A review by jennaclarek
What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition by Emma Dabiri

what i liked most about this book is that while it does have helpful tips on what we can do to help with racism, it's mostly a book about how allyship in general is not enough. a lot of what people consider allyship these days is either performative or online-based...and while that can be important, and it's great to diversify our feeds, etc. most of the work we need to do cannot be quantified. i think so much of modern allyship is focused on shaming people and doing things to be seen, when in actuality a lot of the things we white people need to be doing are more internal and also more proactive. this book does a great job of highlighting that — how we should be learning more, but that learning looks like a lot of different things. and we also need to be putting actions to our words. and we need to work on changing the systems rather than just sharing posts on instagram. i think i most enjoyed the sections on capitalism if only because i HATE capitalism and it's always great to see people explore how racism and capitalism overlap. i also really enjoyed hearing more about the specific racism in ireland because that is so rarely talked about in the books i read! overall this was pretty quick (and i'm grateful because my brain is fried) but it packed a lot of punch and i think it can be really helpful to people in the early stages of anti-racism literature!