What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

Written by Emma Dabiri

Narrated by Emma Dabiri

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

In the spirit of We Should All Be Feminists and How to Be an Antiracist, a poignant and sensible guide to questioning the meaning of whiteness and creating an antiracist world from the acclaimed historian and author of Twisted.

Vital and empowering What White People Can Do Next teaches each of us how to be agents of change in the fight against racism and the establishment of a more just and equitable world. In this affecting and inspiring collection of essays, Emma Dabiri draws on both academic discipline and lived experience to probe the ways many of us are complacent and complicit—and can therefore combat—white supremacy. She outlines the actions we must take, including:

Stop the Denial
Interrogate Whiteness
Abandon Guilt
Redistribute Resources
Realize this shit is killing you too . . . 

To move forward, we must begin to evaluate our prejudices, our social systems, and the ways in which white supremacy harms us all. Illuminating and practical, What White People Can Do Next is essential for everyone who wants to go beyond their current understanding and affect real—and lasting—change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jun 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063112742

Emma Dabiri

Emma Dabiri is a regular presenter on BBC and contributor for The Guardian. She is a teaching fellow in the Africa department at SOAS and a Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths. Her writing has been published in a number of anthologies, academic journals, and the national press. She lives in London.

Reviews for What White People Can Do Next

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, Emma Dabiri builds on the work she began with her online resource, “What White People Can Do Next,” to argue for more substantive action than the types of performative online activism many self-styled white progressives engage in. She links many who identify as “allies” with those in the nineteenth century who opposed slavery but still believed in white supremacy (pg. 4). From there, she looks at historic examples of coalition – like Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition that involved African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor Southern whites – as well as more recent groups. Dabiri quickly rebuts the false equivalences that various white groups often cite when discussing racial prejudice, pointing out that what matters is how those events influence modern power structures (pgs. 39-40). For those unaware of how whiteness was constructed over time in the Anglo-American world, Dabiri spends a great deal of time exploring the historical development in England, Ireland, and North America. She continues with a discussion on how capitalism works in tandem with racism before telling her readers how white guilt over the past is ineffective – rather, they should focus on what they can do in the present to improve the future. Finally, Dabiri discusses the importance of finding moments of joy and for her white readers to realize how systems of white supremacy harm them as well. Dabiri’s straightforward style coupled with occasional humor makes What White People Can Do Next a particularly powerful volume and a great primer for antiracist activists.

[askelmore · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Best for:White people looking for perspectives on the best ways we can effectively dismantle white supremacy and the institutions connected to it.In a nutshell:Author Dabiri shares her thoughts on where some of the current anti-racism focus is misdirected, and offers alternatives.Worth quoting:“What we do require here is an understanding, not so much of an intersectionality of identities, but an intersectionality of issues.”“My fear is that much of the anti-racist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness.”“What would be truly radical would be to sound the death knell for the fiction that white people constitute a race and that this race is imbued with any ‘natural’ abilities unavailable to others.”“Language is of course not irrelevant, but the capital B - while coming from a place that understandably is attempting to confer more status on to the world ‘black’ — seeks to reinforce a way of seeing the world that we should be disrupting and unraveling.”Why I chose it:It sounded interesting.Review:The back cover pretty much tells prospective readers what they can expect:“Stop the denial. Stop the false equivalencies. Interrogate whiteness. Interrogate capitalism. Denounce the white saviour. Abandon guilt.”Dabiri is not so much interested in how white people can be ‘allies’ as we’ve come to know the term. She wants us to work to build coalitions. Think about Fred Hampton, and how he got different groups to all align in the Rainbow Coalition - Black Panther Party, Young Patriots Organization, and Young Lords. Groups that today we might look at and think all have different interests, but the reality the systems of capitalism and white supremacy is fucking all of us over. We all have an interest in dismantling those systems. And it’s not about white people feeling ‘sorry’ for people not racialised as white, or guilt over it.I also appreciated Dabiri’s discussion about race and the challenges with leaning into the separate ideas of race when it is a fully social construct; specifically how a lot of the anti-racism work that is out there today is focusing on emphasizing difference without (white) people really fully understanding what it means to be racialized as white. I especially felt this after having just read Angela Saini’s Superior.This is one of those books that needs to be read multiple times. There’s so much here, even though the book itself is a relatively short 150 pages. But Dabiri doesn’t need more space - she makes her arguments strongly within the brief but full chapters. Recommend to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:Recommend to a Friend