YouSaid · the spoken record

Emma Dabiri

lines on the record: 26
first: 2022-07-29
most recent: 2022-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Feel like in the same way that you can inherit wealth, you can inherit poverty and disadvantage. And I think just, yeah, less kind of like judgmentalness about people that are different to us than thinking about why they might be in the positions that they're in.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sign up to all of the environmental, like everything that we need to do to stop global warming, like action, all of that in 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, because I guess growth's kind of raisin detra is 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it would kind of go back to like generative justice, that idea, that kind of what you take from needs to be reinvested in. And its future health and life secured.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a 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”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was a teenager, lots of people telling me that I should do modeling and like going to a modeling agency and then 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 donz 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think 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 was something that I did find that I find really funny is I remember like, um,”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, you look like you smell of wheat. Where people have cane rows. So I don't know how it's a non traditional hairstyle when it goes back to like the birth of humanity.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, like, my first book is about hair, and I've been really involved in campaigning 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 her 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 will do with our hair. Like, for instance, I have braids, but, you know, 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,”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 ethno-mathematician called Ron Eglash, and he talks about ways of doing business that invest back into the resources that the user 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was left 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Rodaker 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 in 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's part of that.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 moment. And if maybe we could think about ourselves and each other and our environments in different ways, we could have like more holistic relationships.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think like our very binary way of understanding the world and phenomena, which we've inherited from Cartesian duality that divides the world according to 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 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, completely. So you kind of hear this idea, 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 just”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think our political awakenings do, mine certainly did, came from a position of personal lived experience. But I feel like if you're kind of engagement with it doesn't kind of move to like a critical analysis of it and beyond it. And it's 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?”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, so 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of the things that I perhaps 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 moment. 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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · How to Lead a Sustainable Business – Emma Dabiri on Reinventing Stories Around Race · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT