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What White People Can Do Next

From Allyship to Coalition

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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.

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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from May 15, 2021
      Both a blazing polemic against the concept of race as anything more than a means to create racism as well as a fundamental route toward active unification. In this follow-up to her excellent debut, Twisted (2020), Dabiri once again pulls no punches, offering a sharp, relevant critique and deconstruction of racial categorizations, particularly the common assumption of White people as the default norm. "If whiteness is defined as 'not being the other' and the subordination of that other," she writes, "then a reversal of status is deeply threatening to a person's identity." Deploying chapter titles like "Stop the Denial," "Interrogate Capitalism," and "Redistribute Resources," the author is consistently direct and urgent in her presentation. Skewering reductive online commentary and hollow performative gestures, Dabiri writes, "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." The author also describes inherent deficiencies of allyship--"offering charity at the expense of solidarity"--and makes a compelling case for vigorous coalition-building, which requires recognizing shared interests and working together for the greater good. She references scholars and authors such as Angela Davis, Fred Moten, Barbara Fields, George Lipsitz, bell hooks, and Cornel West to support her studied claims and intentional provocations. "In the history of humankind," she writes, " 'white people' are babies. You have only existed since 1661! (To be fair, so have 'black people.')" Dabiri dismisses Whiteness as "a generic term that collapses crucial distinctions in order to consolidate capital." Related to her argument that the B in black should not be capitalized because it reinforces division instead of dismantling it, she explains that she regularly places quotation marks around "black" and "white" to disrupt "the comfort with which we rely on that terminology." A must-read for anyone seeking to be an agent of much-needed societal change.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Languages

  • English

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