What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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Attend town halls, candidate meet-and-greets, etc for political candidates and ask about ending mass incarceration, reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing or ending solitary confinement, decriminalizing weed, ending cash bail, divesting from private prisons, divesting from banks, divesting from banks that finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, etc. Participate in reparations. One way is through this Facebook group. Remember reparations isn’t just monetary — share your time, skills, knowledge, connections, etc. Thank you to Clyanna Blyanna for suggesting this addition. It's necessary to realize that whether or not you are on the "right" side of history, most of us have been guilty of painting a broad brush over any one group of people with expectations of how they should behave or what they would think. Much like people of color differ in their thinking, so do white people in their responses to each other. Understanding this idea and stepping outside of our echo chamber is crucial to bridging the gap between progressive peoples and harmful political movements like #AllLivesMatter or #NotAllMen. We Haven't Been Taught to Work Together, but Now Is the Time to Learn Arrange for cultural exchanges and cultural ambassadors in your local school’s classrooms. The International Classroom program at UPenn and People to People International are options. The Dept of Education has a good list. Cultural exchanges via the interwebs are very valuable. Actual human interaction between people from different races, religions, and countries (ie: cultural ambassadors) and students in the physical classroom is ideal. By examining the attitudes of poorer white people during 16th century US settlement, we find that capitalism was created to uphold the elite.

Emma’s interrogation of whiteness explores how racism (and other subsequent results of isolative measures including colourism, featurism and texturism) is deeply rooted in capitalist agendas aimed at wealth creation and retention. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article The Case for Reparations and From Here to Equality by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen. The US has already participated in reparations four times. Thank you to Clyanna Blyanna for suggesting this addition.Array is an independent film distribution and resource collective founded by Ava DuVernay. For students of all ages, Array is creating learning companions for the works they produce and distribute, starting with When They See Us. Don’t gentrify neighborhoods. If you’re selling your home, sell to someone who is historically marginalized at a low price point (I know of a place to post the listing — DM me for more info). If you rent out space, rent to someone who is historically marginalized at a low price point. Us white folks have gotten so many breaks and passes that we can name and others that we can’t. It’s time to pass those breaks on to others. The author proposes coalition over allyship as a way to achieve this, defining the latter as an individualistic process that would only separate us more. Instead "coalition is about mutuality. It reframes the task as identifying common ground—while attending to the specificities of racism—that all can strive for and that all will benefit from." It’s solidarity as opposed to charity. She bases this, on coalition building that have work in the past. What this has shifted in my thinking as well, is seeing racism as a thing that is working. Not just as domination of one group of people over another group of people or as a contemporary structural issue. But as a historical project designed to conquer and divide people against their best interests.

conduct a study to review the impact of parental incarceration on minor children. With more data, the Commission could modify the Sentencing Guidelines and allow judges to take this factor into account when sentencing individuals for non-violent crimes.What interests me is thinking about the ways in which a vast array of oppressions or forms of disadvantage might have a common origin.’ This is clearly in the mold of 2020’s antiracist books, but Dabiri wouldn’t thank you for considering her under the same umbrella. She doesn’t like the concept of allyship because it reinforces unhelpful roles: people of colour as victims and white people as the ones with power who can come and save the day. Indeed the sense of superiority encoded into whiteness remains a very effective ruse to distract ‘white people’ from the oppression many of them experience keenly: the pressure of financial precariousness... zero hours contract, the unaffordability of a home, erosion of healthcare and education; as a white person your ‘race’ isn’t one of the impediments to you achieving the good life; the game is still rigged.” There are a new generation of people coming up, who see the contradictions and problems in the form of activism that I'm critical of in the book. They're very astute thinkers. People who are joining the dots between capitalism, class, race and the environment. Young activists, such as Mikaela Loach, are doing just this.