3
" An antiracist movement that emphasizes the *actions* of individual 'white people' with a docus on things like 'calling out' everyday racism, or holding a company 'to account' for not catering to darker skin tones, perhaps isn't up to the task of defeating a concept that our societies have been deeply invested in for centuries, and that has assumed the 'truth' status that whiteness has. The focus on microaggressions and interpersonal slights often occurs at the expense of considering 'whiteness' or as a pervasive, insidious modus operandi, a particular way of engaging with the world. It is a system that is extractive, oppositional, and binary - a dominant system, one that asserts not just that white people should be dominant over other 'races' but that, more fundamentally, sees human life as dominant over all other life forms. "
― Emma Dabiri , What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
5
" 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 co-opt, the tremulous expressions of resistance that are gaining volume as the people rise of 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 indeed 'diverse' them, to make them more 'inclusive' when in truth the need to dissolve. "
― Emma Dabiri , What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
6
" ...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism'). "
― Emma Dabiri , What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
14
" My fear is that much of the antiracist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness. Little in the mainstream antiracist narrative focuses on challenging the idea of “white people” itself. Rather, it takes the category as an unassailable truth, with the emphasis placed instead on making white people nicer, through a combination of begging, demanding, cajoling, and imploring. “Whiteness” was a concept popularized by convincing one group of people it would make their lives better, and demonstrating it through the brutal dehumanization of another group. Now all “whites,” even those with little power in any other quarter of their lives, had the power of life and death over these “others.” This is a “truth” that’s had close to five hundred years to really embed itself. The question I pose is this: Does telling “white” people that racial equality means that their lives have to literally get worse (“but thems the breaks”) really seem up to the challenge of uprooting this centuries-old pernicious promise? "
― Emma Dabiri , What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
