Emma Dabiri > Quotes

“The same forces that have a disregard for black life, for the lives of the indigenous, for the marginalized, for the lives of women, are the same forces who disregard the life of the Earth itself; individuals who see themselves set apart from other people, who imagine themselves disconnected from the natural world over which they short-sightedly assume mastery, who see the destruction and degradation of life as a fair exchange for the tightly policed boundaries of ethno-nationalist identities, the pursuit of wealth or the achievement of billionaire status.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“We seem to have replaced doing anything with saying something, in a space where the word ‘conversation’ has achieved an obscenely inflated importance as a substitute for action.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“People racialized as “white” should be as keen to escape the concept’s pernicious grasp as anybody else. When we critique whiteness, or indeed say “abolish whiteness,” it is not an attack on individual “white” people (nor is it some sort of call to genocide). On the contrary, it is the call to abolish a concept, an idea, an ideology, one that was unambiguously created to divide people, a tool with which to manipulate the exploited to keep them from acting in their own long-term interests.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“Cultural appropriation operates as part of a structural power dynamic where the ‘appropriating’ actors belong to an advantaged group. This group systematically extracts the cultural resources of a subordinate group, erasing the subordinate group’s involvement in the process. The structurally advantaged group becomes the primary (financial) benefactor of an innovation that was not theirs.”
― Emma Dabiri, Don't Touch My Hair

“speaking about pain is not the same as dismantling the power structures that create that pain.”
― Emma Dabiri, Don't Touch My Hair

“The natural-hair hierarchy means it is easier for those with 'good' hair to go 'natural', and to then be praised as 'natural queens'. Meanwhile, women with the hair texture that is most stigmatised might be more likely to use wigs and weave, and then face discrimination.”
― Emma Dabiri, Dont Touch My Hair

“Never forget that race—a powerful and emotive mythology, often emphasized in contexts where people have little else to believe in—exists as a persuasive instrument for mobilizing people to act against their own interests and to keep these types in power.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“Universal healthcare, free education, access to decent and affordable housing, safe working conditions, and occupations that provide a sense of fulfillment and meaning are all pretty basic and fundamental concerns, yet, for far too many of us, what are really relatively unambitious requirements have become aspirations we can only dream of.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“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 – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“naming whiteness is necessary; it is the “invisibility” of white people, who are presented just as “people,” the default norm from which everyone else deviates, that is part of its normative power-making.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“I think we’ve nailed how to say what we don’t want, but we find it much harder to articulate what we do want—let alone how to achieve it. The protests and the organizing in the wake of the killing of George Floyd have shown us in no uncertain terms that a great thirst for change exists. But it’s not so much that there is too much to do, it’s more that we require a new, far more expansive, approach to understanding what we want to achieve and the steps necessary to take us there. As the scholar George Lipsitz cautions, “Good intentions and spontaneity are not adequate in the face of relentlessly oppressive and powerful well-financed military and economic political systems.”3”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“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 – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“In fact, in many ways race and capitalism are siblings.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“standards of living and access to opportunities have been stratified along racial lines. This isn’t always because your ancestors worked harder; it might be because they were thieves. Even if there’s no one in your direct lineage who is a thief, the economies that were built on this stolen wealth benefit white communities all over the world.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“This new status of “white” was a powerful tool for pacifying discontented and impoverished Europeans in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the 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. The myth of a white race as a biological reality was a (remarkably effective) technique designed to convince “whites” that they are deservedly advantaged compared to racial “others.” Yet in the many instances where this is the case—because as a white person your “race” isn’t one of the impediments to your achieving the good life—the game is still rigged: unless they are part of a particular social class, many are still set up to lose, with little comfort beyond the belief that “at least I’m not black!”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“In our desire to see our own beauty acknowledged, we forget that the beauty regime is an oppressive construct designed to keep women in a state of heightened insecurity.”
― Emma Dabiri, Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture

“This racialized ordering of the world is endemic to a system that has inculcated us all with a scarcity mindset, which is a great deal at odds with the abundance that truly exists in the world.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“Meiksins Wood explains that, “by the seventeenth century, the word ‘improver’ was firmly fixed in the English language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable.”35 The word “improvement” was well established by the eighteenth century, by which time it was acquiring the more general meaning we give it today. Nonetheless—and this is key—Meiksins Wood asks us to consider the “implications for a culture where the word for ‘making better’ is rooted in the word for monetary profit.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“Akomolafe 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.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“And the recent fatal police shooting of George Nkencho, a young, mentally ill Irish citizen of Nigerian descent”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“I remain curious as to what exactly it is that we are expected to be doing with our time? What is more profound or simply enjoyable than this type of activity? What is life for, if not physical intimacy and communion with our bredrin? If, at the end of the exchange, we look better than we did before, issa win.”
― Emma Dabiri, Dont Touch My Hair

“I think it was actually the “rational actor” theory that alerted me to the fact that the “con” in “economics” wasn’t incidental.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“Millions of us feel deeply that change is long overdue unless we are to succumb to death.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“Investment in the absoluteness of racial categories is in fact a conservative, fearful choice. What would be truly radical would be to sound the death knoll for the fiction that white people constitute a *race* and that this racwe is imbued with any 'natural' abilities unavailable to others. The first step is the mainstreaming of knowledge about the invention of 'race,”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“In the US, even more obscenely vast gains during the pandemic have prompted calls for a windfall tax on super-rich tech titans to help pay for the economic recovery from the pandemic. Senator Bernie Sanders and Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, both Democrats, have introduced legislation dubbed the “Make Billionaires Pay Act” for a one-off 60% tax on the wealth gains of billionaires between 18 March [2020] and the end of the year to help working Americans cover healthcare costs. Under Sanders’ proposal, [Jeff] Bezos would pay a one-time wealth tax of $42.8bn, and [Elon] Musk would pay $27.5bn.66”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“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 – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“The inherent criminality certain “white” people ascribe to black people blinds them to the fact that this is a potential threat to their civil liberty too (remember Hannah Fizer):”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“A more equal distribution of wealth would be a panacea for much of this, but “whiteness” takes the heat off wealth-hoarding elites while everyone else fights each other.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“So, I reject the capitalization of ‘black’. When, out of a lack of anything more suitable, we are driven to use terms that should be contested – terms that are, in the words of Stuart Hall, ‘under erasure’ – we should be seeking to destabilize them. It’s the reason that throughout this book I frequently place inverted commas around ‘black’ and ‘white’, intentionally disrupting the comfort with which we rely on that terminology. It’s for this same reason that I flinch when I hear the term ‘mixed race’, that most pernicious of racial classifications. While I completely understand why some people use the phrase to describe themselves (there are few satisfactory alternatives), any argument that insists that someone must use a term that exists to reinforce the ‘truth’ status of a system that is chaotic, nonsensical and violent, a term that further perpetuates the idea that race is a biological reality, is really not the neutral, commonsense position it might claim to be.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“Windrush scandal, Jamaica 50 deportations”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice