White Flank: Organizing White People for Racial Justice

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.

Chandra Russo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University. She is the author of Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest to the US Security State(2018).