Emma Dabiri on history and belonging
The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May:
Emma Dabiri on history and belonging
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This week, Katherine talks to Emma Dabiri, author of Don’t Touch My Hair/Twisted and What White People Can Do Next.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Wintering Sessions. I’m Katherine May. I’m making a pot of tea, which feels like about all I can do at the moment. I just keep coming back and making pots of tea. Today’s, as it often is in the afternoon, is jasmine, dragon jasmine pearls, my favourite. It’s the tea I make when I want to feel soothed.
And there’s a really particular reason that jasmine tea makes me feel soothed. It’s because, when I started university, I drove there with H and my mum and got into my room, unpacked all my stuff and then, there was this terrible moment when none of us knew what to do. My mum suggested that H and I went into town and bought some supplies, and so that’s what we did. We went and walked down to the high street, and we bought really stupid things. We didn’t know what to buy for ourselves, and we ended up in the Whittard tea shop which anyone English will know is like the world’s least practical grocery store. It only sells fancy tea, and it’s not even all that fancy—anyway, that’s another story—but we bought a teapot and a packet of jasmine tea, and then they both went home, and I was left on my own to get to know everybody else on the corridor. Those people are now some of my best friends in the world, so it didn’t turn out badly.
But what I do remember is that first week making pots of jasmine tea for people. It was something that I could offer, and so when people came to my room, I’d make them jasmine tea and hope that that was something distinctive that I could offer. And, weirdly, I came to associate that really distinctive scent of jasmine tea with, I don’t know, like a strange mix of emotions, actually, with feeling unsettled but finding a way through it. It’s not comforting in itself; it’s kind of almost edgy. It brings back that feeling for me, that mix of fear and anxiety and excitement and possibility and trying to do a thing that makes you feel soothed. I always used to take it with a little slice of lemon, too. I’m not sure about that anymore. I think that might undervalue the innate beauty of jasmine tea.
Anyway, I’m telling you this because I know that so many people listening will be feeling hugely unsettled at the moment. I feel like the Roe v. Wade decision in America has just turned every woman I know upside down, and plenty of men too; although, I would say not enough of them, frankly, but maybe that’s something for another time too.
But that connects fantastically with my guest this week, Emma Dabiri, who is one of those people that when that news broke and I was dealing with my unsettled feelings, I went to her social media feeds to see what she thought, as I so often do, because she’s such an astonishingly clear and certain voice that cuts through so much of our discourse. I love that there is this person out there who is so nakedly clever and critical and kind of fearless and who thinks about the overall balance of things in such a crisp way.
I was thrilled when she agreed to an interview, and I think you’ll love listening to her too. This interview was recorded before the Roe v. Wade decision. We don’t touch on that at all. Maybe it’s a welcome space from the before times, but I think you’ll really enjoy it anyway. We talk about some serious stuff, and we talk about some light stuff too, least of all my early struggles with entering the British middle class and learning their conventions. I hope it will give you a laugh, and I hope it will make you think. I’ll see you out the other side.
Katherine May:
Emma, welcome to The Wintering Sessions. I am so chuffed to be talking to you. I’m such a fan of yours. You know like when it’s a real thrill to meet someone? Hi.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh my gosh. The feeling’s so mutual. I’m actually just kind of grinning stupidly, thinking I feel the same way.
Katherine May:
It’s so funny.
Emma Dabiri:
So, yeah, I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Katherine May:
That’s why I run a podcast: so I get to chat to really cool people. It’s like a ready-made social life that people get invited to in a really formal way. So we came to the idea of this conversation because you wrote a beautiful post a while ago about learning to come to terms with winter having always been a summer person, and I think I’m gradually learning to come to terms with summer, so I think we’re like moving on reverse planes. It’s been really hot the last few days, so I am very ill at ease at the moment because I just do not deal with the heat at all, and I hate the flood of light that comes at this time of year. Like, I don’t know what to do with myself in it; I want some shade. And also, I’m like permanently sunburnt at this time of year too.
Emma Dabiri:
Aww.
Katherine May:
Yeah, I know, it’s pathetic. So I would like to start by asking you, tell me about why summer is fantastic, before we even think about winter. What is it you love about this time of year?
Emma Dabiri:
So I really feel that I’m into the seasons, and I feel quite strongly that were I to live, say, in somewhere like California that was kind of a perennial summer, I personally would go mad because I definitely need gloom and darkness and shade. I think it’s just that to live in a climate that is kind of gloomy and grey all of the time, or nearly all of the time, or where there are potentially years and certainly months where there’s just kind of no sustained sunshine, I think, is also quite detrimental. But I think I really need the balance, I think. I need seasons. Or I like seasons.
Katherine May:
I used to have a Ghanaian friend. It’s summer all year round where she was from, and I couldn’t stop asking her. I couldn’t get my head round the idea of it. “What’s it like? How do you know notice when it’s Christmas? What changes are signalled?” And she’s like, “There is no change. It’s exactly the same. The days are the same length, the weather’s the same, and we make the changes. We bring the culture to the weather.” And she said, “You guys, you’re kind of really dependent on the movement of the year to guide you.” She found us all quite surprisingly changeable, I think, as people, almost, because we were so moved by the way the year was changing. I still can’t get my head round what it would be like.
Emma Dabiri:
Determined by outside forces rather than having more autonomy. It’s so funny that you reference Ghana because I think I actually really had this realisation about myself. Now, this realisation far predates me liking the cold; I have to preface it with that. Me liking the cold and actually kind of craving the cold is a very recent development. I lived in Ghana for about six months many, many years ago, about 15 years ago, and it was actually there where I realised, after maybe two months or so of just constant heat and warmth and sunshine, that I was actually craving the particular dampness of Ireland.
Katherine May:
Imagine that.
Emma Dabiri:
I was just like, I actually need to go to, not even Dublin, where I come from. I was like, I need to be in the west coast; I need to be in the west of Ireland. And I was like, what is wrong with me? I’ve literally spent my life complaining about that, trying to flee from it, and now I feel myself craving it. When I left Ghana, I went to Mayo and somewhere else. I went to the west coast, basically, for about ten days, and even though it was the summer, it rained.
Katherine May:
Of course, it did.
Emma Dabiri:
It was occasionally, regularly kind of gloomy and damp, but also so richly saturated in a particular way that I felt like my eyes really were just drinking that up, and the fine misty rain on my face. I was like, oh man, I didn’t realise how much I have actually been kind of shaped by this environment. I wouldn’t have liked the cold at that stage. That was still a good decade off, actually liking the cold, but definitely seeking out that wetness.
Katherine May:
That’s amazing because, actually, Ireland’s damp is such a particular damp. It is part of how mystical it can feel. It’s that kind of mood that the damp creates. And that deep, deep green and all those wildflowers in every lawn that you find in Ireland, which you don’t find in my part of England, is special. Even though it’s kind of a bit unpleasant and makes it difficult to dry your washing. Did you know that that kind of miserly rain and what it does to your skin is called ‘a Cornish facial’?
Emma Dabiri:
Really?
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. Actually, I was in rural Ireland last year. It was that kind of weather, even though, again, it was the summer, and this old man was just like, “Oh, this weather is wonderful for your complexion no matter what colour you are.” I was just like, “Thank you.”
Katherine May:
It’s like an Evian spray but built into the environment. It’s supposed to be amazing for your skin.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, yeah. I definitely know I was craving it, but I feel like, because my relationship to Ireland was-- so, yeah, I grew up there—well, I was born there, I grew up there, and my mum’s side of the family is entirely Irish—but because my dad is Nigerian and because that was such an anomaly when I was a small child in the 1980s and a teenager in the 90s, my sense of belonging there was very complicated, and I was always being told that I wasn’t really Irish. I honestly think that really had an impact on my relationship to the landscape and to my environment and to the weather. I was just like, “Oh my God, the other side of my family is from this really hot, warm place.”
Katherine May:
Maybe I’m better-suited kind of thing, yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. “I’m brown, and I need vitamin D, and, actually, I should be in the tropics. What kind of perverse punishment has been meted out on me that I’m me, and I’m here, and so alone.” But, yeah, when I left Ireland, I think that’s when I realised actually how much that weather and that environment had actually shaped me and, I think, had a big impact on who I am and actually how much I crave to be in that kind of weather sometimes.
Katherine May:
But it does make sense because I think when you’re younger—well, I don’t know about you—I was very absolute about things, and I thought I would find my place in the world and that that would be a definite thing, and as I’ve got older, I’ve realised that I’m just always craving change. I get to one place, and I get nostalgic about somewhere else, or I think about the next thing. I can imagine having those feelings when I was younger and experiencing racism as you did when you were younger and thinking, “Okay, so this isn’t my place, then. There must be a place.” It makes a load of sense. I know you’ve written that you kind of got out of Ireland as soon as you could, really, and moved on and tried to find that place, I guess.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, completely like as you’re saying. I think what I’ve really come to not just know but fully understand as I’ve gotten older is that kind of perpetual quest for finding the right geographical location. If it’s motivated by something that’s internal, and there’s an internal disconnect, or you’re looking for that place where you think everything will just fall into place, and there’ll be kind of like a magic formula that you fit and you belong, I think you could spend your whole life looking for that place. To an extent, not entirely, I think a lot of it is internal, something that’s internal, but kind of looking for an external solution to it. I recently re-read one of Nella Larsen’s books called Quicksand.
Katherine May:
I’ve not read that one.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, Passing is better known, particularly because it’s just been made into a movie. But this course that I was teaching in Villanova, it was like a comparative literature course, and we were looking at the relationship between the Irish Literary Revival and the Harlem Renaissance.
Katherine May:
It’s impossible to say.
Emma Dabiri:
It’s a proper tongue twister. We were looking at Quicksand, and I re-read that book as part of that course. I mean, it’s written a hundred years ago, but in it is this woman who has a Danish mother and a black father. She’s in 1920s America, and it’s basically her search from everywhere, like from the rural South, to Harlem at the height of the Renaissance, to Copenhagen where her mother’s family comes from. Her search to kind of find the place where she believes everything’s just going to fall into place, and inevitably, it never happens. She never finds it.
Katherine May:
There’s dramatic irony even in that set-up, isn’t there? You’re never going to find that place. That’s just not how it happens, but there’s always a part of me that thinks I would be better off living in a much more rural location, where it’s really quiet, and I wouldn’t have to see people. And as soon as I get to one of those places on holidays, I’m really bored within five days, and I’m like, “Right, where are the people? What am I doing?” I don’t think we know ourselves very well, really.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I don’t know how I would fare in that environment. I think when I was younger, it wouldn’t have even remotely appealed. It would have just seemed like a hellish possibility; whereas, now, I totally see the appeal of that kind of existence. I think it would be probably good for us all to be in that kind of environment or set-up for, I don’t know, a week or two, at least, a year. But I think, for me, that would be quite adequate.
Katherine May:
Yeah, that would be enough.
Emma Dabiri:
I’ve just left London, though, after 20+ years of living there.
Katherine May:
Oh, really? So are you still in a city, or have you changed completely?
Emma Dabiri:
No, I’m not that far from you actually. I’m on the Kent coast.
Katherine May:
Oh, are you?
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, and actually, how I came across Wintering was, I was in one of my local bookshops, and I picked it up at the cash register, and I was like, “Oh, that looks intriguing.” I was just thinking that, but I didn’t say anything, and the woman who works there was just like, “Oh my God. This book is amazing. You have to read it.”
Katherine May:
Ah, that’s nice.
Emma Dabiri:
I thought you were American. I thought it was an American book because I just saw ‘New York Times Best Seller’ on the front. I was just like, “Oh, is she American? Is it an American book?” and she was like, “No, she’s local basically.” And I was like, “Really?” I was like, “I have to read this.” So, yeah.
Katherine May:
I’m local-local as well. I’ve lived here all my life, not in Whitstable but further along the river, so I am truly a Kent native. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’m so local.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh, I love that.
Katherine May:
Well, I mean, I did manage to move away briefly for university. It’s really funny. I’m always really curious about what it would be like to live in another place, like a different country or even the other side of this country, but I’ve got this really strong sense that I belong here even though I love other places. I mean, maybe it’s just a complete lack of courage and opportunity so far, I guess, but I can’t imagine moving around. I still can’t picture it somehow.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh my goodness. If you are where you are from, and you feel that you just really, really belong there, I think, yeah, that’s what so many people are searching for. I don’t think you need to leave. It’s all good.
Katherine May:
Yeah, that’s true.
Emma Dabiri:
I miss Ireland so intensely. I don’t know. It feels weird for me. I’m really happy where I am now, more so than I’ve been, I think, in a lot of places. I really do feel very content here, but at the same time, I really, really pine for Ireland. The thought of never living there again is quite hard to countenance, but then it’s like, would I uproot my--? My children were born in London but grew up here, which is quite close to London, and also, on their dad’s side, they actually have been in this part of Kent for generations, so their roots have been quite connected to here for generations.
Katherine May:
It’s just so fascinating how particular our sense of place is because I moved to Whitstable 15 years ago, and it took me ages to feel like I belong here. I moved here because I’d always wanted to live by the sea, but I moved from the really working-class area of Kent. I grew up in Gravesend and then the Medway Towns, and I felt like a class traitor when I first moved here. Whitstable hadn’t gentrified as much as it has now. It’s really gentrified now, and there’s no way I could afford to have moved here now, but even as it was, it had a few nice little places to go to.
I felt intensely uncomfortable for the longest time, and like I had to almost defend a kind of working-class position for everybody else that those people didn’t know. It sounds just ridiculous as I say it, but I almost didn’t feel like I deserved this place. It felt, like, too fancy. That’s the truth of it: it felt too fancy for me. I felt like I didn’t belong. I used to get maybe invited to parties or whatever. I suddenly realised that I couldn’t master the middle-class sense of humour. The way you talk to each other in Chatham is that you take the piss of each other. That’s what you do. If anyone starts to go on about themselves, you take them down a peg a bit. You can’t do that here. Oh my God, I offended so many people when I first moved here.
Emma Dabiri:
I totally, totally get it. Dublin, particularly the part of Dublin I grew up in, the humour, what people expect from a social situation, is extremely different, and it does feel weird. Part of the reason I left Ireland was because I was like, “I need to be around other black people. I need to not be the black girl,” but then, at university and stuff, there actually were very few black people at my university. When I moved over here, I just found myself around very upper-middle-class, upper-class white English people, and I was just like, “Oh, this is a whole different vibe.”
Katherine May:
I know. Yeah, let’s do an anthropology of the British white upper middle classes. Because I knew I was going to go to university, and I knew that was going to be a change, I’d really paid attention to all those discussions of manners. I knew that you called it a napkin and not a serviette, and that you said sofa instead of settee, and you said lunch instead of dinner, and you didn’t say front room, all of that kind of thing. I’d learnt all of that, but nobody talked about the humour and the way that social conventions about how you talk about yourself was so different, and it took me a decade at least to master it.
I could not understand why these people talked about their children like they were like these little gods that [inaudible]; whereas where I come from, you insult your children. That’s what you do. It’s like, “Yeah, this idiot over here.” That was the convention as I was growing up, a very warm convention, not people being mean to their children, but you wouldn’t over-rate your children to other people because it would be like a failure of humility, I guess, if I was going to say it.
I feel like I’m rambling here, but what I’m trying to say is that belonging is not just about landscape; It’s about the peopling of that landscape and how there’s these tiny things that you can transgress without even knowing it.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, what you’re saying completely resonates. I think one of the things that I miss most about Dublin is, it’s like the culture, it’s the sensibilities, the perspective, the sense of humour, and also, actually, the way people speak to each other, the importance that is placed on craic—obviously, I mean craic, like the [fun?], C-R-A-I-C—and then also people just very witty, fast-paced. I guess, the closest thing you’d say would be like banter, but people really like slagging each other off. Do you know what I mean?
Katherine May:
Absolutely.
Emma Dabiri:
In a way, sometimes when I go home now, that side of me has become kind of dulled. It’s not as sharp, the way it used to be.
Katherine May:
You can’t take it anymore.
Emma Dabiri:
I’m kind of like, “What? Hang on. Are they taking the piss, or have I just been seriously insulted?” and then I’m like, “Oh no, God. I’ve been in England too long.”
Katherine May:
Yeah, and also, the first time I asked a middle-class person how’s your mum, they were like, “Do you know my mum?” I was like, “No, of course, I don’t. That’s just what you ask, isn’t it?” I feel like probably a lot of people listening to this are understanding me for the first time now. Let’s move on from my social incompetence, but actually, I think this is a neat segue. I’ve noticed your writing lately has been so much about class, and about economic disadvantage, I guess, and it’s so refreshing to read your analysis of it because I don’t think it comes across very often in our culture, people really talking about the disadvantages that still massively linger and the way that we’re connected by disadvantage, sometimes, rather than by other things. Does it feel invisible to you? It feels to me like we’re losing that discourse, and that it’s almost out of fashion a little.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh yeah. We’re totally losing it, which is very convenient for the status quo, and for power, actually, and I feel like with the emphasis being on other aspects of identity-- and then, again, there’s the idea that class isn’t necessarily an identity; it’s actually like a social positioning. Of course, there are class cultures that exist, but it’s not solely a culture or an identity. It’s also like a structural position, and that is not really engaged with in the kind of intersection of different identities that are prominent, where emphasis and attention is placed, and I feel that race and class often overlap.
I write a lot about how race was invented and the motivations behind the introduction of the idea of a white race and a black race. This is in the 17th century, like English colonial Barbados. It wasn’t called the black race then, but the idea of there being these two distinctly different races and a white race that was allegedly inherently superior was-- in many ways, part of the motivation behind this was to enshrine and protect class interests. I always find it really interesting that the first slave codes that we see that are the first example we have of the notion of a white race and a black race being codified into law, the first time that happens is in colonial Barbados in 1661, and it’s a response to the series of uprisings that happens on the island where indentured Irish servants and kidnapped Africans are coming together to attack the English landlords who they see as a common enemy because the notion of race hasn’t yet been introduced.
Katherine May:
Just to pause there, when I read that, I thought, it’s so hard to imagine now, isn’t it?
Emma Dabiri:
So quite effective.
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah, it’s been really effective and really compelling, and it seems so natural to our understanding, but just to put massive emphasis on this, that wasn’t always there.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that’s not the way it’s been for most of human existence. You see the same thing in colonial Virginia as well, where indentured English servants and kidnapped Africans come together, and there’s a rebellion called Bacon’s Rebellion where they fight, again, the elite class of land owners and lawmakers, and, again, those two exploited populations who were comprised of people who will soon begin to understand themselves as black and white can see the landlord class as a common enemy.
But what happened after race is invented is, those class solidarities—this is essentially what they were—become overridden by racial identity, where people who were racialised as white, even if they were exploited by a particular class of people, if they are also white people, they see more of a shared identity based on whiteness rather than based on their kind of class or structural position.
Then the other thing that I think really informs my writing or my thinking about class is that I grew up in a very working-class part of Dublin, and I just felt so strongly that—and I very much mean the kind of liberal mainstream social media type of anti-racism that is very popular and dominant at the moment—when they’re speaking about white people, I’m like, “This doesn’t seem like it maps on to the realities or the experiences, or is going to resonate at all with the white people that I grew up with.”
Katherine May:
That you grew up with, yeah. Absolutely.
Katherine May:
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Katherine May:
It always really strikes me, because I’ve changed social class—I’m definitely middle class now—my son is definitely, definitely middle class. I mean, he pronounces the T in Waitrose. I find it really hard to even do that. I can see the difference in my social capital and my power now, in that I can say things and people listen to them. People hear me when I speak, and I don’t think the mainstream discourse understands just how powerless that group of people is. They don’t have connections to anyone that might even help them. I don’t think the middle class can imagine not knowing a journalist somewhere along the line or something like that. It’s so far back from the understanding.
Emma Dabiri:
Completely. It’s those networks and those connections, and that’s kind of what I’m saying about it being like an actual position, like a position rather than just an identity. It’s where you’re kind of structurally positioned in society.
Katherine May:
Absolutely, yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
You don’t have those networks. You don’t have that access, which is the basis of social mobility or careers and career progression in this country and in many places. I also think class, in terms of just the idea that it’s kind of-- the strikes that are happening at the moment. I find labour movements so interesting because when you think about people power, since 2020, there have been these conversations—they’ve been happening for a long time—really, really mainstream widespread zeitgeisty conversations about how can we enact change, and people protest or make a lot of noise online, and nothing really changes.
Katherine May:
Nothing happens, yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Nothing happens. And when you think about where real effect, real change has been created, one of the kinds of few sides where people power can be demonstrated is through striking, is through [inaudible].
Katherine May:
It’s the labour movements, yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
Exactly. And if you have no class analysis, and you’re not thinking about labour, and you’re not thinking about workers, you’re not going to focus on that kind of organising. Your emphasis is going to be in other places, and those other places often don’t prove as effective in bringing about any change because they’re performative and symbolic.
Katherine May:
It means we think we’re organising, but we’re organising ineffectively. We’re using up so much of our time and energy getting upset with each other online, and then not--
Emma Dabiri:
Thinking we’re doing something.
Katherine May:
Yeah, it does. It does feel like occupation, doesn’t it? It’s been such a theme of the conversations in this season on The Wintering Sessions, that everybody’s very disenchanted with, particularly, Twitter, which I think for a long time felt really effective. That’s not to be too harsh on it because, actually, it was an effective way of gathering, but the gathering itself doesn’t impact anyone that isn’t on Twitter. I think we’re beginning to see the huge problem that that’s caused us because we have got ourselves really tangled up in ineffective protest. That feels so blunt to say that, but I think it’s probably true.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah. I recently read a really amazing book that named some of these processes that I’ve found so troubling recently, and it’s called Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). It’s quite interesting because the author is talking about the elites of marginalised groups and how, again, it’s this conflation of race and class, people that do belong to groups that are not the dominant white male middle class. There’s power within groups—the people who kind of constitute the elites of those other groups—and it might be a class position, or it might be a class privilege. I’m trying to avoid privilege.
He also talks about the attention economy, like a new class of people who really control attention because of a social media following, for instance, and how their priorities might be very different from the priorities of somebody who’s maybe in the same group as them but isn’t on social media or doesn’t actually really care about Hollywood representation or some of these demands where all of the attention has been focussed, but actually needs access just the basic requirements that people need to have a decent quality of living. But those voices, we don’t hear from those people. They don’t come to the fore, and so the set of priorities, even with marginalised groups, are determined, often, by people who have power and access and privilege within those groups.
Katherine May:
And who are doing it for them. When you paused at using the word privilege, I know exactly what you mean. I’ve been a bit troubled by the kind of announcing of white privilege that happens between white people like me. It’s almost like that kind of packages it up, and we’ve done that now. We do it at the beginning of every online event. Someone will say, “Well, of course, as a white privileged person,” and we all go, “Mm, yes.” That feels like action, and of course, it isn’t.
It just struck me as you stumbled on that word that one of the things that social media does is, it uses up words really quickly and taints them. So where once a term like white privilege would have had enduring power for maybe a decade or more, and it would have been a useful term that we could’ve worked with, it gets burnt up really, really fast and becomes just cliched and completely emptied out of any meaning so quickly. That’s one of the things that makes activism really difficult as well, I think, that the terminology is so unstable, and the rallying cries are so unstable, and the sense of what we’re arguing about at the moment is unstable and having everybody’s opinion all at once means that everything decomposes very, very quickly and political ardour just burns itself out.
Emma Dabiri:
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Even from the perspective of writing, I can’t bear to use certain words just because they’re just so cliched. There’s kind of predetermined stock phrases and buzz words that are not only expected but demanded of one to use, and I’m like, “No. I refuse to be forced to use this language.” There’s a lot of very stock words in the kind of online liberal, mainstream, anti-racist lexicon, and I really try to avoid using really any of them in my writing, even from the perspective of just having a love of language.
Katherine May:
Just so it feels fresh.
Emma Dabiri:
[inaudible].
Katherine May:
But I don’t think people hear stuff if you don’t use different language. My background’s more in autism awareness and rights, and I’ve seen exactly the same thing, that we all end up using the same language over and over again, and the effect is just deadening. You just think, “I’ve heard that. I know that already,” and the brain just skips over it. There’s nothing interesting there anymore because we’ve said it.
But, of course, that person that’s used that language might be talking about something really, really urgently important that’s happening to a real human being. I don’t know what to do about that. This is my big human question at the moment because autistic people wouldn’t have been able to get together without those social media organs that have been so powerful for us to meet each other. But they’re sort of destroying us at the same time, and they’re making us very, very tired in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever experienced before, that fatigue with self-advocacy and activism that comes from doing it as a full-time job, almost.
Emma Dabiri:
Well, I think it’s about recognising the utility in these platforms or methods because as you’ve described there, there is a lot.
Katherine May:
There’s a lot.
Emma Dabiri:
But being very aware of not only their limitations but also their capacity to do damage as well.
Katherine May:
And to create in-fighting. It’s easier to in-fight than it is to focus on what really needs to be done. It’s so simple to just go, “Well, I didn’t like it when you said that.” You just see fights breaking out all over the internet every day between people that are aligned.
Emma Dabiri:
But a lot of that is because-- there’s the narcissism of small differences, but then, that’s turbo charged as well by the fact that this concept of clout-rage and calling people out and these sassy ‘I’m speaking truths to power’ takes are actually more divisive than that, actually kind of witch hunts and pile-ons on people and stuff. That is actually really incentivised, particularly in somewhere like Twitter. That highly emotive content is what accrues likes and shares and, therefore, more influence, so people are actually incentivised to be divisive. It’s kind of like a politics of competition rather than one of solidarity.
Katherine May:
Yeah, who’s the most outraged; who’s the most offended? That’s seen as a position of triumph, and it’s just unconstructive, I think.
Emma Dabiri:
Well, who has the most followers, but a great way to accrue followers is through outrage.
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah, and I know that if I say something angry on Twitter, I will get five times the retweets than if I say something just pleasantly observational, everyday life. “Here we are. Hi.” It’s looking for your outrage because that’s so contagious. The problem is that it has such a personal effect on the person that is outraged. What I’m saying is, I feel guilty that I’m always scooting off to Instagram for some nice pictures. I feel terrible about that, but there’s this real [inaudible] that I experience that’s like, I can’t take this anymore. I can’t deal with it. The world is so outrageous. What do we do with that? I don’t know.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I mean, for me, Twitter feels like a real hotbed of it, so I spend very little time on the Twitter streams, and honestly, I read a lot of theory—I’ve been doing a PhD for a really long time, so that kind of is why I have to be doing that—yeah, a lot of theory in the black radical tradition, which is something that I talk about quite a lot, and I actually find that such an antidote to the kind of reactive one-dimensional outraged hot takes. It’s really rigorous, generous, radical, I’d say. Yeah, rigorous and radical, and actually quite generous and generative tradition with deep thinking happening as well as organising.
Katherine May:
Absolutely. I mean, it’s an incredibly scholarly tradition, yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
So, yeah, I find that a real antidote to social media race discourse.
Katherine May:
Does this put you in conflict and opposition with people that really is your kind of team ultimately? Is that offensive to people, for you to say that, or does it fit very comfortably into a kind of wide-ranging discourse? It should be the latter. Is it?
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I don’t know. Not necessarily speaking about me directly, but I have seen people who say that it’s elitist to say that people should be engaging with some of these texts. And my response to that is, I think of the Black Panthers, and I think of them as being very, very working-class black people from Oakland in the 1960s [inaudible], and they’re reading Nietzsche and Plato, so I don’t know. I don’t believe it’s elitist to read.
Katherine May:
I feel like it’s kind of elitist to say that reading’s elitist, but it might be [inaudible] probably. What do you think about that headline in The Sun yesterday that actually mocked builders for saying that they were reading and that they were in touch with their emotions? Did you see that?
Emma Dabiri:
Shoving bacon sandwiches, [inaudible] woke.
Katherine May:
Yes, that’s it, woke builders. They’re woke because they’re slightly educated, and they’re in touch with their emotions.
Emma Dabiri:
That was it, yeah.
Katherine May:
That’s, like, a really obvious example of using education against working-class people. Like, you’re not allowed to reach out and learn stuff. You must stay down. I really think that was-- yeah.
Emma Dabiri:
It’s actually obscene. I’m so glad that you brought that up because I saw that, to much mirth and hysteria, the other day, but it’s actually endemic of something far more pernicious, and I think that’s kind of more of a recent development. I don’t mean just since social media, but maybe recent in the past, I don’t know, few decades because there are very strong working-class socialist traditions, for instance, where people would be reading lots of theory and lots of books that are dense, and very, very engaged in international solidarity and the socio-economic climate in other parts of the world and have a really strong knowledge of international relations. I think, increasingly, there’s been this idea that, actually, that’s not for working-class people. It’s real ‘stay in your place’.
Katherine May:
It’s deeply offensive, and I think it comes from both sides of the political spectrum as well. I think the Labour Party has become an incredibly middle-class organisation, and I don’t think everybody in there understands that working-class people are capable of that kind of thought. I have depressed myself again. We need a class analysis more than ever, is what I’m saying.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, completely.
Katherine May:
Actually, this is a good moment to ask a question that one of my patrons sent in because it fits just right here. It’s from Sarah Horner, and she asked—and I think this is such a pertinent question—are podcasts, uh-oh, like Blindboy, The Rest Is Politics, Revolutions and so on, building an opportunity for critical thinking, or are they just another echo chamber for a small number of people who already agree? And she says, “I want to be optimistic that they’re an indicator of our appetite for real insight, but in daily life, with real people, I’m not seeing it.” I don’t know if you know those podcasts.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I do. I’ve been on Blindboy a couple of times. He’s a friend of mine. Yeah, so, for instance, I feel that when I speak to Irish guys who’d be kind of the generation below me, for instance—actually, not just men, people generally, but I’m going to actually just focus on men for a second—the way a lot of them think about their identity as men and about masculinity and stuff has shifted so much because my male friends wouldn’t have been able to express themselves maybe in those kind of ways. I think that is in large part because of a cultural shift, that a lot of it has been expressed through social media, and a lot of it has been expressed through podcasts and men talking about their emotions and their sexuality--
Katherine May:
Mental health
Emma Dabiri:
--their identity and mental health and stuff in ways that wouldn’t have been permissible when I was a teenager or even in my twenties.
Katherine May:
When you think about the cultural shift that’s been happening in our lifetime, men attending births, for example, my dad’s generation didn’t do that.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh God, yeah. My dad wasn’t even in the country when I was born.
Katherine May:
Well, I think I’d avoid it that much again. The conversations we’re having about gender, the conversations we’re having about sexuality, the conversations about parenting, about housework, about who earns the most, every part of our culture’s been exploded, and I don’t think we all realise all the time just how much we’re in the middle of that explosion. A lot of that stuff has yet to fully settle, and it’s, therefore, no wonder everything feels so up for grabs and uncomfortable. But I’m such an optimistic person. I can’t help it. I do think that discomfort is a sign of something good gradually happening, not straightforwardly, but the fact that it still hasn’t set yet is a very, very good thing indeed because if we all felt culturally certain, I think we’d be regretting a lot of those certainties in 50 years’ time in the way that we look back at the cultural certainties of the 50s, and they now look horrifying actually. They relied on a lot of unspoken oppression.
Emma Dabiri:
I’m really interested in a lot of late-60s and early-70s movements, and if you look at the progress that was seemingly made, there was progress made, but then I think about how attitudes were when I was growing up in the 90s. They were dreadful.
Katherine May:
I know.
Emma Dabiri:
And it’s just like, where did all that progressiveness go, and I feel like the pendulum can just swing. I feel like we can’t rest on our laurels because it is all kind of up for grabs. I see very conservative and anti-progressive tendencies, also, that are very strong as well, so, yeah, I just don’t know. I think I’m an optimistic person as well, but we might kind of resolve microaggressions, and by the time we’ve done that, the world will be too hot to live in.
Katherine May:
We’ll be too hot to be aggressive to each other. We’ll just be all tired.
Emma Dabiri:
Earth won’t be able to sustain human life, so it won’t matter. Yeah, I think the stuff with the environment is kind of pretty pressing. Then, sometimes, I see the naval-gazing kind of infighting of people who actually you would think be able to see themselves as not even just allies but actually fighting for the same thing, and I just feel a bit like, ugh.
But I’m looking at those movements, that organising with the Amazon workers and all the left-wing governments that are coming into power in Latin America and South America and the recent election in Colombia where it has its first left-wing president. He’s like a former guerrilla. And then the vice-president is the first black woman who’s ever had that position in Colombia. If it was just a black woman who was the vice-president of Colombia, but she was a raging conservative, I wouldn’t be celebrating that as a win, but it’s a black woman who’s also a strongly leftist black woman, so, yeah, it’s just a very leftist government. Their stated aims are for equality and no repression, and these are the stated aims. I don’t know how achievable that will be in our current--
Katherine May:
Well, it’s a global system. I think we in the West forget that there is a global picture here, and the despair I feel about the direction politics is going is actually quite specifically European and North American.
Emma Dabiri:
Ireland is a bit of shining light in that.
Katherine May:
Yeah, tell us about Ireland. I don’t think everyone always notices though.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I know. I literally have people ask me. They’re like, “Well, how is it a different country?” I’m just like, “What?” I’ve honestly had people ask me that question, and I don’t know how to answer it. “How is France a different country? What are you talking about?” There can be a weird ownership over Ireland, people being surprised that it has its own currency.
Anyway, Ireland has just kind of emerged as-- it’s so funny because when I left, it was still very socially conservative, and London, especially, seemed, like, so liberatory and just lightyears ahead. There’s been a reversal. Through mass movements and organising, Ireland has just changed, brought in a lot of new legislation around pretty draconian laws that we had. I don’t know. This generation is just really, like, “No, we’re not having all of this super repressive bullshit that has determined life and culture for so long.”
Katherine May:
I love that. It makes me so excited. I was a generation-Z teenager, just very badly misplaced. I would have been so at home right now. I’d have been so angry. Having a little TikTok rather than a really stupid old lady TikTok which is what I’ve just developed, me not doing dances.
Emma Dabiri:
I love TikTok, but I actually just don’t have the headspace. I wish I was sixteen because I would have the headspace.
Katherine May:
It would be amazing if you were sixteen.
Emma Dabiri:
I know. I had such bad social anxiety, but I would have been able to express my sense of humour to an audience without having to engage with anyone. It would have been great.
Katherine May:
Yeah. God, I could talk about TikTok forever at the moment because I’ve just got interested in it, and I’m learning so much there. It is so much more global than any media I’ve ever encountered before, and so much more diverse. Let’s end on a note of optimism. That feels like the future to me. It really does. It feels like young people are flooding into these spaces that are a genuine mixing pot. The term mixing pot is another term that just burned itself out, but here is an actual cauldron that ideas are being thrown into, and they’re all sitting quite comfortably alongside each other. You can spend half an hour on there and learn some stuff about other people that you just did not know, and I love that.
Emma Dabiri:
Yeah, I think that’s incredibly exciting. I don’t think I’ve engaged with it as much as I would like to.
Katherine May:
As obsessively.
Emma Dabiri:
No, I’ve had quite a few peers of my kind of age, who are not big into social media at all and actually, find the way people are on Instagram, they find it quite cringy, being like, “Oh no. TikTok is actually really cool,” people whose opinions I respect speaking very highly of it when they’re not social media people really at all. So I think I really do need to explore it, but I don’t have headspace. I’m like, I can’t handle it.
Katherine May:
Yeah, I know.
Emma Dabiri:
I can’t handle another app.
Katherine May:’
Too many other things. When my publisher suggested it, I was like, “Not another thing,” and then I obsessed over it for about two weeks and can’t leave it alone now. It feels punk actually. It’s very--
Emma Dabiri:
DIY.
Katherine May:
Yeah, it’s like it’s really unaesthetic, like it’s the anti-Instagram.
Emma Dabiri:
That’s what I’ve heard.
Katherine May:
That’s the joy of it, people doing really scrappy stuff that’s intelligent and that the quality of it lies in something other than prettiness.
Emma Dabiri:
Oh my God. You’ve got me hyped. I’m like [inaudible] TikTok when we finished talking.
Katherine May:
I’m a convert [inaudible] to you. Emma, thank you. I would just carry on talking for the next three hours, so I will have to stop. I think we should just do a series where we just put the world to rights and just carry on week by week. It’s been amazing to talk to you. Thank you so, so much, and I know everyone’s going to love listening to you, so thank you.
Emma Dabiri:
Well, thank you so much for having me, and we didn’t even get into sea swimming.
Katherine May:
So I decided to have a little slice of lemon in my tea for old times’ sake, just the smallest slither. It’s like a little crescent moon floating in the top of my tea. Smells great. It’s so funny how these things comfort us, but also how often we deny ourselves those comforts when we’re at our most distressed and our most worried.
If I can do anything for this world through writing Wintering, I hope it will be to convince people that they’re not obliged to increase their own suffering when they’re already suffering, that you don’t show solidarity for people in need by making your life painful. Instead, it’s about acknowledging that suffering comes round to all of us sometimes. We all get our turn, and we do all we can to comfort ourselves in those times. We do everything always to live the best life we can, and that gives us the strength and the level of calm that’s required to go out and fight in this world for the things that are necessary and for the compassion that we need to give.
So I’m going to keep on making jasmine tea. And I was thinking, while I was making it, that I learned to use that teapot for another purpose quite quickly in my first weeks at university. I learnt to make whiskey tea, as well, in that big teapot which is whiskey and tea and sugar and lemons, and I realised that I became a lot more popular when I started pouring cups of that than when I just stuck to the jasmine. It’s really funny to think about it. I know my grandma had told me that she used to occasionally like a little slug of whiskey in her tea; although, I never once saw her take it. And I thought, well, okay, I’ve always been an inventive soul, so whiskey tea is sometimes a thing for me and my friends now. It’s definitely, definitely a way to bring a sense of dazed calm to your afternoon if it’s your kind of thing.
I feel like I’m having to do a lot of breathing out at the moment, very deliberately, but you know me, I’m always optimistic, and I’m always hopeful. I’m hopeful because every single person that I’m talking to at the moment is saying enough is enough, and I’m so ready for that, you know? My postie knocked on the door today, and after she’d given the dog a biscuit, as she does every day—the dog loves her—she just started talking about her working conditions and how difficult things are for people in her job at the moment and how childcare is a massive factor, that they’re struggling to plan around childcare because of working hours getting changed.
She said, “I just wanted to tell you that because I think we’ll be going on strike too, and I want all of you people to understand why because I don’t think the message will get across in the news.” I’m just so full of admiration for her to stand and do that, to come and tell the people that she has casual chats with every day exactly where she’s coming from and where her hardships lie and to say it face to face in a way that we don’t do enough. It’s socially awkward to go from those really light, casual chats that she and I have, while I’m signing for something or when she’s petting the dog, that are very superficial and very deliberately so. It takes such steel to say, “I just need to tell you something about my situation that’s going to illuminate a world for you that I know you don’t understand,” and, wow, that is what we’re all going to have start doing in this world, to say, gently, respectfully, I disagree, and here’s why and here’s my perspective, and here’s what I know that you may not know, and here’s what I’ve experienced. It’s not easy lovelies.
I hope you’re all okay. Take enormous care of yourselves, and we’re in it together. Thank you to everyone who helped make this podcast possible, to my brilliant Patreon community, to Buddy the producer and Meghan the convener. We’ve been talking a lot lately about how we shift this podcast to meet the needs of the world that’s coming, and I think we’re going to take a little break over the summer and replay some brilliant old episodes. We’re going to come back slightly different, but still, I think it’ll be wonderful. But the world’s changing, and we need to change a little bit too. Thanks so much to Emma Dabiri whose books are available wherever you get your books, but there are links to her books and to her socials in the episode description, so do check her out. She’s a wonder. And thank you all. I’ll see you very soon. Bye.
Show Notes
Producer Note: You'll notice a slight change in Katherine's audio in the second half of the podcast. This is just due to a necessary 'source switch', where we had to change where her recording was coming from. Your ears will adjust very quickly but apologies for the ever so slight dip. Thank you!
This week, Katherine talks to Emma Dabiri, author of Don’t Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next.
What begins as a conversation about Emma’s new-found commitment to appreciating all the seasons - not just summer - becomes something else entirely. Emma is one of our most agile thinkers and fearless speakers, and soon she is talking about everything from race and class to how we should think about the world right now. A thread of belonging runs through it all - how we seek and find it, how complicated our identities have become, and why it matters.
We talked about:
Seasons and learning to appreciate winter
Invisible social transgressions
External solutions to internal problems
Race, class and needing to be around other Black people in Ireland
References from this episode:
Emma’s Book: What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
Emma’s Book: Don’t Touch My Hair
Book: Elite Capture
Book: Quicksand & Passing
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Season 3: Cole Arthur Riley on 'We did good'
Season 3: Aimee Nezhukumatathil on nurturing wonder through nature
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
To keep up to date with The Wintering Sessions, follow Katherine on Twitter, Instagram and Substack
For information on Katherine’s online writing courses, including her programme Wintering for Writers, visit True Stories Writing School
Note: this post includes affiliate links which means Katherine will receive a small commission for any purchases made.
Wintering is out now in the UK, and the US.
