Katherine

“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

“Racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy. They are the product of Eurocentrism and colonialism. To act in ways that reinforce their fixedness rather than undermine them is to continue to operate in the terrain mapped out by white supremacy.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“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

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