Guilt Is Not An Organizing Strategy

James Tracy: Tell me a little bit about you and your activist background, that contributes heavily to this book.

Chandra Russo: So twenty years ago, while working in a community health center after graduating from college, I was quickly swept into immigrant justice organizing. That was 2006, a time that many folks have likened to our most recent buildup of ICE operations: the round-ups and executions, and also these waves of powerful resistance. I won’t give my whole biography except to say that organizing in different spaces—New York, central Mexico, Colorado—informed my desire to go to graduate school. It was the foundation of my first book, Solidarity in Practice. And throughout my time as an academic, I’ve moved in and out of formal movement spaces, largely around immigrant defense but also other issues. And then my research projects are generally inspired by the burning questions that emerge from my own movement work.

James: It’s pretty obvious when you read books about social movements, books written by academics that have actually gotten their hands dirty in movements and in organizations. It’s a special category. Our colleagues who have only academic experiences can often produce worthwhile research. But a book like yours has a whole extra layer of insight thanks to this. Tell me a little bit about what you wanted to accomplish with White Flank.

Chandra: I wanted to pose the question: What can be done to bring more white people into struggles for racial and economic justice? I really did not plan to write about a single organization, as I ended up doing with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). But what was pretty clear to me early on is that, under the umbrella of SURJ, there are a range of instructive approaches.

In social science-speak, I sampled on the dependent variable. I was trying to find groups most exemplifying the work that SURJ as an organization imagines can be done. That brought me to three city-based groups in Los Angeles, Buffalo, NY, and Louisville, KY as well as two rural organizing formations in Ashland, KY and Shelbyville, TN.

Many people have preconceptions about what SURJ is, imagining urban and suburban groups populated by class privileged progressives. Book groups and discussion circles. Maybe folks joining protests as they arise. But that really isn’t the whole picture.

The groups I looked at are engaged in collective action to change systems and policies. 

The urban groups I studied are working in partnership with Black and Latine-led orgs, running campaigns to prevent jails from being built, to reallocate funds away from prisons and policing and into community-based resources.

The rural projects are a bit different, built around what folks in these predominantly white, rural areas identify as their most pressing needs. 

So for the two I studied, this means majority white but still multiracial groups fighting for housing justice. But it really could be any widely felt issue–hospital closures, the opioid crisis. Organizers invite people into the work based on a shared, pressing need, and then embed the organizing with political education. A basic starting point is naming white racism and race-baiting as tools that elites manipulate to keep poor and working people from building power.

Liberals and many on the left often write off these regions–rural, white, Southern but places that have also been abandoned by the market and the state–as the center of white racist bigotry. But these groups demonstrate a different vision. In their desire for better conditions for themselves and their communities, they too can be organized into antiracist politics.

James: You talk about the anxiety of liberals and left around white rural areas as being the bastion of conservatism. Do you think that analysis sometimes contains a lot of class anxiety as well?

Chandra: Yes, there probably is at core a deep class anxiety for class-privileged white people to interrogate: what is the material basis of our antiracist practice? Dismantling white supremacy is also going to require some sort of redistributive program. If we make poor white folks more central to racial justice projects, those efforts are going to look very different than what many class-privileged, white liberal folks might like to imagine our antiracist commitments require. 

James: I’ve been revisiting The Gospel According to James Baldwin, and there is that one quote of his that I’ve been sitting with a lot lately. “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” This can be interpreted in many different ways. But it makes me question if the most effective thing to do today is to build intentionally all-white antiracist organizations.

Chandra: Such a profound question. Here’s where I land right now. We need to be organizing white folks both because we are white and beyond our whiteness. We need formations that are intentionally going after predominantly white communities with a consciousness about what whiteness means, and what whiteness does, and how whiteness is practiced. We know from the results of various political struggles and elections and so on that whiteness still really matters to how white people act politically. But our organizing processes need to bring in white people because of the other social positions we hold in common across racial lines: as tenants, as those in need of healthcare, as those battling addiction.

That is the approach in play for the groups I studied. The project isn’t: let’s create all white groups. But rather: how can we move politics in all white or predominantly white communities? And that is a sensible question if we think about legacies of residential segregation, so where people live, go to school, to work, to worship.

James: Your book is so useful because it’s not about guilt. It’s all about strategy and history and how we come together to undermine racist structures. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your book as a counterpoint to a lot of these authors telling white people that they should feel guilty instead of walking in solidarity with others.

Chandra: I don’t want to denigrate any approach. There is value to learning about the way that white people’s behaviors prevent us from seeing racial realities as they are. And also, a guilt-based strategy is not great for organizing. Not if the goal is to bring a critical mass of folks into building political power. If we want to bring people into efforts that are ultimately going to require some level of personal sacrifice, as all movement efforts do, we can’t start by telling people that they are bad. And we can’t start by telling them, “here are all the things you need to give up.” Like if you’re going to bring more white people into struggles for racial justice, it doesn’t make much sense to start with “you have white privilege, and you need to give it up.” As if that’s possible. Or, “this is the thing that you were born into, and you should feel guilty about it.” 

We invite people in by asking folks what they care about and by showing them a vision of how to get there. We gotta help each other connect the dots. So: “The way that you get from where you’re at to this other vision is by joining with others. And fighting for a thing. And yes, that’s gonna take some sacrifice, but let’s do it out of love and joy and the fact that we can grow together, not the fact that we have to give up our personal badness.”

James: One of the other things I love about this book is that it’s a recent history. In my writing, I’m often trying to find older people before they die, interview them, and find that box of primary documents that’s usually deep in their moldy basement somewhere. I think that’s such a gift that you’re able to get this fairly recent history down, because it makes it immediately usable for people to reflect on. So my last question for you is simply: what’s your hope for SURJ a year from now, five years from now? What are some areas of growth that you hope to see?

Chandra: I think something this book shows pretty clearly is the importance of building up hyper-local organizing infrastructure, particularly in places where the Left has just kind of thrown our hands up, “that’s right-wing territory.” We need a multi-layered agenda. Yes, we’re putting out fires constantly at the national level, but I don’t think the way we fight consolidating fascism is by focusing solely on national-level electoral projects. The Right has really been ahead of us on this hyper-local, seemingly small-bore focus. 

Last spring, I started paying more attention to these data center opposition struggles. I think that this could be a crucial organizing opportunity. If you crunch the data, as my collaborator has, a majority of these new proposals and new forms of resistance are in places that lean rural and lean whiter. The Left can and should get ahead of this. How do we turn these very organic, local mobilizations into new political possibilities? Guided by people on the ground but with real clarity around refusing race-baiting. And bringing more white people in.