White Flank
White people's participation in racial justice movements has always been fraught, with competing ideas about what meaningful involvement entails. Yet the question of what it will take to get more white people to fight for multiracial democracy is as urgent as ever. Chandra Russo takes up this question in White Flank.
This book tells the story of a new generation of white antiracist efforts in a range of local contexts, from Los Angeles to rural Appalachia. These groups are part of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), which has emerged as the largest U.S.-based effort explicitly seeking to organize white people for racial and economic justice. Beyond just book clubs and discussion circles, and against the seductions of virtue signaling, SURJ invites white communities to take part in antiracist action and equips them to organize for lasting change.
Growing the white flank of a multiracial justice movement is bound to be messy. Russo argues that these groups reorient our understanding of antiracism away from a matter of individual morality and instead towards an emphasis on collective action to change systems. This is a crucial achievement.
—Daniel Martinez HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone
"Russo's White Flank is an incisive examination of what anti-racist organizing is, isn't, and has the potential to be in the U.S. Through extensive interviews, careful fieldwork, and impressive theoreticalacumen, Russo presents a nuanced picture of what people are doing and what more it will take to organize an antiracist politics that goes beyond ethical positioning and extends into practical, political action that can make possible the egalitarian, multi-racial American democracy that freedom-fighters have been pursuing since Reconstruction."
—Deva Woodly, Brown University
"This exciting work takes readers into the organizing trajectories, the inner lives, and even the quandaries of linked white antiracist groups, urban and rural. Written from extensive ethnographic research and with a firm sense of traditions of struggle, White Flank reflects profound insights from its author and from activists to whom she has listened so well. Describing campaigns building on specific mutual interests across color lines, but also aiming to foster broader interracial solidarity among whites, this study will be as useful in social movements as it is in classrooms."
—David Roediger, University of Kansas and author of An Ordinary White
