Hello and welcome to The Blind Bye podcast, you juvenile hall, hence it is the first day of April. And I got to say yesterday, I really, really enjoyed yesterday because the clocks went back at the weekend, so the evening was longer. And it probably felt like spring, there was warmth in the sun, genuine warmth in the sun, t shirt, warmth. And there was the promise of that smell of new growth. It's it's it's probably my favorite smell of the year.

Now, it hasn't kicked in yet. It tends to kick in. End of April. There's a generous smell in the air when every single plant is just putting out those growth hormones and are sprouting new leaves, it's it's it's a floral smell, but it's not flowers. It's like flowers causin so. I got a little bang of that and I had the warmth of the sun and the length of the evening, and it was like a fucking tonic is.

It really gave me a lovely sense of optimism and an appreciation for the present moment, and I'm just so fucking grateful. I'm really grateful for furniture. To just give me a little hug and a pat on the back, because I need this. Because. Winter winter's tough going, sometimes there's beauty in winter. There is beauty in winter, but. Sometimes it's tough going and I needed something and the sun gave me a loving head, but. So for this week's podcast, I have.

A chat, I'm going to give you a little chat that I did very recently with someone who was previously a guest on this podcast, Emma Dabiri, who she's an academic and an author. And I had her on the podcast back in 2018 or 2019 to speak about the show. So I had her on the podcast about two years ago, and she just written a book called Don't Touch My Hair, which was like a history and discourse on African hair, because Emma is she teaches African studies.

That's our area of expertise. And since that time, like the book became massive, it was released in America under the name of Twisted. And has become huge and has become a really, really well known, we worked together on my BBC series Blind by Industries in particular, and the episode about modern slavery. And Emma has a brand new book which is actually out today, which is fantastic because I got an early read of it. And the book is called What White People Can Do Next from Alé Shipped Coalition.

Now, when I announced the title of this book on my Instagram and I said I was going to be chatting to Emma. I got quite a few annoyed direct messages from people who were kind of pissed off at the title of the book. Gone, what do you mean, why is this stop some type of instruction manual for white people while you're promoting this? And Emma explains in the chat that we're going to have like the title of the book is it's deliberately provocative, it's a deliberately provocative title.

The book itself is fucking fantastic. It's. A wonderfully concise. Deconstruction of race, of race and racism, it's also an anticolonial book, it's anticapitalist book. You know that a frequent theme on this podcast is I like to look at Irish history from a colonial perspective because I'm fascinated with Irish history. And why do I do this man? Because it's helpful to me. And I'd like to think it's helpful to other people that if we can understand our history in Ireland from a colonial perspective, that this allows us to have a sense of empathy, solidarity and coalition with anyone who is suffering under similar power structures today so that we can actually help to fight it rather than perpetuate.

And a central tenet of the book is Emma is challenging the the the inherent power dynamics in the concept of ally ship arguing instead for coalition when it comes to how people can confront the structures of racism was actually taken aback when I was reading the foreword of the book where Emma describes why she wrote this book, because she references that her appearance on my podcast, which we we did in Vicar Street like two years ago, she said. Recently I recall having a public discussion in which we touched on Afro futurism, philosophy, ancestor veneration and its relationship to African concepts of time, as well as the trajectory between the blues and Trappe music.

I enjoyed it immensely and found the interviewer's questions refreshing, but apparently not everyone felt the same way at the end of the event. I was approached by a woman who worked in development somewhere in Africa and she said she enjoyed the conversation but felt it was a wasted opportunity. She wanted us to discuss a ship. My heart sank. So the book is its. It's anticapitalism, it explains what racism is and. It's like a road map. To racial justice.

Where it's transforming and demonstrations of support into real and meaningful change. And I do strongly recommend you go and get it because. It's a fantastic book, and Emma is a brilliant writer and she's an expert in her field. She's an expert in her field. And not only when you read Emma's book, it's the type of book that's. You then want to read 10 other books from the people she quotes in it, if you get me before I get into the chat, I want to get the ocarina paws out of the way early so that I'm not interrupting our conversation.

So here's the ocarina. That was the ocarina pause, you might have heard an advert there. And support from this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the patrie on page Patreon dot com forward slash the Blind by podcast. This is an independent podcast. It's my full time job. This podcast is How I Earn a Living. And the Patriot Act allows me to do this as my job so I can put it out every week and put maximum amount of time into making sure that I'm putting out the best podcast.

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Like the podcast shared the podcast Live Review. You're not a crack. So the book is called What White People Can Do Next. It's out today. It's written by Emma Dabiri. And here's the conversation we had.

And then I'm going to I want to take it just by chapter. By chapter, if I can. Yeah, it's regarding the books. The book is called What White People Can Do Next.

And like, why did you why did you write this book? What's the why did you write this book? A combination of things, but probably primarily like frustration and a fear, not fear, but frustration and concern that we're being presented with a historic opportunity for change that we're squandering.

Mm hmm. Because the right questions are being asked and the right frameworks, frameworks aren't being used.

Did you feel kind of reluctant to write a book like this? Because your last book, your you're an academic in African history and you're an academic and art and like. You weren't necessarily speaking about race, you were just speaking about writing about the history of Africa and African cultures and African hair, and now is it fair to say this is a political book?

Yeah, I think that would be a fair I think that would be a fair assessment. I mean, like my. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I teach is, you know, history and kind of cultural production across various different mediums. My PhD is actually in sociology and I look at the construction of racial categories. But with my kind of output in terms of public facing work, I've been far less interested in conversations about racism, per say, and I've been far more inspired by African knowledge systems and black cultures and their diversity, different forms of cultural production.

But I do have like a strong I have like kind of years of scholarship looking at how racial categories, how and why they came into being, what the effects of that and what the effects of that are. And in this current in this current climate, I felt compelled to actually speak more directly about racism, because it just seemed to me like a lot of the discourse seemed untethered from theory around race, which could really which could really help, I think, form the direction that we go in.

Like a lot of it just feels untethered from a lot of the current discourse. And anti-racism seems untethered from theory and a historic and in many ways I see a lot of inaccuracies and I see a lot of reinvestment actually in the in the categories of race that we should understand as really fictitious and that we should be trying our best to kind of dissolve rather than be invested.

Could you give us a little history of the construct of racism? Because I've seen you speak about it before online and you place it at the foot of the British Empire of British colonialism. Yeah, give us a little just speak about that. Yeah, absolutely.

So the racial categories, black and white, that we understand ourselves and each other through today are a colonial construct. They're an English innovation. I have to point out that it's the English in the colonial Caribbean and the what will become the United States rather than the English in England and the invention of the white race and the quote unquote Negro race, as it's referred to at the time, is a reaction, is a response to this environment, is a response to what's happening in Barbados.

So the English have English people have gone to Barbados, they have stolen from the indigenous people.

They have started these kind of huge plantations and farms and brought over initially, actually lots of indentured Irish and lots of people who have been taken there from Ireland, from Kamal's symbolics activities in Ireland at the time.

And these are Irish people who are they're not slaves, they're not enslaved, but they are indentured labourers who were there in pretty gruelling and shitty circumstances quite rapidly, the English landlords and some Scottish landlords as well.

The two main two main groups that realised they need like a lot more labour and they start bringing in, like loads of Africans from from West Africa.

It's a it's a history that I feel like uniquely kind of connected to being both Irish and Nigerian. I'm like, wow, on both sides, both sides of my heritage are the two groups of people that were that were used or that race was invented because of the way they were being used. So basically what you have is Irish indentured laborers and enslaved Africans. And I specifically don't say like white and black because the. Hasn't that concept isn't haven't been popularized yet, but you have indentured Irish and enslaved Africans working on these plantations and then you have them like basically coming together.

And there's a series of uprisings in Barbados where they come together and attack their landlords. And this is deeply threatening to the power system because there's more of them than there is of this like small, small elites.

And it's as a reaction to those uprisings that you see the first introduction of the idea of white people and black people as racialized categories. And you see it codified into law in a in these slave codes that bring in, like, really draconian laws against how black people will be treated and handled. There's two things going on. One of these is one of the motivations behind this new concept of white people and black people is to justify the enslavement of Africans that, you know, these economies, these individuals and ultimately these economies and the Western world will become incredibly dependent on because this system of capitalist slave exploits, exploited, slave exploited labor, chattel slave labor is is is generating a hell of a lot of money.

So in order to justify the exploitation of Africans, this notion of racism is introduced saying these people aren't fully human. And it's when we start to see the introduction of or the Association of Blackness with lots of negative characteristics and this concept of inferiority. And by the same token, we see whiteness with this inherent kind of belief in the superiority of these two groups. One is superior and one is inferior, according to this new logic. So it does that.

But another thing it does is that the indentured laborers start to be taught that their interests lie, their allegiances are more with people that share the same racial newly racialized identity as them, rather than the people who share far more of a class identity with them and the circumstances of whose lives are actually more more similar to. So it shuts down these nascent Solidarity's that are emerging between indentured European indentured labor and and African and enslaved Africans. Then from Barbados, we see it in Jamaica.

And then the next time we see excuse me, the way we see it in what will become North America is in colonial Virginia, where, again, there is an uprising, what was called a union of commoners, where indentured English and enslaved Africans came together and the rest for the rebellion called Bacons revolt. And again, that was deeply threatening to the power system. And after that, the response was to start to introduce this concept of black and white and to codify it into law.

So quaintness was dangled as a carrot in front of the indentured servants to say that you should not be joining with these people because this system says that you are better, it says you're better.

And then it gave them it gave those indentured servants. It put them in a hierarchy where they were no longer where they were very, very distinct from enslaved Africans.

And they had the kind of power of life and death over the kind of newly minted black race you had a situation whereby, like black people, people of African descent couldn't give evidence against white people. So even a very materially poor white person could essentially do anything they wanted to a black person, and that person would never be able to give evidence against them. They also kind of degraded black people to the to to the extent where in and gave. Yes.

Relative advantages to to India, to the indentured labourers. And they could now they could also see their rights enshrined in contract law, whereas black people became this category where there were no rights. So that's one of the big differences that there's no there's no rights. You have no human rights. You have no you have no recourse to justice. You are just an object. Whereas the indentured labourers, while not while having. Kind of poor material conditions, in contrast to the rich, had the opportunity to join that class at some point if they could kind of acquire enough wealth.

And you do see instances of people, of white people who start off, you know, poor and kind of are able to able to become quite wealthy in this new.

Yes, in this new context, because that's something like, you know, we have that phrase in Ireland. Take in the soup.

I suppose you've never heard Takemitsu before. Haven't forgotten.

Taken the soup is it's a bit of a silly, silly enough term, but it's what we say when so apparently joined the Irish famine, when Irish Catholics were starving and couldn't have food, Protestant organizations would offer soup to Catholics if they were willing to convert to Protestantism. So it means like a traitor to your people. But what I prefer to say is that the Irish diaspora, whatever the Irish went around the world, whether it be the Caribbean or up as far as New York, we essentially took the soup by committing acts of violence towards Africans or African-Americans so that we could climb the ladder of whiteness.

Yeah, and we're like, that's such a great analogy, actually. Yeah. That that makes a lot of what I'd like to hear.

I'd like to hear Irish people speak about it more, because when I speak about race on my podcast and I'm addressing a white Irish audience, I always try and bring it back to colonialism. I always try and say we were colonized. We don't have an excuse. We're able to it didn't happen to me, but we're able to look at our own history and see things like the penal laws, things like the famine and go well, places like Nigeria.

What kind of nice to why can't we look at our own history and then have a common ground or a shared empathy with people from those countries rather than identifying with the system of oppression?

Yeah, so I would say it's whiteness that does that. That's the thing that does so that the history of colonization between the Irish and, you know, Africa, Asia, the Americas, there are so many like there are so many parallels. But the one thing that is distinctly different is the Irish come to be racialized as white in a way that none of those other groups do. The process in the United States is is is is slightly different in terms of when the Irish come, when the kind of millions of Irish come in the eighteen from the eighteen forties, like fleeing the fleeing the the famine, they're not immediately, as I'm sure I've heard you talking about before, they're not immediately identified as as, as, as white, you know, but they distinguish themselves from the kind of they distinguish themselves often through quite an investment in whites, in white supremacy, you know, and to really clearly delineate themselves from black Americans.

He might think there would be a natural sympathy towards or a sense of kind of parallel struggle in what the Irish have experienced as a result of British colonialism and as a result of what the black people have experienced as a result of enslavement. Something I write about in the book as well, which I find so interesting, is, you know, when Daniel O'Connell was going to America and trying to drum up support for the because he was, you know, like a I guess the kind of he could see those type of coalitions that I'm talking about in in the book that are so important and the kind of shared struggle that exists between so many oppressed people.

And so why he was like, you know, kind of a great Irish freedom fighter. He was also like a committed slavery abolitionist when he went to the United States to when he went to America to try and drum up support for abolition amongst Irish Americans. He was kind of met with contempt, actually. And this was these were Irish Americans who saw the who saw emancipation for black people as a direct threat to to labour. You know, they were like, well, these people will be in competition with us for jobs.

It's better that they're that they're enslaved.

So there was actually like a very pro slavery Irish lobby. And then the other thing that was going on was. This time in the states, immigrants were being looked at with suspicion and there was this idea that they were bringing the politics from their from their own countries into America, that they had anti-American values. So for the Irish Americans, rather than align themselves with a cause that might be seen as the result of their anger towards kind of colonialism and the English, they were like will distance ourselves from from that and kind of invest in this American institution of of of slavery.

So why there should have been solidarity. There was quite, quite the opposite.

And you can see to there as well, they kind of stop identifying as Irish because in the seventeen hundreds in New York, the first ever street gang in New York were called the Caribbean Islands, and they were exclusively made up of people from Kerry in New York.

And all they wanted to do was rob English people. And that was it, which means that even even then, they still considered themselves Irish. But then something happens where they start to identify as American whites are Irish American.

And that's when you see all that shit happen, like the New York draft rights of the eighteen sixties where the Irish population of New York committed unbelievable acts of violence towards their African-American neighbors. And there's a lovely quote in your book about capitalism, where you say capitalism, like whiteness is a pervasive organism. It infiltrates the innermost aspects of human experience and transforms our understanding of the world, our relationships with ourselves and with others. You have a nice clash of capitalism in the book, which is fantastic.

You want to talk a bit about that?

Yes. So one of my frustrations with the current anti-racist movement is the kind of absence of discussion or analysis of both class and capitalism in which has been replaced instead with this kind of almost fetishization of interpersonal privilege.

And, you know, sometimes people are like, oh, well, what are we dealing with? Are we dealing with racism or capitalism? Like, just kind of give us we're just focusing on one.

And that is exactly the kind of atomised approach to issues that leads us to not connecting the dots that need to be connected and creates inadequate responses to the to the oppressions that we design, that we claim to desire to to to want to overcome within this period where we see the kind of invention of the white the white race and the black race.

It's no coincidence that this is happening.

Part is, as I was explaining, part of part of that origin story is to justify the exploitation of labor for this new system of capitalism, that is, that the kind of plantation economies are completely dependent on. So capitalism is like a system, a system of production in which inequality in inequality needs to exist within it, like capitalism requires inequality to exist. So talking about kind of like achieving equality within a system that requires inequality to exist just seems kind of like like wasted energy to me.

So I think that needs that needs to be identified.

But also when I say it's colonized, like I remember what it is, I say, but if colonized, you said capitalism, like whiteness is a pervasive organism that infiltrates the innermost aspects of human experience.

Yeah. So it's not only that, it's not only that the capitalism and race and by extension, racism and race is invented to create racism. So that's something that's really key to remember. Race and capitalism are siblings and we see their kind of genesis and origin at the same historical period with the same kind of intention and purpose. So there's that. But then there's also the fact that now the form of neo liberalism, which is like a permutation of of capitalism that we've been bequeathed from the kind of late 1970s is one that, you know, has completely transformed our ideas around collectivism.

And as a as an ideology, it's one. That is like it's one that is completely reliant on individualism, and we we it fosters a sense of competition between people whereby in order to survive the right, they thrive in order to survive and be successful. Under the terms of that system, we have to have this like inherent competition and sense of individualism. I can see that individualism at the expense of a collectivism as really animating this current form of activism.

So even that the the form of activism that is is kind of predominant in this moment is one that is deeply neoliberal and deeply individualist. So even our responses to these forms of oppression actually kind of reproduce the norms of of that oppression. So I'm just like, oh, my foot.

And another thing, am I right? Do you ever get suspicious? I don't know. Suspicious to work. But one thing that makes me feel uneasy is so much discourse happens, in particular on a place like Twitter.

And you're not a fan of Twitter and neither am I. I can see your head is fucking melted on Twitter.

Yeah. Yeah. And but what makes me upset is for some reason, Twitter has become a place where very, very important conversations are happening, not just about race, but about many things. Very important conversations are happening consistently about Twitter. I view it. It's a video game where people are given points for kind of having the best complaint or for having the most. The response thus elicits the strongest emotions and reactions. So now and Twitter is also one of the richest companies in the world.

And the resources that it extracts are the data and data is just the word for our behavior. So now this giant corporation has decided here is a playground where everyone can have their discussions, but we set the rules and the rules are you must have these discussions in a limited amount of words, lack nuance.

And the fucking comments that get rewarded are the ones not that make the most sense or that elicit compassion, but the ones that make people most angry are most afraid. And that, to me, the more and more I look at Twitter, the more I go, something's not right. I don't think social media is the correct forum for a lot of these discussions that we're having, because all it seems to do is make people really angry. And when we get really angry, companies like Twitter make huge amounts of money.

I mean, you've just hit the nail on the head like I. I completely agree. And the nature of the platform is to game Afie division and to reward outrage and to reward reduc to the reduction of complexity.

And you know what performant ism.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And I think it's like really fucking sinister high arousal emotions is what they actually call it in Twitter at the highest levels before. Yeah. So they have designed this to reward high arousal emotions. So high arousal emotions tend to be around where one group feels subjugated and another group disagrees.

Well, that's that's that landscape, you know, that's exactly what it is. And so you see people with the the shallowest and most divisive politics, shallow politics and divisive tendencies really accumulating likes retreat's followers and therefore power and influence. Close keg's. Exactly. And that rage is is is the thing where there are people who have far more considered complex, not even complex, you know, because I actually just just considered and nuanced explanations of things. But that gets lost.

That gets lost in the fray, you know, and drowned drowned out by those reductive reactive forms of outrage.

And the fact that kind of, you know, conversations about race and racism, that this is one of the major arenas where people are getting educated and having these conversations is a fucking disaster. Actually, you know, like I think there's a lot of utility in social.

Media in terms of if we saw it as a starting point, you know, like I've learned so much about before Twitter, my understanding of racism was basically I don't hate people who are a different color.

And that was it. I knew nothing about microaggression. I knew nothing about systemic racism.

A lot of things I learned from my brother.

And that's why we're fatigued by microaggression. Yeah. What's your opinion on microaggression?

I think that while they exist and while there's something that I have come up against, you know, like pretty consistently, although I would not have called them microaggression, they are symptomatic of far more pervasive forces. But because they are.

Could you describe a microaggression for someone who doesn't know what it is? Yeah. So a microaggression might be I mean, it's a range of things. It's so it might be like in in I don't know, like it has different.

There's a range of things. So it might be like an insensitive use of language, but it might also be like an intentionally offensive use of language. You know, there's actually like kind of a range of what it can be, I guess something like in terms of I've written a lot about, well, I wrote a book about hair and the kind of politics of of Afro hair and the kind of entitlement that a lot of white strangers feel towards touching black people in unsolicited fashions and particularly our hair.

And, you know, that's one of the things that would be faster than microaggression. There's there's a range of things, but I just find the emphasis on those interpersonal. So they're part of an ecosystem of racism. But I feel that the the more superficial manifestations of these systems take up all the bandwidth. So we kind of get caught. We kind of get caught in a bit of a tit for tat back. And no one chats about structure.

Exactly.

People say structure, but then they don't talk about it. Then they talk about the interpersonal and structure is sidelined.

What we don't talk about capitalism, because another lovely quote here that you have is, is this one really stuck out to me when you were talking about Profarmer Division and you said long gone, it seems, are the organized strikes of the black liberation movement of the 60s. As Lipsitz notes, there's little evidence of the parallel institutions that were built and the freedom schools, the community banks, the community land trust, the breakfast clubs. What are you speaking about there?

When you when you speak about that and you're using it as opposed to we say online performative, you say we seem to have replaced doing anything with saying something, and then you go on to speak about these structural things that happened in the 60s. What are you getting at there?

So where people are trying to organize to create a material and concrete change in people's circumstances as opposed to now where the.

There's not even a consistent set of demands like I don't really know what people are asking for in the current moment beyond a trance, beyond like kind of asking those who are deemed with having privileged to transfer their privilege in some way. Now, if that was presented as a redistribution of resources in the various ways to go about that, that would make some sort of sense to me. But nothing so clear or concrete seems to be suggested. It seems to be more of a linguistic or verbal game of, I don't know, kind of like just chastising people about privilege and saying they need to transfer the benefits of that privilege.

But then with no kind of meaningful way of that happening beyond, what are some of the things I see calling out, you know, companies not for the capitalist exploitation that they that they, you know, participate in, but because they haven't cast enough diverse models or because they don't have the right range of color foundations or, you know, because boycotting a hairdresser, because they don't do all textures of hair, it all just seems kind of interpersonal again, you know, rather than what we've seen with the organizing of the 60s and 70s where people there's land trusts, there are schools there, breakfast clubs, there are people like actually organizing in the communities that that they that they are talking about and that they represent rather than kind of posturing online because that's the thing.

And we spoke about this on on my BBC series, you know, the the shady thing about existing trying to live today and trying to live good, but understanding that everything that I enjoy in my life, whether it's the clothes that I wear or the food that I eat, has been is as a result of the exploitation of people in the global south. But I've been completely sheltered from it. I'm not aware of it. I have to go and search for these things.

And what you're saying there about calling out these multinational corporations that make billions because they don't have the right amount of representation and then it's like, but what about what they're actually doing in order to create these products? How about looking at the structure of that? Exactly.

You know, I was seeing kind of in the immediate aftermath of the of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, I was seeing some people online using that as an opportunity to call out, you know, these fast fashion brands who use sweatshop labor of, you know, women in from from minority groups and in the UK and in and in the global south. But rather than take exception with that, they just wanted the work and they just wanted the fast fashion labels to put out a statement saying they support Black Lives Matter and I mean that.

Do you just to feel actually full speech. But do you think do you ever feel that?

Because when I see that to like I don't know what the fuck to do, I have to look, you know, I use an iPhone like as I say, I remind myself, like I'm I'm dripping in blood. Even in that BBC show, the premise of it was to find out how many slaves do people own. And the answer is, is that people in the West today, we benefit from about 70 slaves each just to just to eat, just to.

Yeah, to fuck and to wear our clothes. And we are sheltered from this. No, I don't. I think most people are aware of this. We all I've been hearing about sweatshops since I was seven. We all kind of know, but we use a cognitive dissonance. Do you ever feel that people go for this performative thing because it's the only way to feel some type of control like like saying to yourself, you know, when you're trying to get off cigarettes, so you go home, you buy 20, you smoke one and throw the packet into a hedge.

I know. Try and give up cigarettes and buy a packet and smoking twenty five like myself saying you're going to quit yourself making these are known or the classic given up cigarettes.

And I didn't buy any, but when I'm in the pub I take all the people that really smoke. Yeah. Yeah. Cognitive dissonance.

Yeah. So I think that's partially it. People feel like you know it kind of feels overwhelming. It feels like. It just feels overwhelming, like it's too much hard work, but I also think it's a mother's too much hard work, that it's impossible, but I also feel it is partially neo liberal. Identity politics that are obsessed with kind of.

Representation rather than, you know, structural change, and again, something that's different between now and although I'm seeing resistance to this, I'm seeing like growing numbers of, for instance, something I've seen on Twitter is like a lot of growing numbers of young black Marxists who were like very theoretically astute and very involved in organizing. And I think that's been a really interesting backlash against the more neo liberal identity politics. I saw somebody refer to it as a seat at the table, Twitter or representations, whether, you know, reactionary, kind of like anti intellectual and anti intellectual directly.

That has been the the power has considered that to be by far the most dangerous. That's the one that the power structures always try and crack down on when movements move towards Marxist thinking that actually deconstruct power.

Yeah, absolutely. If you ever hear of Flamingo magazine in Britain. Yes. Yes, I do see that article. There was an article in The Guardian about yeah, yeah.

The Sword. The Flamingo magazine was it was a magazine in Britain that was made for people from the Caribbean in Britain.

And then it turned out it was funded by my five six. And then you're like, why the fuck are they doing that? And it's like, am I funded a magazine for black people in Britain so that they could control the narrative so that it didn't become it was anti-communist. Yeah. And speak about blackness, but don't speak about bad about capitalism. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it was it was presented as being quite creative and kind of like, like, you know, a creative space rather than one that was seemingly like very conservative. And there's a lot of subterfuge. Yes. So there's actually a quote from the book if it's I'm quoting Cornel West, the his great crack. I love him. He's he's fantastic. I'm sorry. Let me just I should have had it open. Let me just grab it up, because I think he speaks really powerfully to this today.

Those who peddle divisive rhetoric and shallow politics are frequently named the spokespeople of our times. In the words of Black Liberation Scholar Cornel West. If you do it in a way that is easily co-opted, you will be celebrated while you pose and posture as something that you are not. So when I heard him saying that, I was like, Oh, Cornell knows what's up. He's watching these people.

He feels so if you're just if you're talking about, I guess this, I guess to talk about anti-racism is seen as so provocative that often people don't actually listen to the specificity sometimes of what the voice is saying.

Is this somebody that is like kind of looking for collective liberation or is it somebody that's looking for personal individuals, individual enrichment? You know, is it somebody who's promoting an idea so that it is speaking a lot about these issues so that they can get a seat at the table? Or is it somebody that's speaking about these issues because they want to overturn the table and build something new that replaces the deeply unequal and destructive kind of systems that we that we that we have now?

There's another idea that runs through the book of like fugitivity that if I could just do a quick quote from that as well.

So fugitivity is a concept from Fred Fred Moten, who is again in the black radical tradition, and he is a I guess, a philosopher so callously that this little section, 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 to co-opt the tremulous expressions of resistance that are gaining volume as the people rise up against death.

The issue of corruption is pertinent. Articulations of dissent too often mirror the parameters of our oppression, reproducing oppressive systems, unwittingly reinforcing them or attempting to reverse them or indeed diverse them to make them more inclusive when in truth they need to dissolve. Bioaccumulate Faye describes our current system as a replication of the slave ship, complete with the various levels that existed on board in actual slave ships. The captured Africans were chained in the bottom in the dark, dank homes, with the European slaves on the top deck living it up in the fresh air.

Yet, although they were on different levels and as such had radically different experiences of the ship, they were all still aboard a vessel of destruction. Ikoma Lafe 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. It is not enough to make exploitative systems more inclusive. Do we want to get on the top deck or do we want to destroy the goddamn ship?

So which when you take it back to what you were speaking about regarding Barbados and we said the. Irish indentured servants, they had whiteness dangled in front of them and they became overseers and eventually became slave owners themselves, perpetuate that system rather than uniting with the chattel slaves that worked alongside to overthrow the system for collective liberation.

That's such a good parallel to draw to that analogy, one in one chapter in the book, you denounced the White Savior and you argue that to replace the white savior with coalition identifying common ground. What do you mean by that?

So one of the can I just do another quote on the Fredman, who I mentioned a moment ago. The theorist, poet and philosopher Fred Moten describes coalition as emerging out of the recognition that is fucked up for you in the same way that we've already realized that it's fucked up for us. And then he goes on to say, I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker.

So basically, that's the thing I like. Black people don't need like charity or benevolence. Like the whole allai ship framework to me is like actually like deeply patronizing.

You say you don't like the word. I like to start the book.

I don't like the word ally. I know it reinforces the power dynamic. It reinforces the power dynamic where I've seen so many times the ally and the victim.

I've seen that written, you know, and that just goes that just brings me back to, like my childhood and like choker boxes and pennies for black babies and the missionaries to Africa and the African victim and the black victim and the benevolent white like benefactor and ally ship is way too close to that to that fucking power dynamic.

And also, it's like a favor. It's like a it's like, you know, it's the charitable allies, like, I don't need your help. I need you to realize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly.

I also feel as well about Ali's ship. It's it has more to do with a white person's expression of guilt than it has to do with an actual desire to an actual desire to to to confront power for a mutual good. Exactly.

Exactly.

So there's a whole there's a whole chapter in one chapter because it's a short book, but there's a whole section on guilt and shame and the relationship between guilt and kind of warped responses to racism, of which I lightship would be would be an example of.

So rather than appealing to the charitable nature of nice white people that might come on board to help and be allies, I would like to see for people to identify, you know, the deprivations and inequalities that are perpetuated as a result of capitalism that, you know, most people in the world are in some way deprived because of of course, it plays out to varying extents. And it's not to conflate that with racism. White people aren't experiencing aren't experiencing racism, you know, but that doesn't mean that lots of white people aren't having, like, a terrible existence because of the deprivations of inequality and capitalism and what's so what's to me so inspiring about some of the organizing of the past that I referenced in the book.

I look at Fred Thompson, who was the who was the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, and the way in which he was able to create something that he called the Rainbow Coalition, which was organized between like Latino.

So basically, it was black America and the Black Panthers were whites from the South or something.

Yeah, Latino gangs and then white, poor white southerners, you know, said groups that would be diametrically opposed. In fact, those the white Southerners that he formed the Rainbow Coalition with the young Patriots, they were called they had the Confederate flag as like a symbol. The Confederate flag is like the symbol of the slave owning south. So these people that would be imagined to be like, you know, diametrically opposed to each other could actually identify that if they worked together.

Because so while the young Patriots, the white working class southerners, are not experiencing racism, they are experiencing police brutality, as the Latino and obviously black groups are, and they are experiencing like entrenched poverty and inequality because of capitalism. So. Working together, they identify, look, we can build like a mass movement because we have shared interests rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated to see themselves as enemies along racial lines. So the Rainbow Coalition actually like they worked these groups worked independently.

They work separately to each other. But in communication with each other and organizing towards a common goal, Fred Hampton was killed by was killed by the police about kind of within a year after he had started doing this work.

So it never gets really dangerous shit to the structures of power. That's really dangerous shit.

So it never it never came to fruition. But it's so interesting to me that also Malcolm knows I'm Martin Luther King, just in the year before he was assassinated, was also working on the Poor People's Campaign, where he was working to bring all the American poor across racial lines together to form a mass movement advocating for a form of universal basic income. This is like in the nineteen sixties. So it's just very interesting to me how a lot of these kind of icons of black organizing, civil rights and black power were actually moving towards creating coalitions amongst all oppressed people because they knew then, you know, the numbers are far more.

I mean, that is most of the world, you know. And the thing is to like this is something for Irish people. That we have a history of that, like I had on my podcast before, Bernadette Devlin, the McKlusky. Yeah. And she spoke about like Bernadette was brought over in the 70s by the Irish Americans to speak to the Americans about how terrible things were in the north of Ireland and the Irish Americans welcome to her. And they put her on television.

And then Bernadette says, hold on a second, Irish Americans, we're being treated at home the way that we're treating people of color and black people here in this country. What the fuck is that about? And then she was and she tried to give that she was given the freedom, the key of New York City, and she tried to give it to the families.

Yes, she was fucking shut down very quickly and they didn't start ringing Bernadette up again.

I don't imagine she was upset. So they weren't ready for it. They weren't ready. They wanted this Danny boy, remember when we used to be oppressed always in this awful type of thing, they weren't ready to confront? I mean, the history of the Irish in America with the formation of the police. The police in America is a very, very Irish institution. Even there over the summer with the protests in America, when you saw the American police, the way they were deliberately attacking journalists and they were being deliberately provocative on camera, that that's known as the Miami method of policing.

And it was invented by a man from Dublin in the 1980s.

Oh, my God, yes. I don't remember, isn't it John Timoney?

But like he was an Irish American police officer, born in Dublin, went to America and literally farmed this way of controlling protests where you attack journalists, you you display terrifying power, even though it looks like you should be showing up, showing a nice side of the police. It's like not go the opposite, go straight up fascism. And this is what would work.

I invented that in the fucking 80s.

Wow. Wow. Yeah.

That's not the proudest part of innovation.

And one thing to that you touch on in the book, and it's something you and I have spoken about before for for white people to. Acknowledge and take ownership of our racism to to be able to say I grew up in a system that told me I was better. Why would I not be racist as opposed to running away from it?

And as because the thing is, what I found, what made growing grown up the way racism has been portrayed in films like American History, X and stuff, they're not they're not saying racism is bad because it's it's harmful to black people.

They're saying to white people, don't be the wrong type of white person. Yeah. Yeah. As in all racists.

You mean people with shaved heads who behave in an uncouth fashion.

This is classism and it has nothing to do with coalition or solidarity.

It's just not you need to do racism differently, which is behind closed doors quietly. But don't do it like with tattoos and a shaved head.

What are you, white trash? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So but I then learned from that the worst thing anyone could ever call you was a racist. That means that you are violent and lower class. And then as soon as anyone says to a white person, online racism.

We get this extreme reaction, what racist me, yeah, a visceral reaction, I remind myself every day, of course, I sometimes have blind spots around any group of people who experienced marginalization because I was raised in a society that normalized these things. So I have to recognize it, take ownership of it. And then as a fucking adult who's capable of critical thinking and empathy, work on it. Not the same with race, the same with homophobia, the same with misogyny.

I was raised to benefit from these systems. So take ownership of it and go now I'm fucking out of what can I do that like that?

If just everybody like it's everybody, you know, everybody has internalized these messages because they've been they've been invented like centuries before, like any of us were born. So one of the things I'll just do a quick a quick quote from the book is first things first. This is the most basic, if at once the easiest and perhaps simultaneously the most difficult, because I know you've already started denying it. But stop the vehement denial, especially to yourself, that you have racist beliefs.

Race was invented to create racist beliefs. It goes with the territory. So we have to stop acting like racism as some, like, anomaly, you know, that it's just these extreme or explicit. It's kind of like moments of abuse. It's just it's so present in just the assumptions and stereotypes that you have about that you have about people.

And I also say in the book, like, you don't you don't have responsibility. Like you don't have to feel guilt for what your ancestors did, depending on who your ancestors are. But you don't have to have guilt for what they did.

You're not you're not responsible for what your ancestors did, but you're responsible for what you do next, you know, so exactly what you're talking about. You know, that process of it, just acknowledging that racism, some fucking anomaly, that it's actually like racism isn't like some isn't an anomaly. It's just these are these notions and assumptions and stereotypes about groups of people are kind of what our cultures have been built on. So acknowledge that and then start to kind of unpack that, you know, and grapple with it.

But it's like you can't grapple with it if you're denying if you're denying that it exists. And that's why I think the mainstreaming of this information about why and when race was invented would just normalize this idea. We have that. That's one of the things about kind of anti-racism. It seems like a lot of anti-racism of the moment. It seems to operate as though there are other outcomes possible. There are outcomes other than racism possible. While we continue to view the world through the racialized lens, which we view it, there's going to be racism if we continue to if we continue to understand race in the same way that we do.

And we understand it as something that has kind of like a biological truth status rather than something that is an ideology that was invented with a very specific and particular purpose in mind.

Before we leave right in the three minutes, who should buy your book and why am so what white people can do next is a provocation within kind of three pages. I talk about the limitations of addressing a generic group of white people. So I kind of set up whiteness to disassemble it because I asked people online and the amount of DMS I got where people were going.

How does she feel about writing a title that's deliberately provocative?

You know, the type of white people are.

Yeah, I know. I've got like I think that's good because no one's going to fucking walk past your book.

I've got loads of I'm battling like loads of emails of people who've actually gone out of their way to find my email address, like to just be like this is like absolute disgrace. How dare you call me a white person?

You're being racist, Emma. Yeah, like, I'm being patronizing and I'm being racist. And what else am I being? Oh, I can't even remember. But the thing is, like, I do have a massive reservation in, like, instructing white people in the way that the current movement moment movement does. So I'm kind of setting it up to challenges, you know. But then I am also interested that white people are actually so offended by it because I'm just like a little bit like.

It has limitations, which I address, but you're deeply offended by a comma, like, you know, it's being called a black person was the worst thing I'd ever, the worst thing I'd ever go like. People are acting like people.

The white person is like offensive somehow because the black person isn't offensive when you pull the black when you are a black person, especially growing up in Ireland.

And I was you recalled a lot of things other than black. So it's just interesting when people talk about sensitivity and snowflakes and being easily triggered and then like the the phrase white people seemed to send people into, like, overload. But yes, I would say it's a book for everyone. It's a book for people that feel frustrated by the current conversation and can see that it has inaccuracies, contradictions and hypocrisies in us. You know, so and also also people that really want things to be different.

My final proposal is quite an unexpected one. I think I start to kind of talk about consciousness and other ways I talk about is that the Post activism, the Post activism chapter.

Yeah. And I start I talk about how kind of there's this ecological like a Scots Gaelic. I really wanted it to be Irish, but I spoke to like I spoke to quite a few Irish linguists. And they're like, no, it just it just doesn't mean this like an Irish. But if Scots Gaelic a word called Ducos, I think it is a micro financing and wrong. And it's like this ecological principle that that looks at the human and the non-human and the relationship between people, between people and the land.

And one of the purpose of the proposal that I make at the end is I reject the notion that people of different races should could be allies, but in linking in creating common. In in in creating or linking common struggle, you know, I talk a lot about environmental justice at the end and how we all how we have to like where we're faced with the destruction of our biosphere, you know, and that's actually kind of pressing.

And our relationship to the natural world has been we've been disconnected from that through like from the same historical point, from the same origins that created whiteness, that created capitalism. They've also completely disrupted our relationship with the environment. So I talk about ecology and, you know, are in as opposed to identity. It gets quite philosophical. I can't really get into it now.

But as opposed to these kind of rigid identities that are based on fictitious kind of categories, how we as as humans, we have this entanglement with the natural world in the world around us and how that's kind of been bulldozed, bulldozed over by modernity and how you can see in something like that ecological principle that kind of predates colonialism, this relationship that people have between themselves and their environment and their land, and how we can kind of like tap back into some of those forms of consciousness.

And I propose that perhaps plants are while people can't be our allies, maybe it's plants that are that are our allies and then kind of make us lot things.

So, yeah, in that chapter, the unexpected side was such a meandering answer.

No, you're grand just to finish up for me, who I think would really benefit from this book. The exact people who are pissed off by the title, the type of people who there's there's certain people who they hate, what they call wonkiness.

And these are the people that this book would actually speak to because the book, it's it's Antipov Farm Activism. It's anti what the phrase wonkiness has become. And it's common sense, historical, and really it's just really concise as well.

I know you said earlier, it's a small book. It is a small book, but that's I like that about it. You could read this in a day and come away with so much and there's so many. The people you called in is there's so many other books you can then read from reading your book. Yeah, well, yeah, thank you. And actually I did have one I did have one friend who read it, and he was just like, oh, how do you feel about the possibility that bad faith actors, you are, you know, anti Woog might kind of, you know, try and like might be interested in what you're saying because you do challenge a lot of the kind of what are seen as the.

Shibboleths of the current kind of discourse or, you know, a lot of those buzzwords like, well, I do. I didn't want to say that, but a lot of the buzz words and the kind of terms that I think have some utility at some point, but have now just kind of become untethered or meaning lately. So, yeah, I think people that have, like, frustration with the kind of like strict ideological kind of demands and the and the the the point scoring and the posturing and the performative issue and the hypocrisy that exists in the in the current discourse around anti-racism.

Yeah, I think they'll find it appealing, but I realize the name might be off putting to them. But the name is a subversion.

Yeah. And the other thing, people with the bad faith, I don't think they can take something from this book because at all points, your anticolonial, your anticapitalist and these bad faith people, the people who decry welcomeness in that way, they're always doing it to service capitalism. Yes. They're always right wing capitalists. That's their agenda. And that's why they speak against things like wantonness. They're going to read your book and they'll go not I'm not touching this.

This is anticapitalist, anticolonial. There's nothing here for me, are there is if they want to change their mind. But you know what?

Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah, I totally get you. I guess a lot of oftentimes they, they have they have kind of strawman arguments isn't it. Like saying that like they have these issues with the movement but they're I guess they're or the discourse, but they're just using that as an excuse because their real agenda is, as you said, kind of. Right. Kind of right wing capitalist support the current system.

Yes. They want to say they want to, but there's just so many things that it's easy to kind of point out as inconsistent and kind of hypocritical in some of the current discourse that you see online that I guess they just like target that.

Can I get you on one last point? Them I just saw in the chapter stop, reduce in black people to one dimension. You said don't believe in some imagined inherent goodness of all black people as a response to your own self indulgent guilt at racism. I'm not going to say believe black women or anything trite like that, because funnily enough, not all black women think the same way or indeed agree with each other. So if your mantra is believe black women, you're going to get some mixed messages and come away pretty confused.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds so obvious. Yeah, but like one of the things that I I'm just going to respond to that with another quick quote that I can't believe I'm writing this because it feels so painfully obvious, yet the framework can be so infantilizing and patronizing that it is sadly necessary.

But here's the thing. Like you, black people are people with the full range of complexity, contradiction and emotion that comes with humanity until white people are prepared to see us as innocent or indeed as less than saintly, depending on what variety of white perspective we are dealing with. Racism is present. While there is a strong narrative of black inherent dishonesty amongst racists. At times I've seen almost an inverse of that in some anti-racist allies say that right there. That's the the performative fellowship or the it's the troll gearboxes.

It's this it's the part of fellowship where you say this isn't about equality. This is just another form of structural racism. Just what a smile on his face.

Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of paternalistic and it's kind of like treating people like they're kind of like one one dimensional or just like inherently good, because they are part of a group that has experienced historical oppression. Like nobody would imagine that like like obviously with white people, we know that there are many, many different agendas at play. You know, some white people are motivated by personal gain and interest. Other white people are far more about, you know, creating equal and just society is the exact same with black people, you know, like.

Oh, yeah.

So that's fantastic. We went out. Sorry for going over there about ten minutes. Listen, thank you so much for that. Thanks for your time. And try and relax for the evening if you can. So thank you to Emma Dabiri for that. Just check out the book, What White People Can Do Next from Alice Shaped Coalition. I'll see you next week. I hope you enjoy the lovely spring, enjoy that spring weather. Go out and get your government sanctioned five kilometre run and enjoy the lovely the longer evenings and smell the fucking air, smell that beautiful promise of life.

Amongst the leaves, the young leave Bode's. I've got some. I've got a few little heartaches in the past. I'm researching some hot, hot takes at the moment, some really interesting stuff. So hopefully next week I'll have a fully formed hot take to give you for an episode. Mind yourself. What's new in podcasting? Here's what we love, courtesy of Akehurst recommends. This is Ashwin Soothsaying and welcome to The Daily Beast's Fevered Dreams. I'm Will Summer a politics reporter at The Daily Beast, where I dig into all the darkest recesses of American extremism.

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