S3 Ep7: Emma Dabiri, author, academic and broadcaster, on Reinventing Stories Around Race

Race as we understand it today and the concept of like a white race and a black race was invented in the early period of the transatlantic slave trade in order to create racism. I think if we can understand that race was invented and it's a relatively modern invention, then that kind of frees us up to know that there's alternatives. Hello and welcome to How to Lead a Sustainable Business. I'm Alana Weston and I believe that sustainability will be the next big disruptor of my industry.

It has to be placed at the heart of business strategy if we're to address the climate crisis and transition to an economic model that is regenerative and just. The latest IPCC report demonstrates what we all know. There is no time left for incremental progress. Complete systems change is needed for us to grapple with the enormous challenges that face our planet and the people who live on it.

I want to focus on the leaders who are driving that change. Throughout this series, I'm going to look at six different sectors where my guests are at the forefront of that reinvention. This week is a special episode where rather than exploring an economic sector, I'm looking at the possibility of rethinking race. I'm joined by Emma Dabbery, the author, academic, and broadcaster.

In 2019, she published Don't Touch My Hair, a richly researched exploration of the history of black hair interwoven with her own experience growing up in Ireland as the daughter of an Irish mother and a Nigerian father. The book is an intellectual investigation into why black hair matters and how it can provide a blueprint for decolonization. Her second book, What White People Can Do Next, was published at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. It offers a clear thinking analysis of the construction of race and how through coalition and solidarity, we might dismantle this system and rebuild it in a way that benefits everyone.

Welcome to the podcast, Emma. So tell me, how did you first find your voice as a writer, an academic and a broadcaster? I think a lot of the things that I have spoken about in my work up until this point are themes that I've long been fascinated by since childhood. From my earliest memories, I was really into history.

I was into history overall, but then I really sought out Black history because I, obviously that was a part of my own history, but that I wasn't really exposed to or certainly not taught about. and I think the kind of ideas that I now write about and research are ones that I yeah I was talking about when I was a lot younger but not necessarily imagining that there'd be an audience for it we were in like a very different cultural moments and I think my interest in black history and kind of like black consciousness was seen as you know a little bit odd and certainly not really something that many other people in Ireland were into or like au fait with.

And then I went and did my degree in African studies and history. And I remember people in Ireland being like, oh, why are you studying that? Are you really anti-white? Even like on the Nigerian side of my family, people being like African studies, that's not like a real subject.

Across the board, people were like, what the hell are you studying and why? But I was like, no, this is what I'm fascinated in. I don't care what job it gets me. Things will fall into place.

And kind of, yeah, They did. I found your book, Don't Touch My Hair, just such a great read, really. It's the wit, which in taking on these topics is actually quite a tricky thing to do. What made you decide to kind of blend your own history with the history of black hair in telling this story of how you think about race or exploring how you think about race?

I think hair was really kind of jumped out at me as a kind of an innovative way of thinking about Black history because hair is something that in African cultures and African diasporic cultures, you know, a lot of creative energy has been poured into and there was a lively visual language and form of communication that operated through Black Hair. So I kind of approached Hair as like an archive to access the histories of people who were either excluded from the archive or just themselves documented their pasts in different ways.

And then in terms of blending my own narrative in there with the kind of wider histories, I actually didn't want to do that too much. And I think in the first drafts of the book, there was less of me in there. But then many people from my husband to my editor was just like, your position is actually like a pretty unique one that's never really been written about. And also my interest in blackness, my interest in hair, my interest in race, all of these things were really influenced by like the specificities of being a black girl in Dublin, like in the 1980s when that was far more of an anomaly than it is now.

I mean, it really brings the story alive. And I guess that brings me on to this idea of the personal and the political in an age of social media where discourse has changed, language has changed. And in some cases, there is this oversimplification of ideas. But at the same time, it offers us this incredible breadth of experience that we can draw on or at least engage with.

So how do you navigate the personal and political in the age of social media? I think when I first started to really do public facing work where I was really working from that space of the personal is political. This is like a decade ago, you know, where social media, it was there. Like I used Twitter and I guess there wasn't such an industry that had been built up around one's personal narrative being commodified.

And so I think the personal being political was still kind of more radical then, than it has become. And I think like our political awakenings do mine certainly did came from a position of personal lived experience But I feel like if your kind of engagement with it doesn kind of move to like a critical analysis of it and beyond it and it just kind of like simply reproducing what your lived experience is, then I feel like we can be in tricky territory. And we have to be very vigilant against our personal lived experience, preventing us from thinking collectively and thinking about how we can be in solidarity and coalition with people that might have had quite different lived experiences, but that we might actually have, you know, quite serious points of resonance with.

In both of your books, you really focus as much on the construct of whiteness as much as blackness. And I guess it's important to understand the origins of racialized thinking in order to imagine a different way forward. Could you share a little bit about how you think this kind of awareness can help us move the conversation on? Yeah, completely.

So you kind of hear this idea like, oh, racism, it's just a natural kind of human expression. And there's been racism for as long as there's been, you know, kind of humanity. That's actually like objectively inaccurate. And when there was such a widespread and mainstream conversation about, quote unquote, anti-racism.

I was like, if this isn't the moment to kind of mainstream understanding of how race, as we understand it today, and the concept of like a white race and a black race was invented in the 17th century, in the early period of the transatlantic slave trade, in order to create racism. And I think if we can understand that race was invented in order to create and kind of justify racism, and it's a relatively recent and modern invention, then that kind of frees us up to know that there's alternatives.

There's always been like different complexions and different features and different hair textures, but the idea that that had any intrinsic value and that value kind of led to predetermined like racial behavior is literally an idea that's introduced. The first time you see it is in 1661 in what is then the English colony of Barbados. This is the period where you start to see whiteness being imbued with all of these, you know, virtuous characteristics and this idea of an inherent superiority and that they are the kind of natural lords and masters of this inherently inferior group, which helps to justify the slave trade, which the kind of European economies are becoming increasingly dependent on.

And throughout your books, you argue that much of the motivation for the construction of a racialized society was and continues to be about reinforcing economic power structures. And I guess I'm interested in how dismantling those could also allow us to rethink some other fairly recent and arguably very Western mindsets. So for example, the assumption that nature must be dominated. How useful could dismantling race be to solving some of the other problems that we need to solve that have been firmly set in stone, but quite recently?

I think like our very binary way of understanding the world and phenomena, which, you know, we've inherited from Cartesian duality that divides the world according to like these binaries. And it's not long after that revolution in thinking that the concept of race was invented. But that binary way of seeing the world, you know, has really serious ramifications. And in What White People Can Do Next, I talk about how even that division and distinction between nature and culture and like man and nature, rather than seeing ourselves as like intimately intertwined and connected and entangled with our environments, seeing ourselves as distinct from, and again, you know, imagining ourselves as the masters and kind of controllers of, has led to this really damaging relationship that we have with our environment.

Something as kind of seemingly distant, you know, as race and the environment, our relationship to those things and how we understand them have their origins in the same cultural moments. And if maybe we could think about ourselves and each other and our environments in different ways, we could have like more holistic relationships. Wouldn't that be nice? I mean, it's interesting because this podcast is really about systems change.

And the first part about systems change is you've got to understand you're in a system and you could be in a natural system, but it's not binary. It's about interconnection, interdependency, overlapping, symbiosis. There are so many things that come from nature that help us to understand even human systems that we think we control somehow. And I guess what's been interesting to me is, as I've been speaking to so many interesting people who have tried to kind of address those systems and reinvent them.

They're all about disrupting or hopefully transforming those industries and the way they've been constructed. Is it possible to rethink or reimagine race? Yeah, I don't know. So one of the kind of prompts that I even have in what white people can do next, I'm like, if white people have become racialized as white relatively recently, like who were you before you were white so the question I was interested in is we hear about like what the Irish gained materially from coming to be racialized as white particularly in America when a million Irish people are fleeing the famine but how they become involved in the project of white supremacy and how they are materially remunerated for that but I'm quite interested and what they lost.

One of my frustrations with the phrase white privilege is that it continues to promote whiteness as something aspirational And I feel that whiteness should actually be understood as a system that is damaging also to people who are racialized as white because it part of that binary extractive dominant way of viewing the world which is damaging to everybody and is damaging to the world There's some really interesting writing that David Roddicker speaks about. And he says that how the Irish that came to America were one of the European groups who experienced the most profound rupture with their way of life.

And they came from like a very rural way of life where they were intimately and deeply connected with nature to these like teeming industrial cities where they were kind of on the lowest strata alongside black Americans who they quickly kind of often stepped on to rise above. But it was partially that kind of violent disrupture with the kind of natural world and becoming part of this industrialized, you know, kind of violent, exploitative system that contributed to their kind of investment in white supremacy and this kind of fear that their pre-industrial behaviors could be seen as being kind of black behaviors.

that disconnect from the natural world we're now seeing that's a loss can you explain a little bit more about your thinking of the difference between allyship and coalition because i found that exploration really hopeful i was left like feeling really uncomfortable with like a lot of the allyship discourse and i was seeing a lot of references to the ally and the victim. And I was just like, who's the victim? Am I the victim? And if I'm the victim, is the ally my savior?

Hang on, am I the black victim and the white ally is like my savior? Like, I'm not comfortable with that. It kind of prevented people from seeing the ways in which they also might personally benefit from changing systems. The ways in which these systems are systems that are damaging to them and to the environment as well.

And I'm going to quote Fred Moten, and this is a quote that I use in the book. He says, I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly. I love that.

I underlined that when I was reading the book. I loved that, that it's killing you too. And I think that's the revelation and the way you bring that to life in ways that I think people don't have to go very far to recognize once the scales have fallen, you know? And I guess what I wanted to, because this is a business podcast, what I wanted to do was to segue into what do you think business leaders can do to tackle racism?

I mean, within their own organizations, but also in the role that we have in popular culture if we are behind a big brand, for example. Okay. So there's a concept called generative justice that I've read about through another thinker that I reference a lot in my work. He's an ethnomathematician called Ron Eglash.

And he talks about ways of doing business that invest back into the resources that they use or extract rather than just, you know, all of this like extraction. The model is kind of like a circular one where if you take from something, what you make from that goes back into kind of like renewing it. There's actually a chocolate company from Ghana that he uses as a case study that has kind of an idea of the commons and they have all of this like commonly held land that's owned by the community.

And then they put the profits from the chocolate like back into that. And I think that's exactly what we've been trying to explore with this podcast is to say, if you don't look after your stakeholder, whether that's your employee or the community that you live in or the nature that you derive ingredients or resources from, they will either burn out, they'll run out, they'll leave, you know, something will happen to them. And so pricing that in to any business model only makes sense as a sustainable way of being.

And I think the whole issue of race and understanding the racialized experience at work has got to be beneficial to making a better community at work and also having real talent and talented people on your team and productive people on your team who aren't burnt out by their racial struggles. I asked some of our team to, you know, I said, you know, I'm going to interview Emma. what would you love to take away from this interview? And they said, well, can you ask her what specific ways she thinks business can support Black and mixed heritage employees?

I mean, are there things that you would love to see, or maybe you have seen in certain circumstances or other businesses or universities or places where you think that they're making progress in small ways to drive the systems change? Well, like my first book is about hair and I've been like really involved in like campaigning like around hair. And yeah, I don't think hair is like a trivial thing. I think like, for instance, people with Afro textured hair, the way our hair grows from our heads is different.

So hair looks different and it does different things. And so if you have kind of expectations about how somebody needs to look in work to be professional or to be like taken seriously, but you base the standard on like how white people's hair looks, then black people are penalized essentially for being black because, you know, it's a racialized feature. and then there are like protective hairstyles that we'll do with our hair like for instance I have braids but you know there's like there's been high profile instances of people like with braids I think it was Zendaya at the Oscars and they were like the host was just like oh you look like you smell of weed these idea that like certain braided styles or ways of just wearing your hair short because it is different to Caucasian hair that these hairstyles are like gang affiliated or that they are like representative of some sort of like criminal behavior.

It's really like kind of shifting, saying that these hairstyles are actually neat and are professional and are not non There cave paintings where people have cane rows So I don know how it a non hairstyle when it goes back to like the birth of humanity It is those small things I think make a huge difference And people at work just want to do the right thing Are there things that you think that people do that are unhelpful? You mentioned this idea that you can solve things through casting ad campaigns.

Are there risks to the idea that we should have representation, for example, on boards? Is there anything risky about that in itself as a concept? I think like representation doesn't mean that the majority of people from that group are doing well. Sometimes if there are high profile examples of, oh, look at that person's there and they've got that opportunity.

Anyone from that group that's complaining, you know, must be kind of like making it up because look, well, you're doing well for yourself. I think there can be kind of like, you know, a tokenistic thing where representation can kind of be used actually to like obscure the reality that maybe a lot of people from that group, what they're experiencing. And then there can also be representation that's being used to obscure systems that are exploitative. And you're like, oh, but look, it's diverse.

And I'm like, oh yeah, but look, it's actually like poisoning the world. Actually, when I was growing up and I didn't see people that looked like me in anything really, that was actually secondary to the fact that I didn't see people that looked like me in my lived environment. But what's something that I did find that I find really funny is I remember like when I was a teenager, lots of people telling me that I should do modeling and like going to a modeling agency and them being like, oh yeah, you have such like a perfect little face, but no one's going to cast you in anything in Ireland.

You're not going to be in like a Duns ad. They were just like, when you go to England, try it there. It kind of made me feel monstrous. It was just like, well, what do they mean someone like me couldn't be in this?

And it's just like, you know, really reaffirming you do not belong here, you know? So that has shifted. So representation, you know, it has its positives, definitely. It's quite interesting though, when Black features that are very maligned then become the aspiration.

Well, I guess there's a risk of the exoticification, you know, that can happen and that maybe also isn't serving the wider struggle. Yes. An objectification is as bad as an erasure. I love the quote that you used in the book from James Baldwin, which is, we've got to be as clear headed about human beings as possible because we are still each other's only hope.

We have these enormous challenges on this warming planet. How do you see the rethinking of race as being part of getting to the solution? And how hopeful are you? So race was invented in order to prevent certain solidarities emerging.

So people would be easier to exploit and less able to build mass movements of resistance. So many people think forms of separatism are subversive, which kind of racial division like really was created to, you know, kind of further enshrine. But it's actually solidarity that is subversive. Like solidarity is harder.

Sometimes it's easier to be seduced by forms of separatism. I'm really excited actually by like the kind of current wave of like Black writing I'm seeing emerging that is more and more of my peers and contemporaries, like just really interesting, like Black scholarship coming out that is based more in this Black radical tradition and is looking more at solidarities and coalition rather than the more kind of individualistic privilege politics that in some ways reproduces some of the things it is that we should be trying to move beyond.

Now let's move on to our quick fire round. I asked these questions to everyone in the podcast, and they're a little bit different in this context, but let's give them a go. So what's your definition of sustainability? I guess it would kind of go back to like generative justice, you know, that idea that kind of what you take from needs to be reinvested in and its future health and life secured.

And is there such a thing as sustainable growth? I don't know, because I guess like growth is kind of raising detra is like the constant and ongoing maximization of profit. And I don't know that that tallies with sustainability. Like, I think maybe we have to reassess how we measure success.

And what do you think is most important? Consumer demand, legislation or innovation? Innovation. And imagine you're a world leader.

What are the first three things you do to create a fairer society? Sign up to like all of the environmental, like everything that we need to do to stop global warming, like action, all of that in a, like an integrated, immediate plan of action. I believe that there is so much in the world that like everybody could have a really good quality of life. The basic kind of requirements of what people need to just have a happy and contented life.

With that, I guess some form of like universal basic income so that people can actually have enough money or access to resources that they can live, you know, and support themselves, but they can think about, yeah, doing what they find fulfilling. And what is your call to action for listeners? I feel like in the same way that you can inherit wealth, you can inherit poverty and like disadvantage. And I think just, yeah, less kind of like judgmentalness about people that are different to us and thinking about why they might in the positions that they're in.

And if you could do one thing to halt climate change, what would it be? Probably like stopping fossil fuels, finding other ways of generating energy. Emma Dabbery, thank you so much for coming on to How to Lead a Sustainable Business. Thank you so much for having me.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please do take a moment to subscribe and rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. This lets us know what you think and helps others to find the show. This episode was brought to you by Selfridges Group and Intelligence Squared. The producer was Redzi Bernard, with technical assistance from Mark Roberts.

I'm Alana Weston, and this is How to Lead a Sustainable Business.