Race and Anti-Racism

Starting next week, I'm going to be bringing you five new podcasts every single week from Monday through Friday, with more of a focus on my own thoughts and perspectives, while still sharing taste of my conversation with the amazing woke guests I talk with every week on my Patreon, which you can always support on patreon dot com slash woke AF to get the full Woke AF daily experience. To bring to a close these weekly shows, I wanted to share my full conversation with Emma Davery, author of

the new book What White People Can Do Next. It is not a book for white people, but about white people and the how and why of their creation of race as a social construct in order to subjugate non white people enforced white supremacy. Our conversation went deep into the connection between the construction of race and the system of global capitalism, so you'll definitely want to listen closely to this half hour conversation. Emma, talk to me about what drove you to write this guide for non people

of color. Okay, so first of all, I would say it is posing as a guide for non people of color, but that's not what it is. It's something while others have actually described it as a as a trojan horse. Quite a few of my black friends and peers were even a little bit you know side when the book was first was first announced. This has been a conversation that we've been having, like quite publicly. However, when they actually read the book, they were like, no, this book

was not what I thought it was. And actually there's a lot in here for to be honest, like I wouldn't have the energy or the inclination to just write a guide book to white people to kind of try to teach them how to better recognize my humanity, which is something I kind of say in the beginning of the book. There are things that white people racialized as white, can implement that would lead us towards the world we

need to be trying to create. But there are also ways of thinking and engaging and acting that actually everybody could implement that there's ways that we can kind of shift the ways in which we talk about certain issues and the way our solutions to them, You know that I think that I think it's powerful for everybody to think about. I taught African studies for over ten years at a university in the UK, and so I'm actually drawing on, you know, some African philosophies. I draw a

lot on the Black radical tradition. You know, most of the sources and literature that I am drawing on and that I am grounded in, you know, from African studies and from the Black radical tradition, which I think puts this book slightly in contrast to a lot of the other more recent anti racist titles which are grounded more in current articulation of anti racism. That I a mainstream kind of anti racism that I'm a little bit critical

of within the book, shall we say? So, I would say that I am located in a different intellectual tradition, I guess than a lot of the other anti racist literature that is popular at the moment. Do you think, you know, because there are so many things that have come into our lexicon, anti racism being one of them, right like, we have moved at least in the United States, and so I would love your thoughts as a person

being from across the pond in the UK. You know how we moved from a place of we just wanted to tolerate people, right, then we wanted to accept them. Then we moved into a place where no, it's not enough to just you know, accept somebody's differences. Now we want you to not just not be a racist, right, we want you to be anti racist. Do you think that this progression is just a progression that is in name only? Do you think that it is possible in

all honesty for someone to be anti racist? So I think in our current articulation of the problem, it is not possible. One of the things that I was concerned with and that I writing against is the fact that we are so we're now having finally, we're having this like mainstream conversation where racism and anti racism is high

on the agenda. And yet within that conversation, what I felt was absent was the real kind of grappling with an understanding of the fact that race is a social construction, and that the idea of a white race and subsequently a black race was very intentionally created, engineered and kind of spread through law and legislation from whence it took root and became you know, kind of far more of a psychological attachment, but it was done. It's as recent

as the seventeenth century. The first time we see whiteness introduced as the idea of a white race introduced is in the colonial Caribbean in Barbados, and quite shortly after that we see it in North America in places like Virginia. Sorry, and it's from from there. The idea, you know, spreads

kind of throughout the world. But the reason that it is created and invented is explicitly to create and enshrine a notion of white superiority and to justify the subjugation of African people, people of African descent, that these colonial

economies are becoming increasingly dependent on. It's in that period that we that we start to see all of these negative assumptions and ideas being attached to black to people who are racialized as black, and until we grapple with the real and also this is intimately connected to the beginning of the system of global capitalism that we currently still live under a version of, and so much of the liberal anti racist conversation seems like it's doubling down

on the truth status of race, rather than grappling with the artificial nature of it and really helping people truly understand why and when the when and why these categories were created. Until we start to be able to see outside of race as a biological truth and reality, I think it will be impossible to actually have an anti racist world. Race as we understand it today was invented to justify racism. Until we fully understand that, we will continue to we will continue to have racism, you know.

And again, what I think a lot of the mainstream conversation is also devoid of. What tends to be absent is that intimacy and that connection between the invention of race and capitalism. And so much of the current anti racist mainstream liberal discourse does not engage with capitalism. It acts as though racism is, you know, kind of occurring

in a vacuum in which capitalism doesn't exist. So two of the things that I really wanted to have central in the book were when and why race was invented and that relationship between the invention of race and capitalism. You know, I think that it's really interesting because the reality is, I always go back to a Tony Morrison quote that I will butcher, but the essence of it being that racism is a distraction, right, and that when you are grappling with people to your earlier point, I'm

not here to convince you of my humanity. Right like that, that is no longer a place where I find myself. When I was much younger, growing up in eastern Long Island in New York, in a ninety six percent white area, I had a different sentiment, right, because I just wanted to fit in. Right, As I have gotten older and thinking to myself, well, why am I sitting here explaining myself to you? It is a waste of my energy

and is a waste of breath. I think. What is what I find problematic about where we are is that you are presenting a very intellectual and thoughtful argument about how we got the way we are, right, about how we arrived at this place where we have people literally and I have my friend that comes on the show all the time who wrote the book Dying of Whiteness.

That is that we are at a place where around the world, not just in the United States, but we are dying of whiteness because we refuse to have a thoughtful conversation about why race was created in the first place, and that to have that conversation absent of the purpose of the creation, which was slavery to justify to justify the slave t And even now we have politicians in that are sitting members of Congress right now that say that that slavery wasn't necessary. Evil continue and that will

continue with that narration. We're fighting right now in twenty two states in this country that have banned critical race theory. So we can't even get emma to where you want us to go because we are we are not even allowed to open the book. Is what they is what

they have created in twenty two states here. And so I wonder, you know, at a time when we're still trying to convince people of the fact that racism exists, that white privilege is a thing, that everything is intertwined in this way where we're still it's like I'm trying to convince you that the sky is blue and yet the earth is on fire. Right, So I can't have any more complicated conversation about how we fix anything if

I have to convince you that it exists. So you know, so how you how do you deal with the real like that reality. And obviously, I mean, you lay out so many things in your book, but I find myself, I guess, in this place of hopelessness because if I'm still trying to convince you of the thing that we're not we're not moving, we're not getting anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I completely hear that. Like, in many ways, with what I was writing, I wanted to create a compelling narrative as to why it would be in the best interests of most people in the world to actually really interrogate whiteness and for people who are racialized as white to come to understand that in many ways whiteness was invented

to hoodwink many of them as well. Come on so interesting for me to explore as somebody who grew up in Ireland and as a white Irish mother, and Ireland has an interesting position in all of this, given that I think my early reckoning with racism and my early kind of radicalism I would say from a young age was in many ways a direct consequence of I spent the first I was born in Dublin, but I spent the first few years of my life in Atlanta, Georgia.

My dad was studying at Morehouse. So I went from being in a very black environment for the first few years of my life to moving to Ireland. Back to Ireland in the mid nineteen eighties as a small child and being confronted with a very in your face and explicit form of racism that I think was actually quite quite unusual, I think in other like in the it's

certainly never something I experienced in Atlanta. And I realized that the investment in white supremacy, you know, is far more entrenched in the United States than it is in Ireland. Yet in Ireland, where there hadn't really been the opportunity for the development of an institutionalized of more institutionalized racism because of the physical absence of black people or people of color from that environment. At that time it was

like a ninety nine point nine percent country. Attitudes and ideas about black people had very much been imported from both America and the United States. So I came up against that in a very interpersonal and confrontational way from a young age, which is what really led me to, you know, to a very young interest in black history

and African studies and whatnot. But I've always been interested in that position of the Irish as both colonized because Ireland was colonized Britain by England for over eight hundred years, so Ireland as both colonized and as colonizer, and the way that Irish behaved, many of the Irish behaved when they went to the United States fleeing the famine in the mid in the mid nineteenth century, their level of investment in white supremacy, and rather than having any kind

of you know, solidarity with black Americans who might have imagined there would be a natural sympathy between the two groups, there was quite quite the opposite. And you see again and again how the Irish, who are not immediately included as categorized as white, people who were not at first seen as being racialized as white, very much invested in the project of white supremacy in order to access the

material benefits of that. So with that history and mind, I was interested in thinking about how the Irish came to be racialized as white and how I could kind of use that to explore these kind of contradictions and diseases which can still exist within whiteness. And I was really fascinated to see that or to learn that when you see whiteness. First. The idea of a white race first introduced, and it's through a series of slave codes

in colonial Barbados in sixteen sixty one. The first time that happens is actually as a reaction against the number of uprisings that are happening between indentured Irish and Barbados. Indentured Irish and Barbados are not yet raciable. The idea of a white category doesn't exist yet. You have indentured Irish there, and as they cannot keep up with the labor demands, you are beginning to see more and more kidnapped Africans being brought into that to that place to

meet those labor demands. And there a number a series of uprisings occur where the indentured Irish and the enslaved Africans, who do not yet see themselves as black or white people that concept hasn't been created yet, come together to attack the English landlords who they both see, who they

both see as a common enemy. These uprisings are a real threat to the status quo and to the power balance because there's more, there are more Africans and indentured Irish in these in these spaces than there are these

English and sometimes Scottish elites. So one of the things that this legislative concept of whiteness does is it gives those indentured Irish so they're still exploited in contrast to the other white right, but as provided that they are given someone else to exploit, then then they are creating a different they're creating a different peer right where they

are no longer on the bodom exactly exactly. So there's a deep investment, you know, in that, and they're also dangled the promise, you know, now as white people, you two can access these things that the rich elite have, you know, and that's so complete an option that's shut

down to people who become racialized as black. But it was so interesting that whiteness, the concept of whiteness, shut down those moments of coalition and solidarity which really could have upset the whole social order and created just created a completely different reality. And then you see the same thing happening in colonial Virginia where you have indentured English

laborers and enslaved Africans again come together. There's a rebellion called Bacon's Rebellion, where they also attack the English elite, and very shortly after that the law met the English.

White English lawmakers, who are now kind of understand themselves as white, introduce again these slave codes that create a situation where people who are now racialized as black have no recourse to justice or any sort of human rights, and white people who are really quite a motley crew of everybody from you know, Scottish, English, Irish, I think some Portuguese felons, land lords, a whole range of society who have no idea of themselves as am who have

no concept of themselves as having any kind of shared identity. That motley crew becomes reimagined as white people, and even those on the lower rungs of that kind of whiteness start to see their fates and fortunes far more in alignment with other people racialized as white than they do with people who are racialized as black, who might actually have more kind of circumstantial shared experience of lifestyle with them. So whiteness one of the things that does is to

shut down solidarity and code mission. I mean, I mean that that is literally the point, right that is that is literally the point is that if you can create this stratification of power right, and then you ensure that there is always going to be this underclass, what is perceived to be this underclass. And we can all agree, regardless of what country we are coming from, but we can all agree that the black and the brown belong on the bottom. Then you can build off of that.

And I think that what's you know, what is so fascinating to me as I'm listening to you weave through centuries right of oppression, is that I'm thinking about you know. Lyndon B. Johnson said at one time that if you can teach the poorest white man that he is better than the best negro, then you can pick his pockets. That all of this, all of this comes back to

it being steeped in what capitalism. If we were if we were to reimagine a system that wasn't a pyramid scheme, because that is how I see it, If we were to reimagine a system that was not a pyramid scheme, then it would we would recognize that everyone has been bamboozled. And that's why and that's why I think that your book is so important, because it is the recognition that

everyone has been bamboozled by whiteness. Right, and that the only people, the only people that truly truly benefit are the wealthy, are the wealthy white elite, because everyone else, to your point, has much more in common in terms of just trying to put food on the table, just trying to keep their head above water then they do with those that they aspire to be. There is something in America, and I want to know if you sense it elsewhere as well, But there is there is this

aspirational sense of being right. We don't fix our tax codes here because there's this belief that one day you're going to hit the lottery and you too will be rich, right, and so you want to pay less taxes when that miracle, you know, cease to happen. I think about it all the time that like for Americans, wealth is this aspirational thing, so they will follow whomever. It doesn't matter if they're bright, It doesn't matter if they're misogynists or racist like Donald

Trump it has, it doesn't matter. There is something about this this shiny, bright thing of wealth that is like a moth to a flame. And I want to know if that because unless you can break that kind of hypnotism, I don't think that you get anywhere, right, because there's a I don't I don't think that you move anywhere. And I wonder if you see that same type of because I'm not as privian and well versed in international thoughts about race and racing. But do you see that

that's sense of this aspirational desire? Yes, those tendencies are certainly amongst us, and they are very much used to manipulate people from acting according to their own best interests, you know, that idea of aspiration and being able to one day achieve the good life. So in this it's still voting against the things that would actually make your current material conditions better or even livable. However, they are not as pronounced here, and again it's different in Ireland

as they are in the United States. In the United States, that tendency seems like turbocharged, you know, like actually far more deeply integral to to what America is and means, you know. So I think it's more pronounced in the United States. It definitely exists here, but I think it's

yet more potent where you are. Yeah, we've just created we've concocted a series of tales in the United States that are grounded in white American exceptionalism, right, and this idea that you will pull yourself up from your bootstraps, that you can you know, you can arrive, you two can arrive at this place and it doesn't matter what your current reality is. It's living in the fantasy of

what could be right. And I think that both the possibility of the thing right is both what draws people to America and also what can make you so disgusted with America right, because it's like the dangling of the carrot of Oh, there is possibility to have these things if you if you clear every single hurdle and obstacle that it's placed in your way as a person of color, as a woman, as a queer person, as a person with disabilities, Like if you can mate around all of this,

then yes, yes, there's this possibility. Yeah. And also when other people are you know, like here in this country, I'd say, like inherited wealth is like a really big thing as it is in the United States, but there's

actually like very little social mobility here. So one of the things that I talk about in the one of the things that I really look at in the book actually is again one of my frustrations with the current the kind of mainstream liberal iteration of anti racism is this almost criticization of interpersonal privilege, often at the expense of looking at things like inherited wealth, looking at things like, you know, for more structural wealth, power imbalances and types

of inequalities that exist. So I have a chapter in the book that looks at the redistribute. It is called redistribute Resources. It thinking about inherited wealth and you know, forms of forms of taxation and how black people, and again this is more pronounced in the United States, have been locked out of opportunity to create wealth and to accumulate wealth in an intergenerational way, and to really think, to really put our energy towards tackling things like that.

I talk about things like universal basic income and even reparations, and I think our energy would be better placed looking at those more structural processes. Then this, as I said, almost feticization of interpersonal privilege that just often plays out online. I think that's something of a distraction technique. Actually, I mean, I think, you know, frankly, all of it is such

a deep distraction. And I appreciate your writing so much because I think that it offers us what we really where we should be, right, how we actually get there, I'm not I'm fuzzy on it, but you definitely present where we should be and how if we have these fundamental grapplings of the formation of race, understanding racism, the why behind it all, then we can actually begin to

move forward. But to in this country we are living in the midst of I think one of the greatest gas lights I have ever seen, right, And it is just it is extraordinary the lengths that right wing white leaders are going to in this country right now to make it seem as if nothing of inequity, nothing of injustice, nothing of domestic terrorism ever happened, Right, It's just all something that we've made up and we and more so

we should just get over well. I think the UK is very much like taking its que from that at the moment. We recently had a report that said, you know, institutional racism doesn't exist here and that not only does it not exist, but that the UK is actually like a global leader in the rest of our world should should kind of take their cue from from the UK in terms of creating kind of like an anti anti

racist society. That report has been you know, just widely discredited and rubbished, but I think it speaks to the level of of gaslighting that is occurring, you know, at that level, and it was a remarkable report, the Cwell Fewell Report, you know, no engagement with the ongoing legacy of empire and colonialism, which you know is really key in the conversations that we need to have about race in the UK. I think empire. I don't even know

if the empire is mentioned once in the report. If it is, there's certainly no kind of real engagement with it. So rather than have a truth for reckoning, you know, with what the British Empire meant and why we have people of color, black people in the UK, why these populations are here, rather than engage with any of that, it was just it was just denial and delusion. Really um.

And then there's the same conversation happening here as well about making not allowing critical race studies to Yeah, because what would what would happen when the lie is unwoven? What would happen when people start to remove rose colored glasses and recognize the lies that they have been told and who it is hurt and whose life has been

made better because of it. The fear that we are living in right now is palpable in so many the fear of the truth right, fear of constructive conversation, fear of unpacking and looking at the birth of power and who has it and why. And I think that you know, more people authors like yourself that continue this conversation, that

continue to push us forward. They won't be able to gasolight us forever because there's just too much there's too much conversation that is out there, and there's too many people like yourself that are saying no, you know, we're going to bring this to light. Emma. I hope that you will come back to woke F. This was such a wonderful conversation, folks. The book is what white people can do next from allyship to coalition. Thank you so much for making the time to join us on wok F.

Hey most welcome. Thank you for having me. Emma's book and studies are not so much about promoting anti racism, but anti racism as in, we need to be calling out and deconstructing the idea of race itself as created by white people to enforce their own supremacy over the

rest of us. We cannot deny our own histories and identities, but part of our collective human history is that racial identity was created to oppress anybody who is not white, and we can even see through history how the definition of white has changed to let certain people in and

keep other people out. As long as our anti racism grants that race is something that innately exists rather than something that was constructed to systematically disadvantage non white people for centuries, will we ever be able to move past our racist systems in society. I'm leaving you with that very big question to consider as we move forward into this week, in which Woke AF will be releasing daily,

five days a week wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy my work as always, please do consider supporting me at Patreon dot com slash WOKEAF, where I will continue to bring the woke a f nation, full hour long shows, exclusive interviews, video content, and much more Power to the people, to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.