Emma Dabiri: Marches and Instagram campaigns won’t stop racism, we need to talk about class

When Emma Dabiri announced the title of her new book, What White People Can Do Next: from Allyship to Coalition, on Twitter last year, she was attacked from all sides.

Some people told her that addressing white people as a homogeneous group was offensive, others asked why we need another anti-racist guide and there were those who bemoaned that educating people about how not to be racist shouldn’t be yet another job for black people. Dabiri accepts all this - in fact it is why she wrote the book, which despite its appearance, is defiantly not another guide to being an ally.

"I felt we were straying off course,” says explains. “The allyship guides that came out in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests became overwhelming and much of the anti-racist conversation is ahistorical, devoid of analysis of class or capitalism.” There were a lot of good intentions but, as she says in her new book, quoting the scholar George Lipsitz: “Good intentions are not adequate in the face of relentlessly oppressive and powerful well-financed military and economic political systems”.

We are speaking the week that former police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with the murder of George Floyd. “That verdict was the bare minimum,” says Dabiri, sighing. “Yet it’s a first, which just goes to show how dire the situation is. It’s not justice, because George Floyd is dead but it’s saying there is some level of accountability. But as the verdict came out, the same extra judicial killings were continuing”.

Dabiri is managing to squeeze in this phone interview while her 18 month old son sleeps. She has two children and has put her PhD (on the identity politics of mixed race people) on hold twice to write books. Don’t Touch My Hair came out in 2019 and went to the top of bestseller lists. It charts black hair history inspired by her own background (Dabiri’s father is Nigerian, her mother is Irish). Writing it, she says, was “wearing and draining” but What White People Can Do Next was “cathartic”. “I was being very responsive to what was unfolding in this moment, drawing on years of research but applying it in an immediate context so it felt fresh and intellectually fun. I feel there is a hopefulness underpinning it and a lot of people have responded saying they find the hopefulness in it.”

The problem, she astutely argues, is that the anti-racist conversations we are having only reinforce our belief in race. The Sussexes’ interview with Oprah Winfrey, for example, showed how we “have to move beyond the discussion being ‘is this racist or isn’t it’.” “It gets stuck at that level and we don’t have the more generative conversations  and take the action we need. The historical context is always missing, along with discussions about class and capitalism. I’m not saying that race doesn’t exist, historically, but we have to be at least trying to challenge the concept of it and the injustice it reinforces.”

Race, says Dabiri, cannot be seen in isolation from class and capitalism. For the book, she went back to the 17^th century, when the idea of race was invented after an armed rebellion held by Virginia settlers. "It gave the newly minted white race power of life and death over the newly minted black race,” she says. “A black person couldn’t testify in court against a white person. So white people can just do anything they like to a black person and there is no recourse to the law. While things have improved since then, they haven’t improved as much as we might like to think – the George Floyd verdict is the first time a police officer who has murdered a black man is being sentenced after centuries and probably thousands of similar type lynchings, so that’s really f***ed up."

In the UK, there is “a historical amnesia” about race, she says, and the government’s inquiry into racism was “lacking in any context”. “There is no engagement about the British empire and the history that created the apparatus of race but is still framing our lives today. A lot of the anti-racist literature is trying to make white people nicer, through cajoling, begging, demanding, training, but it never really deals with the concept of what does it mean that there are people racialized as white. Racism is bad but it acts like there is another outcome other than racism when we continue to see the world as constituted through this taxonomy of race. The idea of race was invented to create racism. So while we continue to organise the world according to that system there will be racism.”

So what can be done to stop racism? Dabiri isn’t convinced that posting black squares on Instagram in solidarity or going on marches can achieve much. “The filmmaker Boots Riley talks about how demonstrations and protests used to be organised around labour and going on strike, which meant they had the power to make change because there was an impact on profit. But it moved to being about students and young people which means they are less effective. Protests can effect change if they are asking for a specific piece of legislative change but if they don’t have a particular set of demands... it is just largely symbolic."

Instead, we need more union between different groups, “to recognise that there are shared experiences and similarities that we can work together in a way that makes everything better overall.” That applies to the Stop Asian Hate campaign going on now. “There should be solidarity with Asian groups,” says Dabiri, adding: “Asian is also such a catch all term that there’s so many people included. In the book I talk about how white and black are generic categories. I think we should have more specificity.”

She continues: “Ideas about race are deeply psychologically rooted. They are linked to how people understand their identity and themselves and have had 400 years to embed themselves. How is that going to be challenged by chastising people about their privilege?” That’s where this idea of coalition comes in. “In the book I say you might not experience racism as a white person but that doesn’t mean that your life isn’t sh**, that you don’t experience other forms of oppression and inequality and have your life opportunities diminished in certain ways. We can start to see this and see the struggles as interlinked – for example in America in the 17^th century the Irish indentured labours and the enslaved Africans were fighting the landlord classes but once race was introduced it stopped these solidarities from occurring.”

There’s an interesting section in the book about how we are so mired in one way of thinking that psychedelic drugs may help us conceptualise these ideas differently. Dabiri laughs as she says hasn’t taken any herself - she doesn’t want to be the research subject - but she is intrigued by how psilocybin, which is found in mushrooms, can shift deeply entrenched values and world views, like our views on race.

Growing up in Dublin, Dabiri says she "learned more about the British Empire than people learn in England". She also started reading about black history at a young age. "I felt very isolated and reading black stories and history was like my refuge in many ways. Black American writers provided me with a sense of sanctuary that didn’t exist in my actual life. I could see a lot of racism growing up and reading black American books I was able to contextualise what was happening to me and get a broader understanding of racism that black people experienced globally.” She adds a caveat: “With that being said, in the book, I call for not just importing American narratives into what’s happening in the UK, and what’s happening in Ireland. Because while there are parallels, there are distinct differences."

Now the book is out, she really has to finish her PhD. We joke that the two books have been procrastination from that on a grand scale. But she has been busy. She was on Have I Got News For You last week (she liked being on with Victoria Coren Mitchell as host and was proud that she won) and was a subject for Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky Arts, which will be shown on TV soon. “That was so nice to do,” she says. “Posing meant I was just left alone for a few hours - I constantly have young children and am really busy so it was nice to just sit and stare." Next, she would like to write a fiction book. "I love folklore and mythology so I think there will be aspects of magical realism,” she says. “I don’t always want to be only talking about race.”

What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri is published by Penguin, £7.99 in paperback original.

Emma Dabiri is speaking at the Evening Standard’s London Rising event. Join us online event (28-29 April, 12pm-2pm) as we explore the challenges and opportunities ahead; championing the people, ideas and emerging trends across business, the arts, fashion, hospitality, retail, sport and politics that will help London soar again. The future starts now. Register for a free eTicket: https://londonrising.standard.co.uk #LondonRising