued by microaggressions i have to say i'm a bit fatigued by microaggressions yeah what's your opinion on microaggressions okay so while they exist and while there's something that i have come up against you know like pretty consistently although i would not have called them microaggressions yeah um they are symptomatic of far more pervasive uh forces but because they are could you describe a microaggression for someone who doesn't know what it is yeah so a microaggression might be um i mean it's a range of things it's so it might be like an in i don't know like it has different there's a range of things so it might be like an insensitive use of language

but it might also be like an intentionally offensive use of language you know there's actually like kind of a range of what it can be. I guess something like in terms of I've written a lot about, well, I wrote a book about hair and the kind of politics of Afro hair and the kind of entitlement that a lot of white strangers feel towards touching black people in unsolicited fashions and particularly our hair and you know that's one of the things that would be classed as a microaggression um there's there's there's a range of things but i i just find um the more superficial manifestations of these systems take up all the bandwidth so we kind of get caught we kind of get caught in a bit of a tit for a tat back and no one chats about structure exactly people say structure but then they don't talk about it then they talk about the interpersonal and structure is sidelined why we don't talk about classic capitalism because another lovely quote here emma that you have is is and this one really stuck out to me when you were talking about

performativism and you said long gone it seems are the organized strikes of the black liberation movement of the 60s as lips its notes there's little evidence of the parallel institutions that were built then the freedom schools the community banks the community land trust the breakfast clubs what are you speaking about there when you speak about that and you're using it as opposed to we say online performative um you say we seem to have replaced doing anything with saying something and then you go on to speak about these structural things that happened in the 60s. What are you getting at there?

So where people are trying to organise to create a material and concrete change in people's circumstances as opposed to now where the there's not even a consistent set of demands like i don't really know what people are asking for in the current moment beyond a trans beyond like kind of asking those who are deemed with having privilege to transfer their privilege in some way now if that was presented as a redistribution of resources and the various ways one could go about that that would make some sort of sense to me but nothing is so clear or concrete seems to be suggested. It seems to be more of a linguistic or verbal game of, I don't know,

kind of like chastising people about privilege and saying they need to transfer the benefits of their privilege, but then with no kind of meaningful way of that happening beyond what are some of the things I see calling out, you know, companies, not for the capitalist exploitation that they, you know, participate in, but because they haven't cast enough diverse models, models or because they don't have the right range of color foundations or you know because boycotting a hairdresser because they don't do all textures of hair um it all just seems kind of interpersonal again you know rather than what we've seen with the organizing of the 60s and 70s where people there's land trusts there are schools there are breakfast clubs there are people like actually organizing in the communities that they're that they that they are talking about and that they represent rather than kind of posturing online because that's the thing and

we spoke about this on on my bbc series um you know the the shitty thing about existing trying to live today and trying to live good but understanding that everything that i enjoy in my life whether it's the clothes that i wear or the food that i eat has been is as a result of the exploitation of people in the global south but i've been completely sheltered from it i'm not aware of it i have to go and search for these things and what you're saying there about calling out these multinational corporations that make billions because they don't have the right amount of representation and then it's like but what about what they're actually doing in order to create these products how about looking at that the structure of that exactly you know i was seeing uh kind of in the immediate aftermath of um the of the killing of george floyd and the black lives matter protests

i was seeing some people online using that as an opportunity to um call out um you know, these fast fashion brands who use sweatshop labour of, you know, women from minoritised groups in the UK and in the global south. But rather than take exception with that, they just wanted the organized they just wanted the fast fashion labels to put out a statement saying they support black lives matter and i mean that that just feels actually feel speechless you know but do you think do you ever feel that um because when i see that too like i don't know what the fuck to do because i haven't

i've looked you know i use an iphone like i'm as i say i remind myself like i'm i'm dripping in blood even in that bbc show the premise of it was to find out how many slaves do people own and the answer is is that people in the west today we benefit from about 70 slaves each just to just to eat just to yeah to fucking yeah to wear our clothes and we are sheltered from this now i i don't i think most people are aware of this we all i i've been hearing about sweatshops since i was seven we all kind of know but we use a cognitive dissonance do you ever feel that people go for this performative thing because it's the only way to feel some type of control? Like saying to yourself,

do you know when you're trying to get off cigarettes, so you go and you buy 20, you smoke one and throw the packet into a hedge? I know trying to give up cigarettes and buying a packet and smoking 20 to try and make myself sick. Bargaining with yourself, making these, or no, no, the classic, giving up cigarettes and buying a packet and smoking 20 to try and like make myself sick bargaining with yourself making these are no no the classic giving up cigarettes and i didn't buy any but when i'm in the pub i take other people's okay yeah that's not really

smoking yeah yeah yeah cognitive dissonance um yeah so i think that's partially it people feel like you know it kind of feels overwhelming it feels like it just feels overwhelming like it's too much hard work but I also think or it's not that it's too much hard work that it's impossible but I also feel it is partially neoliberal identity politics that are obsessed with kind of representation rather than you know structural change and again something that's different between now and although I'm seeing resistance to this I'm seeing like growing numbers of for instance something I've seen on on twitter is like a lot of growing numbers of young black marxists you know who are like very theoretically astute and very involved in organizing and i think that's been a really interesting backlash against the more neoliberal identity politics i saw

somebody refer to it as seat at the table twitter or uh representation twitter you know reactionary kind of like anti-intellectual anti-anti-intellectual historically that has been the the power has considered that to be by far the most dangerous that's the one that the power structures always try and crack down on when movements move towards Marxist thinking that actually deconstruct power. Yeah, absolutely. Did you ever hear of Flamingo magazine in Britain? Yes. Yes. Did you see that article? There was an article in The Guardian about.

Yeah. So the Flamingo magazine was it was a magazine in Britain that was made for people from the Caribbean in Britain. And then it turned out it was funded by MI5 or MI6. And then you're like, why the fuck are they doing that? And it's like, MI6 funded a magazine for black people in Britain so that they could control the narrative so that it didn't become, it was anti-communist.

Yeah. Speak about blackness, but don't speak bad about capitalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it was presented as being like quite creative and kind of like, you know, a creative space rather than one that was seemingly like very conservative. There's a lot of, you know, subterfuge. Yeah, so there's actually lot of you know subterfuge yeah so um there's actually a

quote um from the book it's uh i'm quoting cornell west um the he's great crack i love him he's fantastic um sorry let me just i should have had it open let me just grab it up because I think he speaks really powerfully to this. Today those who peddle divisive rhetoric and shallow politics are frequently named the spokespeople of our times. In the words of black liberation scholar Cornel West, if you do it in a way that is easily co-opted you will be celebrated while you pose and posture as something that you are not um so when i heard him saying that i was just like oh cornell knows what's up he's watching these people he sees so if you're just if you're talking about i guess there's this i guess to talk about anti-racism is seen as so provocative that often people don't actually listen to the specificity sometimes of what the voice is saying is this somebody that is like kind of

looking for collective liberation or is it somebody that's looking for personal individualist individual enrichment you know is it somebody who's promoting an idea so that it is speaking a lot about these issues so that they can get a seat at the table? replaces the deeply unequal and destructive kind of systems that we have now. There's another idea that runs through the book of like fugitivity that, if I could just do a quick quote from that as well so fugitivity is a concept from um fred fred moten um who is again in the black radical tradition um and he is a i guess a philosopher um so i'll just read out this little section as the rich get richer the rest of us will be left in increasingly precarious situations in the global recession that is upon us, the powerful will double down on their control of state and cultural apparatus. They will be determined to repress or to co-opt the tremulous expressions of resistance that are

gaining volume as the people rise up against death. The issue of co-option is pertinent. Our articulations of dissent too often mirror the parameters of our oppression, reproducing oppressive systems, unwittingly reinforcing them or attempting to reverse them or indeed diverse them to make them more inclusive when in truth they need to dissolve. Bio Akumalafé describes our current system as a replication of the slave ship, complete with the various levels that existed on board. In actual slave ships, the captured Africans were chained in the bottom, in the dark, dank holes, with the European slavers on the top deck, living it up in the fresh air. Yet although they were on different levels and as such had radically different experiences of the ship, they were all still aboard a vessel of destruction. Akomalafi says that inclusion today can be understood as access to the top deck of the slave ship.

Inclusion is access to power in a system that is ultimately a tool of destruction. It is not enough to make exploitative systems more inclusive do we want to get on the top deck or do we want to destroy the goddamn ship so yeah which when you take it back to what you were speaking about regarding barbados and we said the irish indentured servants they had whiteness dangled in front of them and they became overseers and eventually became slave owners themselves to perpetuate that system rather than uniting with the chattel slaves they worked alongside to overthrow the system for collective liberation that's such a good

parallel to draw to that analogy yeah um one in in one chapter in the book you denounce the the white savior and you argue that to replace the white savior with coalition identifying common ground what do you mean by that um so one of the can i just do another quote because it's easier yeah okay the fred moten who i mentioned a moment ago the theorist poet and philosopher fred moten describes coalition as emerging out of the recognition that it's fucked up for you in the same way that we've already realized that it's fucked up for us and then he goes on to say i don't need your help I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker.

So basically, that's the thing. Like, black people don't need, like, charity or benevolence. Like, the whole allyship framework to me is, like, actually, like, deeply patronizing. Yeah, you say you don't like the word ally at the start of the book. I don't like the word ally, no. It reinforces a power dynamic. It reinforces a power dynamic, you say you don't like the word ally to start the book. I don't like the word ally, no. It reinforces a power dynamic. It reinforces a power dynamic, you know, where I've seen so many times the ally and the victim. I've seen that written, you know, and that just goes, that just brings me back to like my childhood and like choker boxes and pennies for black babies and the missionaries to Africarica and the african victim and the black victim

and the benevolent white like benefactor and allyship is way too close to that to that fucking power dynamic and also it's like a favor it's like a chat it's like you know it's the charitable ally like i don't need your help i need you to realize that this shit is killing you too however much more softly and i also feel as well with allyship it's it's it's it has more to do with a white person's expression of guilt than has to do with an actual desire to an actual desire to to confront power for a mutual good exactly exactly so exactly. So there's a whole chapter in, well, not a chapter because it's a short book, but there's a whole section on guilt and shame

and the relationship between guilt and kind of warped responses to racism of which allyship would be an example of. So rather than appealing to the charitable nature of nice white people that might come on board to help and be allies, I would like for people to identify the deprivations and inequalities

that are perpetuated as a result of capitalism, that, you know, most people in the world are in some way deprived because of. Of course, it plays out to like varying extents. And it's not to conflate that with racism, white people aren't experiencing, aren experiencing racism you know but that doesn't mean that lots of white people aren't having like a terrible existence because of the deprivations of inequality and capitalism and what's so what's to me so inspiring about some of the organizing of the past that i reference in the book i look at you know fred hampton who was the um who was the um leader of the chicago chapter of the black panthers and the way in which he was

able to create something that he called the rainbow coalition which was um organized between like latino so basically it was black americans black panthers um or whites from the south or something yeah latino gangs um and then white poor white southerners you know so groups that would be diametrically opposed in fact those the white southerners that he formed a rainbow coalition with the young patriots they were called they had the confederate flag as like their symbol the confederate flag as like their symbol. The Confederate flag is like the symbol of the slave-owning South. So these people that would be imagined to be like, you know, diametrically opposed to each other could actually identify that if they worked together, because so while the young patriots,

the white working class Southerners are not experiencing racism, the white working class southerners are not experiencing racism. They are experiencing police brutality, as the Latino and obviously black groups are. And they are experiencing like entrenched poverty and inequality because of capitalism. So working together, they identify, look, we can build like a mass movement because we have shared interests, rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, to see themselves as, you know, enemies along racialized lines. So the Rainbow Coalition actually, like they worked, these groups worked independently, they worked separately to each other, but in communication with each other and organizing towards a common goal. Fred Hampton was killed by the police about kind of within a year after he had started doing this work. Of course, because that's really dangerous shit.

To the structures of power, that's really dangerous shit. So it never came to fruition. structures of power that's really dangerous shit so it never it never came to fruition but it's so interesting to me that also malcolm no sorry martin luther king just um in the year before he was assassinated was also working on the poor people's campaign where he was working to bring all the american poor across racial lines together to form a mass movement, advocating for a form of universal basic income. This is like in the 1960s. So it's just very interesting to me how a lot of the kind of icons of black organizing, civil rights and black power were actually moving towards creating coalitions amongst all oppressed people because they knew then you know the numbers are far more i mean that's it's most of the world you know and the

thing is too like this is something for irish people that like we we have a history of that like i had on my podcast before barnardette devlin mccalliskey yeah and she spoke about like barnardette was brought over in the 70s by the irish americans to speak to the americans about how terrible things were in the north of ireland and the irish americans welcomed her and they put her on television and then barnardette says hold on a second irish americans we're being treated at home the way that you're treating people of color and black people here in this country.

What the fuck is that about? And then she was, and she tried to give the, she was given the freedom, the key of New York City and she tried to give it to the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers, yeah.

She was fucking shut down very quickly and they didn't start ringing Bernadette up again. I can imagine. She was ostracized. Because that was so dangerous and they weren't ready for it.

They weren't ready. They wanted this Danny boy, remember when we used to be oppressed, oh, isn't this awful type of thing. But they weren't ready to confront. I mean, the history of the Irish in America with the formation of the police, the police in America is a very, very Irish institution.

Even there over the summer with the protests in America, when you saw the American police, the way they were deliberately attacking journalists and they were being deliberately provocative on camera, that's known as the Miami method of policing. And it was invented by a man from Dublin in the 1980s. Oh my God.

Yes. I can't remember his name. John Timoney. But like he was an Irish American police officer born in Dublin, went to America and literally formed this way of controlling protests where you attack journalists you you display terrifying power even though it looks like you should be showing a brave showing them a nice side of the police it's like no go the opposite go straight up fascism and this is what will work a dublin man invented that in

the fucking 80s wow wow that's not the proudest not at all innovation um one thing too that you touch on in the book and it's something you and i've spoken about before for for white people to acknowledge and take ownership of our racism to to be able to say i grew up in a system that told me i was better why would i not be racist as opposed to running away from it and as as because the thing is what i found with media growing up the way racism has been portrayed in films like american history x and stuff they're stuff, they're not saying racism is bad because it's harmful to black people. They're saying to white people, don't be the wrong type of white person. Yeah, yeah.

As in, oh, racists, you mean people with shaved heads who behave in an uncouth fashion. So what it actually is is classism. And it has nothing to do with uh coalition or solidarity it's just no no you you need to do racism differently which is behind closed doors quietly um but don't do it like with tattoos and a shaved head what are you white trash yeah yeah yeah so but but i then learned from, the worst thing anyone could ever call you is a racist. Because that means that you are violent and lower class. And then, as soon as anyone says to a white person online, racism, we get this extreme reaction.

What, racist? Me? Yeah, a visceral reaction. I remind myself every day, of course, i sometimes have blind spots around any group of people who experienced marginalization because i was raised in a society that normalized these things so i have to recognize it take ownership of it and then as a fucking adult who's capable of critical thinking and empathy work on it and the same with race the same with homophobia the same with misogyny i was raised to benefit from these systems so take ownership of it and the same with race the same with homophobia the same with misogyny i was raised to benefit from these systems so take ownership of it and go now i'm a fucking adult what can i do

that like that thank you it's just everybody like it's everybody you know everybody has internalized these messages because they've been um we they've been invented like centuries before like any of us were born you know so one of the things i'll just do a quick a quick quote from the book is first things first this is the most basic it's at once the easiest and perhaps simultaneously the most difficult because i know you've already started denying it but stop the vehement denial especially to yourself that you have racist beliefs race was invented to create racist beliefs it goes with the territory so like we have to stop acting like racism is some like anomaly you know that it's just these extreme or explicit kind of like moments of abuse. It's just it's so present in just the assumptions and stereotypes that you have about that you have about people.

And I also say in the book, like, you don't you don't have responsibility. Like, you don't have to feel guilt for what your ancestors did, depending on who your ancestors are but you don't have to have guilt for what they did you're not you're not responsible for what your ancestors did but you're responsible for what you do next you know so exactly what you're talking about you know that process of it just acknowledging that race isn't some fucking anomaly that it's actually like that race isn't some fucking anomaly, that it's actually like, sorry, racism isn't like some, isn't an anomaly. It's just, um, these, these notions and assumptions and stereotypes about, um, groups of people are kind of what our cultures have been built on. So acknowledge that and then start to kind of unpack that you know and and grapple with it but it's like you can't grapple with it if you're denying if you're denying that it exists and that's

why I think the mainstreaming of this um information about why and when race was invented would just normalize this idea we have that... That's one of the things about kind of anti-racism. It seems like a lot of the anti-racism of the moment. It seems to operate as though there are other outcomes possible. There are outcomes other than racism possible while we continue to view the world through the racialized lens which we view it. There's going to be racism if we continue to understand race in the same way that we do.

biological truth status rather than something that is an ideology that was invented with a very specific and particular purpose in mind before we leave right in the three minutes who should buy your book and why um so i what white people can do next is a provocation. Within kind of three pages, I talk about the limitations of addressing a generic group of white people. So I kind of set up whiteness to disassemble it. Because I asked people online, Emma, and the amount of DMs I got where people were going, how does she feel about writing a title that's deliberately provocative? You know, the title pissed white people off. Yeah, I know. I've got like... But I think that's good provocative you know the title pissed white people off yeah i know i've got like but i think that's good because no one's gonna fucking walk

past your book i've got loads of um i'm battling like loads of um uh emails you know people who've actually gone out of their way to find my email address like to just be like this is like absolute disgrace how dare you call me a white person and you're being racist Emma yeah like I'm being patronizing and I'm being racist and what else am I being oh I can't even remember um but the thing is like I do have a massive reservation in like you know instructing white people um in the way that the current movement, moment movement does. So I'm kind of setting it up to challenge it, you know? But then I am also interested

that white people are actually so offended by it. Because I'm just like, it's also like, it has limitations, which I address, but you're deeply offended by it, come on. Like, you know, if being called a black person was the worst thing I'd ever, the worst thing I'd ever been called, like people are acting like being called a black person was the worst thing I'd ever the worst thing I'd ever been called like people are acting like being called a white person is like offensive somehow being called a black person isn't offensive and when you're called a black person when you are a

black person especially growing up in Ireland when I was you were called a lot of things other than black um so it's just interesting when people you know talk about sensitivity and um snowflakes and um being easily triggered and then like the the phrase white people seems to send people into like overload um but yeah I would say it's a book for everyone it's a book for for people that feel frustrated by the current different um my my final proposal is quite an unexpected one i think i start to kind of talk about consciousness and um other ways i talk about is that the post-activism uh the post-activism chapter yeah and i start like i talk about um how kind of like there's this um ecological like it's just it's scott's gaelic i really wanted it to be irish but i spoke to like um i spoke to like like quite a few irish linguists and they were like no

it just it just doesn't mean this like an irish but in Scots Gaelic, a word called ducos, I think it is, I might be pronouncing it wrong. And it's like this ecological principle that, um, that looks at the human and the non-human and the relationship between people, between people and the land and one of the so the proposal that i make at the end is i reject the notion that people of different races should could be allies um but in linking in creating common in in in creating or linking common struggle you know I talk a lot about environmental justice at the end and how we all um how we have to like we're we're faced with the destruction of our biosphere you know and that's actually kind of pressing and um our relationship to the natural world has been um disc we've been disconnected from that through like from the same historical point from the same origins that created whiteness

that created capitalism they've also completely like disrupted our our relationship with the environment so i talk about ecology and you know are in as opposed to identity it gets like quite philosophical i probably i can't really get into it now but as opposed to these kind of rigid identities um that are based on fictitious kind of categories how we as as as as humans we have this entanglement with the natural world and the world around us and how that's kind of been bulldozed over by modernity and how you can see in something like that ecological principle that kind of predates colonialism, this relationship that people have between themselves and their environment and their land and how we can kind of like tap back into some of those forms of consciousness and i propose that perhaps plants are while people can't be our allies maybe it's plants that are that are our allies and then kind of make a proposal so yeah i think that chapter is a bit unexpected sorry that was such a meandering answer no you're grand

um just to finish up what for me who I think would really benefit from this book, the exact people who are pissed off by the title, the type of people who, there's certain people who, they hate what they call wokeness, and these are the people that this book would actually speak to, because the book, it's anti-performativism,ism it's anti what the phrase wokeness has become and it's common sense historical and and really it's just really concise as well i know you said earlier it's a small book it is a small book but that's i like that about it you could read this in a day and come away with

so much and there's so many the people you quote in it there's so many other books you can then read from reading your book yeah well yeah thank you and actually i did have one um i did have like one friend who read it and he was just like oh how do you feel about the possibility that um bad faith actors are, you know, anti-woke might kind of, you know, try and like might be interested in what you're saying, because you do challenge a lot of the kind of what are seen as the shibboleths of the current kind of discourse or, you know, a lot of those buzzwords like, well, I don't even want to say them, but a lot of the buzzwords and the kind of terms that I think had some utility at some point, but have now just kind of become untethered from meaning.

So yeah, I think people that have like frustration with the kind of become untethered from meaning completely so yeah i think people that have like frustration with the kind of like strict ideological um kind of demands and the and the the the point scoring and the posturing and the performativity and the hypocrisies that exist in the in the current discourse around anti-racism yeah i think they'll find it appealing but i i realized the name you know might be off-putting to them but the name is a subversion yeah and and the other thing people with the bad faith i don't think they can take something from this book because at all points you're anti-colonial you're anti-capitalist and these bad faith people the people who decry wokeness in that way they're always doing it to service capitalism yes they're always right-wing capitalists who are that's their

agenda and that's why they speak uh against things like wokeness they're gonna read your book and they'll go no i'm not touching this this is anti-capitalist anti-colonial there's nothing here for me. Or there is if they want to change their mind. But you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Yeah, I totally get you.

I guess a lot of, oftentimes, they have kind of straw man arguments, isn't it? Like they're saying that they have these issues with the movement, but they're, I guess, with the discourse discourse but they're just using that as an excuse because their real agenda is as you said kind of right um kind of right-wing um capitalist support the current system yes they want to do but there's so many things that it's easy to kind of point out as inconsistent and kind of hypocritical in some of the current discourse that you see online that i guess they just like target that can i get you on one last point then my question book just so uh in the chapter stop reducing black people to one dimension uh you said don't believe in some

imagined inherent goodness of all black people as a response to your own self indulgent guilt at racism i'm not going to say believe black women or anything trite like that because funnily enough not all black women think the same way or indeed agree with each other so if your mantra is believe black women you're going to get some mixed messages and come away pretty confused yeah i mean it sounds so obvious yeah but um like one of the things that i i'm just going to respond to that with another quick quote um i can't believe i'm writing this because it feels so painfully obvious,

yet the allyship framework can be so infantilizing and patronizing that it is sadly necessary. But here's the thing. Like you, black people are people with the full range of complexity, contradiction and emotion that comes with humanity.

Until white people are prepared to see us as innocent or indeed as less than saintly, depending on what variety of white perspective we are dealing with racism is present while there is a strong narrative of black inherent dishonesty amongst racists at times i've seen almost an inverse of that in some anti-racist allies um so yeah that right there that's the the performative allyship or the it's it's the troker boxes it's that it's it's the part of allyship where you say this isn't about equality this is just another form of structural racism just with a smile on

its face yeah exactly and it's kind of you know like paternalistic and it's kind of like yeah treating people like they're they're kind of like one one dimensional or just like inherently good because they are part of a group that has experienced historical oppression like nobody would imagine that like like obviously with white people we know that there are many many different agendas at play you know some white people are motivated by personal gain and interest other white people are far more about you know creating uh equal and just societies. It's the exact same with black people, you know? Of course. Like, obviously.

Human beings. Yeah. So that's fantastic, Emma. Sorry for going over there by 10 minutes. Listen, thank you so much for that. Thanks for your time. And try and relax for the evening if you can. So thank you to Emma Dabbery for that chat.

Check out the book, What White People Can Do Next from Allyship to Coalition I'll see you next week I hope you enjoy the lovely spring enjoy that spring weather go out and get your government sanctioned 5km run and enjoy the lovely

the longer evenings and smell the fucking air, smell that beautiful promise of life amongst the leaves, the young leaf buds Smell the fucking air. Smell that beautiful. Promise of life. Amongst the leaves. The young leaf buds. I've got some. I've got a few little hot takes on the pot.

I'm researching some hot hot takes at the moment. Some really interesting stuff. So hopefully next week I'll have a fully formed hot take. To give you for an episode. Mind yourself. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play.

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