Understandably, the responses to this article have tended to focus on the individuals named in it. But I think one of the most important bits of it is this question of what the role of white people ought to be in a revived antiracist movement? https://novaramedia.com/2021/01/20/the-slumflower-beef-has-exposed-the-limits-of-influencer-activism/

I don't think that there's an obvious answer. It's not a bad thing that the emphasis has been on the self organisation of Black and brown people, and it lots of ways this has been a corrective to a longstanding failure to integrate an analysis of race within class and/or gender.

There's a generation of younger, socially conscious white people who have learned of their centrality to upholding a racially unequal society. But what do we actually want them to *do* with that knowledge?

The things they've been told to do range from the politically useful (read, listen, learn) to the politics of ritualised self-abasement which helps no one, and adds nothing to the conversation.

"Privilege checking" mostly boils down to white people prefacing the things they want to say by apologetically telling us that they're white first.

Which comes from a place of sincerity, of really trying to grapple with, and respond to, the political moment. But it's useless.

So how do we want white people to apply the useful stuff politically?

There's got to be more than the politics of passivity ("sit back and shut up"), the politics of interpersonal policing ("call out other white people") and the politics of consumerism ("open your purse").

Again, there aren't obvious answers to this. But I think the more we avoid tough questions, the more space is left to cynical actors appropriating the language of racial liberation for their own self-serving purposes.