Otegha Uwagba is Black. I am white. Uwagba's WHITES - an essay on racism, whiteness and the mental and emotional labour required of Black people to negotiate racism and whites - is a trenchant lesson for us whites on how it really is to be Black in the UK, and how we whites so casually and so carelessly fail to realise, let alone recognise, our own racism.  On page 43, Uwagba quotes Wesley Morris on 'the truest description of the Black experience when navigating white spaces': For people of colour, some aspect [s] of friendship with white people   [or as Uwagba writes, being around white people in general]  involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at any moment, by a slip of the tongue, or at a campus party, or in a legislative campaign. But it's not always anticipated. She gives several examples of being dropped through that trapdoor and how it feels. And they're all awful.

The only thing we whites can do, if we're serious about allyship, is to become Race Traitors, defined by Noel Ignatiev (a white man) as: Those white people fully committed to the abolition of whiteness. ... Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. In the same section Uwagba quotes from Barnor Hesse's The 8 White Identities, which she has 'found to be a useful framework for understanding how committed (or not) individual white people are to overthrowing whiteness'. What true allyship looks like, Uwagba believes, is described in the seventh and eighth white identities: (7) 'white traitor', defined by Hesse as the white person who 'actively refuses complicity; names what's going on; intention is to subvert white authority and tell the truth at whatever cost', and (8) the 'white abolitionist', who 'changes institutions; dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself'.

Despite not being affiliated to or working for any organisation, I resolve to find ways to do this.