Emma Dabiri Instagram – No “new content” needed but just a reminder from 2021 ♾️
Allyship is dead. It must be abundantly clear to everyone that the allyship // privilege paradigm DOESNT WORK. A reimagined framework (and once the dust settles), the hard work of offline coalition building is the only way out of this…
“Whiteness’ was a concept popularized by convincing one group of people it would make their lives better, and demonstrating it through the brutal dehumanisation of another group. Now all “whites” even (especially) those who lived in shit conditions and had 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 500 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?
The allyship narrative is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness, proposing charity at the expense of solidarity. Little in the mainstream anti-racist schtick 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.
In the words I so often repeat of Fred Moten “I don’t need your help. I need you to recognise that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker” 🖤 | Posted on 07/Aug/2024 17:51:52
