对话尼日利亚裔爱尔兰作家、种族问题学者艾玛·达比里（上）

对话尼日利亚裔爱尔兰作家、种族问题学者艾玛·达比里（上）

【作家简介】
Emma Dabiri 艾玛·达比里
尼日利亚裔爱尔兰籍作家、学者，知名报刊撰稿人
艾玛·达比里是一名尼日利亚裔爱尔兰籍作家、学者，现居伦敦，以对种族问题和种族主义的直言不讳著称。达比里常为平面和网络媒体撰稿，其中包括《卫报》《爱尔兰时报》等知名报刊以及学术期刊。她的第一部作品《别碰我的头发》于2019年首次出版并畅销。

【本期核心内容】
在本期节目中，艾玛·达比里与主持人分享了关于社交媒体、族裔矛盾及其历史问题的意见，并带来了自己的一件特殊物品：书架。
 
以下内容为对话文稿。
EP1 对话爱尔兰作家、学者艾玛·达比里（上）

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Emma Dabiri:
What I do in the book is trace the inception of the idea of a white race to a particular year.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Very specific year. Yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nihal Arthanayake:
In the 17th century. Yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. Exactly. And from its first inception, it is created in order to promote the idea that white people are superior and that black people are inferior.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Hello and welcome to the award-winning Penguin Podcast with me, Nihal Arthanayake. This is a space in which we invite authors to discuss their inspirations, their aspirations, and the stories behind the works they present to us. Each episode, our guest brings with them a selection of objects that have influence them and their writing and then we explore why. My guest today is a social historian, broadcaster, and the author of the 2019 bestseller, Don't Touch My Hair, alongside finishing her PhD, juggling teaching and broadcasting commitments, and sitting on the judging panel for the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize. Her latest book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship To Coalition was published this month the to great acclaim. Described as an incisive and deeply practical essay about transforming demonstrations of support of racial justice into real and meaningful change, she's credited with cutting through the haze of online discourse to offer clear advice delivered with characteristic wit and clarity. To, create a roadmap to liberation. It is, of course, my great pleasure to welcome to the Penguin Podcast Emma Dabiri. Hi, Emma.
Emma Dabiri:
Hi. How are you?
Nihal Arthanayake:
Great to have you here. I'm good. I'm good. I'm really good. I was interested, because as I was reading this book there's quite a few comments about social media and how people kind of perform on social media. What does it mean to you?
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I think its meaning has really changed. You know, like when I started using it, it was for me an incredible tool to connect with often a lot of other scholars, people who were PhD students, or academics, or activists, who were involved in different scholarship around blackness and African studies and black studies, and all of these kind of things, especially people in the states and other parts of the world that I didn't have geographical proximity to. And people would share studies, and I would have really interesting kind of thought-provoking conversations with people. And then increasingly over the years it changed, and it went from being a space where people were sharing ideas and writing that were kind of grounded in research to ideas and writing that were... I mean, the whole political climate kind of changed and we entered into the era of fake news. And I really saw kind of the discourse changing and just becoming increasingly adversarial, accusatory, toxic, inaccurate, ahistoric, and it's just kind of, I don't know, like a cesspit now.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Has it allowed people to mistake conversation for action and think that by the very nature of having a conversation they've done enough?
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. Completely. We always hear like, "Oh, we have to have the conversation." The word conversation has been elevated to kind of like a preposterous status, and it seems to just be a replacement for organized kind of more concrete action. And there's a part of the book where I quote a scholar of African American studies, George Lipsitz, where he talks about what are the consistent set of demands that exist in the contemporary racial justice movement? And he asks where are the parallel institutions? Where are the things like the land banks, the schools, the breakfast clubs? Where are all of those community grassroots organizations and parallel institutions that were being built in previous moments when people were kind of working in the communities on the ground rather than atomized in their own kind of silos? And of course with the pandemic that's only exacerbated the lack of connection and the kind of individualism and the replacement. It seems of a lot of that type of organising with just word and rhetoric and quote, unquote, conversation.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Were you always inclined towards putting the words white people on the cover of this book?
Emma Dabiri:
No, I have a real reservation with the title. The title is a provocation, and I think by the third page I have deconstructed it and spoken about my reluctance to use a generic term to kind of give instruction to a group of people which a lot of diversity exists amongst. White people aren't a monolith either. I set it up because that's very much the language of the current movement. So, I kind of just reproduce that to disassemble it and to kind of write against it in a way.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Is it possible for a white person to say, "I'm white and I'm proud to be white," without a whole heap of negative connotations being piled upon them for making that statement?
Emma Dabiri:
Well, I mean, if one has an awareness of what whiteness was created, invented, codified into law to do within the... Because obviously the white racial category is a construct, what I do in the book is trace the inception of the idea of a white race to a particular year.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Very specific year. Yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nihal Arthanayake:
In the 17th century. Yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. Exactly. And from its first inception, it is created in order to promote the idea... Fundamental to its construction is the notion of superiority that white people are superior and that black people are inferior. And that tenant is central to the construction. And that's never been properly reckoned with. So to announce your pride in that it speaks volumes. I mean, I find nationalism problematic for any reasons, but at the same time I completely understand a pride in one's heritage and culture. I feel proud of my Irishness. I love Irish culture. I've had a complicated relationship with being Irish and being black, but I understand somebody having a pride in their culture and their heritage, but to have a pride in whiteness specifically, either the person is ignorant of the history or knows the history and feels proud of that. And if that's what they feel proud of, well, that's very revealing.
Nihal Arthanayake:
So it's not possible for them to disassociate themselves from 1661 or laws that were ordained in Virginia?
Emma Dabiri:
It didn't end there. It just grew...
Nihal Arthanayake:
Well, it began there.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, it began there, but I only identify that point so that we understand the constructed and fictitious nature of it as a construct. It's something I write about in the book, it's one that has to be continuously reinvested in and strengthened, and kind of buttressed. So, in the 19th century, you see the begining, and far, far more recently, you see the beginning of scientific racism and the embracing of this idea in the sciences that the black and white, quote, unquote, races are distinctly different species to each other, and that the inferiority of black people and non-white people can actually be proven and evidenced in science. That's happening in the 19th century. And from there we have colonialism and-
Nihal Arthanayake:
Or eugenics in the 20th century.
Emma Dabiri:
We have eugenics and we have colonialism, which is, again, central to the colonialism of Africa and Asia, is the belief and investment in the English superiority and a white superiority. So, while this starts in the 17th century, it's continuously reinvested in.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Yes. I mean, you only have to read some of the reactions to Sathnam Sanghera's book Empireland to know that there's still some people who very much uphold those values. Let's get to your first object. Unsurprisingly, for someone who is so well read and that, of course, screams out of every page of this book, it's bookshelves. Make bookshelves interesting to me, Emma Dabiri.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh, wow. So if-
Nihal Arthanayake:
Tell me they're made from some exotic word or something at least.
Emma Dabiri:
The particular bookshelf I'm speaking of is from a salvaged wood, painted by my own fair hand. A dusty, pink... But it's more what the bookshelf contains. So my house is full of bookshelves and I don't have enough bookshelves to store all my books, so I actually just have dusty piles of books, towers of books everywhere. But there's one particular bookshelf over... Well, there's four shelves, but two of those shelves just really have the books that I always return to, that are just incredibly well thumbed and dog-eared, and full of post-it notes. And they would mostly be books pertaining to the black radical traditions.
Nihal Arthanayake:
Does it depress you when you read something that's 50 years old and you think so little has changed?
Emma Dabiri:
I mean, I feel like the root of the matter has not really been tackled. So I'm not entirely surprised that we are where we are. If we could build on the work of our forebears rather than starting again from scratch, I think we'd make more progress. At the same time I completely don't lay the blame for where we are at the hands of activists and those that fight against these forces. The forces that kind of facilitate this are kind of highly organized, deep rooted. There's a quote from, again, George Lipsitz, that I'd like to respond to that with. "Good intentions and spontaneity are not adequate in the face of a relentlessly oppressive and powerful well-financed military and economic political system." So yeah, I don't think diversifying our feeds is going to cut it.