‘A white guy who doesn’t get it, or does he?’: a multilayered analysis of one activist’s effort to build coalitions across race

Abstract

This ethnographic study uses discourse analysis to examine how one White college‐educated activist worked in coalition with other White and African American activists to create a ‘Community Learning Center’ for African American residents of a low‐income housing project. Dissatisfied with Whiteness theories that mark White activists as privileged and therefore failed or successful in their coalition efforts, this paper applies a multilayered analysis of Whiteness and coalition‐building. By juxtaposing two different readings (coalition and Whiteness) of the same transcript, the paper works outside the binary of success and failure to discuss educative moments that emerge when activists talk across difference and debrief their efforts to reconstitute what is coalition‐building.