“This unconscious tendency to double down on the racial categories ‘black‘ and ‘white’, making blanket statements about the behaviours, beliefs, actions and desires of diverse groups of people unified under fictive, generic ‘races’, highlights how many of us still apparently believe that race exists as a natural biological reality. I have serious reservations about popular social movements, however well intended, that reinforce a reinvestment in racial categories in this way. ‘Allyship’ being described as a ‘selfless act’ exacerbates the division, assuming a fundamental and immutable separateness between ‘different’ ‘races’, offering charity at the expense of solidarity. … With … its fetishizing of privilege without any clear means of transferral, as well as the ways in which it actively reinforce whiteness, allyship is not only up to the task, it is in many ways counterproductive. …

Race is one of the most powerful, seductive and enduring myths of the last four centuries … The concept of a ‘white race’ and a ‘black race’ … is a socially engineered concept invented with a very specific intention in mind. That intention was racism. Until we understand this beginning, there will be no happy ending. … We have to at least attempt to imagine outside and beyond the race logic inherited from long-dead élite European me, and conceive other ways of dreaming, living and being.

aus: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.14, 19, 27, 142.

08/24