What White People Can Do Next

From Allyship to Coalition

By: Emma Dabiri

Narrated by: Emma Dabiri

Brought to you by Penguin.

An incisive - and deeply practical - essay from the acclaimed author of Don't Touch My Hair

Stop the denial
Abandon guilt
Interrogate capitalism

When it comes to racial justice, how do we transform demonstrations of support into real and meaningful change? With intellectual rigour and razor-sharp wit, Emma Dabiri cuts through the haze of online discourse to offer clear advice.

© Emma Dabiri 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critic reviews

Essential . . . accessible and yet so full of scholarship. Witty, insightful, a must-read (Owen Jones)

Fascinating, invigorating . . . this book is for everyone . . . we have an academic like Emma Dabiri writing as if James Connolly and Audre Lorde had a love child (Jess Kav)

A gamechanging skewering of social-media discourse with a historically grounded analysis of anti-racism, collectivism, neoliberalism, and post-colonialism (Jason Okundaye)

Deftly and wittily deconstructs allyship and white saviour tropes to give an unblinkered takedown of what needs to happen next (Francesca Brown)

A thoughtful, nuanced read that is deftly researched and studded with relevant reflections from Dabiri's own life in Ireland, the UK and the US... Dabiri is on top form when applying her razor-sharp analysis to the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and racism, and how it harms us all (Georgina Lawton)

Vital, needs to be read by as many people as possible . . . One of those rare books that is completely clarifying and that you find yourself referring back to for years to come (Ellie Mae O'Hagan (via twitter))

I really loved What White People Can Do Next: so smart, so readable, so helpful. There is so much I hadn't thought about before - 'whiteness' as a confection, the empty performance of online rhetoric, the impossibility of transferring privilege - and so much that I had somewhere in the back of my mind but that I'd struggled to articulate. (Nick Hornby)

Refreshing . . . A nuanced and historical analysis of post-colonialism, anti-racism and collectivism. The sharpest of any book out on 'race' in recent years (Good Readers Club)

Vitally important and written with intelligence and insight, this book is an essential companion for anyone seeking to understand racism, on the journey towards an anti-racist future (Jeffrey Boakye)

Fantastic . . . a wonderfully concise deconstruction of race and racism Emma is challenging the inherent power dynamics in the concept of allyship, arguing instead for coalition when it comes to how people can confront the structures of racism

Necessary reading

Contrasting a lot of popular discourse around race today, this book unpacks and challenges our conceptualisations of whiteness, capitalism, advocacy and more.

It's incredibly composed and situated, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Really good and clear rhetoric

This was pretty good, I agreed with most of Emma's points. I'll need to listen a few more times to let everything sink in properly.

A few key ponts that Emma really hit the nail on the heard were the pettiness with which lefties engage in online. So if you say something off brand or don't agree with ALL your sphere's tenets, you're SOL. And this makes coalition building impossible.

Or the useless concept white people have a special ritual to transfer their privilege (I'm white), or white peoplebeing motivated by something as unproductiveas guilt. I'll need to look into theory more but I wasn't as aware just how manufactured race is until I listened to this.

I might come back and update this at a later point, but if you're reading this, this is a valuable piece of media to engage with.