Interracial Solidarity Research Articles

Book Review: Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing. New York: Melville House. 2021.

The tenth anniversary revised and updated edition of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing is a critical retelling of New Left politics in the United States. This retelling should be of interest to historians, political scientists, sociologists, community organizers, and anyone concerned with the possibilities and challenges of creating a meaningfully inclusive society. It should be of interest to this diverse audience for the following reasons.

“Imagine Growing Up Thinking the US is the Best Opportunity”: Immigrant Origin Youth of Color Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement on Twitter

Immigrant origin youth are among the largest growing population in the United States of America (U.S.), and are important political agents for social change. This study examines how these youth engage in interracial solidarity, particularly in digital spaces. This study used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the Twitter posts of 36 immigrant origin youth (ages 18–23; 62.5% women) from African/Afro-Latine, Latine, and Asian origins. We examined their posts about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and racial justice for Black Americans in 2020. We found that immigrant origin youths’ identities as racial-ethnic minorities informed their support of BLM. Further, we found racial differences in digital action such that African-origin youth focused on celebrating Blackness and calling in peers of all races, while non-African origin youth strategically amplified the work of U.S.-origin Black Americans and called in allyship in their racial-ethnic communities. Lastly, we found that African-origin youth viewed their positionality within the BLM movement differently compared to their U.S.-born Black peers due to their different relationship to chattel slavery and anti-Blackness. This study suggests that scholars and practitioners can support immigrant origin youths’ sociopolitical development by incorporating an intersectional analysis of inequities to promote collective identification and mass mobilization.

Are Asian Americans BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)? Internalization of the model minority stereotype and COVID-19 racial bias on interracial solidarity toward Black Americans.

Collective minoritized identities such as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) may promote cross-racial solidarity. However, Asian Americans occupy a racially triangulated position as the "buffer minority" stereotyped as both the model minority and perpetual foreigner, complicating their inclusion in the BIPOC identity. The present study examined how the model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes relate to Asian Americans' perceived belongingness and identification with the BIPOC identity and, in turn, their interracial solidarity toward Black Americans. A path analysis was conducted using cross-sectional data from a sample of 312 Asian Americans (Mage = 41.19, 69.87% college graduates, 46.79% foreign-born) to examine direct and indirect effects on Black community activism orientation (BCAO), with internalized model minority stereotype (MMS) and experiences of COVID-19 racial bias (CVRB) as exogenous predictors and perceived BIPOC inclusion and BIPOC self-identification as mediators. The BIPOC variables demonstrated a direct and positive association with BCAO. Furthermore, internalized MMS negatively related to BCAO through the sum effect of decreased perceived BIPOC inclusion and BIPOC self-identification, while experiences of CVRB positively related to BCAO through the sum effect of increased perceived BIPOC inclusion and BIPOC self-identification. Asian Americans' perceived BIPOC inclusion and BIPOC self-identification are shaped by their racially triangulated position, characterized by both the inhibiting effect of internalized MMS and the promoting effect of experiences of CVRB. This heightened or diminished BIPOC self-concept subsequently influenced their willingness to engage in interracial solidarity for Black Americans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Ruse of Recognition: Black Labor in the Afterlife of Slavery

Given the abolitionism professed by successive labor leaders in the years following the U.S. Civil War, why did the cause of interracial solidarity fail to gain traction in postbellum organized labor? Drawing on archival and secondary data on the encounter of Black and White labor from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century, we trace the failure of interracial solidarity to the labor movement’s refusal to reckon institutionally with what Hartman calls the “nonevent of emancipation” and the “afterlife of slavery” for Black populations. Enslaved artisans dominated the skilled trades before the war, and White unions emerged correspondingly to exclude Black labor. When, after the Civil War, the formerly enslaved began to argue that they were being excluded from unions, White labor used emancipation as an anti-Black discursive technology to deny those claims. White labor also employed violence to exclude Black people from the labor movement. By addressing the research puzzle in this way, we offer a novel synthesis of Black studies and the sparse but important body of work on the sociology of slavery to reframe the mainstream approach to interracial solidarity in the sociology of labor and labor movements.

Humanizing Black lives in protest: emotion, embodiment, and interracial witnessing

ABSTRACT The video of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests and civil unrest, leading white support of Black Lives Matter to reach an all-time high in 2020. During this time, the heightened visibility of Black death by police and public conversations about anti-racism prompted conversations about institutionalized whiteness, interracial solidarity, and meaningful social justice action. This participatory rhetorical study, based on our analysis of twenty-six interviews with protest participants, investigated how racially diverse participants narrated their experiences of attending and/or organizing protests. We argue that the protests produced rhetorically impactful instances of witnessing through embodied experiences of relationality and collective feeling. Considering the protests’ impacts along with critiques of white witnessing and performative allyship, we explore the rhetorical potentialities of protest for humanizing Black lives by increasing anti-racist emotions and contributing to coalitional interracial subjectivities. Our theorization of interracial witnessing extends rhetorical witnessing to specifically address how spatial reconfigurations of racialized materialities and emotions during protest create new forms of recognition. In addition, the use of participatory approaches also extends media witnessing through the use of interviewing as an inventive space for deepening the witnessing process.

Advocacy Stories: Equity Literacy Practices of White Low Income Mothers Navigating School Reform

This article, based on collaborative ethnography, describes five low income white mothers’ equity literacy practices as they advocated for their children’s diverse “failing” school during a state takeover. Mothers used both hard and soft advocacy. They promoted equity by reinforcing positive aspects of the school community, and resisting and reframing negative stories perpetuated about the school based on stigma at the intersection of race, class, and standardized educational attainment. They shared the ideal of exposing their children to “real life” by staying loyal to their school. These mothers’ stories present possibilities, and challenges, for realizing interracial solidarity that fosters and sustains equitable schooling in the United States long term.

Afro-Asian resonances: Staging the Congo Crisis in 1960s’ Chinese theatre

AbstractIn the first half of the 1960s China witnessed an unprecedented florescence of theatrical works on Third World decolonization, which aimed to disseminate the ideology of Maoist internationalism and cultivate transnational and interracial solidarity among the Chinese public. Existing scholarship on Maoist internationalist theatre tends to understand the phenomenon as the domestication of Third World decolonization for China’s political ends. This article, by focusing on the heterogeneous processes of production, adaptation, and reception, illuminates the practical and epistemological challenges of representing an internationalist subject, the imperfect performance of foreign culture and history, and the porous process of meaning-making for Chinese performers and audiences. Using previously untapped historical materials, such as performance programmes, personal recollections, and newspapers, this article explores the staging of the Congo Crisis (1960–1965)—a widely mediated international event in Maoist China and a central conflict in the global Cold War—in the spoken drama War Drums on the Equator (1965), its many local variations, and a dance drama adaptation, The Raging Congo River (1965). By mediating and enacting ‘embodied and affective knowledge’ about Congo, these theatrical works made the political motif of internationalist solidarity into sonorous and kinaesthetic artefacts that engendered plural meanings to Chinese performers and audiences. This article further reveals flawed perceptions, processes of corrections, and the epistemological limitations in the performance of the Congo Crisis in Maoist China.

Translating critical reflection into collective action: The mediating role of Asian American racial identity ideological values.

Throughout U.S. history, Asian Americans engaged in various forms of collective action to challenge systems of oppression. Despite this, few studies challenge the stereotype that Asian Americans are apolitical and uninterested in collective action and focus on psychological correlates of Asian Americans'collective action. Collective action may be motivated by critical reflection on racism and inequality, which may induce shifts in racial identity ideological values that lead Asian Americans to align with minoritized groups. The current study examines whether Asian American racial identity ideological values-specifically, Asian American Unity, Interracial Solidarity, and Transnational Critical Consciousness-help explain why critical reflection is linked to collective action among Asian Americans. Multiple mediation analyses suggested that, among Asian American college students in the Southwest United States(N = 272), beliefs about Interracial Solidarity and Asian American Unity mediated the relationship between critical reflection (i.e., Critical Reflection on Racism and Perceived Inequality) and collective action (i.e., Support for Black Lives Matter and Sociopolitical Participation). Transnational Critical Consciousness did not mediate the relationship between critical reflection and collective action. This study highlights how Asian American unity and interracial solidarity beliefs underlie Asian Americans'critical reflection and collective action.

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Solidarity as slow conversion

How can insights from the international Slow movement deepen our understanding of moral conversion in the face of injustice? This article proposes an understanding of solidarity with the marginalized as slow conversion, that is, as ongoing conversion to the neighbor that is relational, costly, and enduring. After distinguishing “slow conversion” from what some have termed “epiphanic conversion,” I illustrate the distinction by contrasting two efforts to construct parish-based interracial solidarity in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston during the 1960s: the Roxbury Apostolate, a clergy mission to the inner-city developed from outcomes of a summer urban immersion trip for seminarians, and the St. Mary of the Angels Parish Pastoral Council, a participatory lay advisory board established after Vatican II. While the former initiative articulated a grander vision and more sweeping goals, it was the latter, more mundane structure that ultimately proved to be a source of relational, costly, and enduring solidarity between church and neighborhood. Slow conversion can thus be understood as the work not of a single moment of insight or encounter but the project of a lifetime, sustained over generations through community practices and structures.

The Whiteness of the White

The Whiteness of the White

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures By Julie-Françoise Tolliver

Reviewed by: The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures by Julie-Françoise Tolliver Cameron Cook The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures BY JULIE-FRANÇOISE TOLLIVER U of Virginia P, 2020. x + 279 pp. ISBN 9780813944890 paper. Julie-Françoise Tolliver’s book, The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures, adeptly examines how Quebecois writers turned to Africa and the Caribbean to express solidarity in the struggle for independence. The book begins by informing the reader that this engagement reveals “both gaps and unexpected connections in the francophone political imaginary” (4). Tolliver contends that the authors studied “call on metaphors and similes to do the work of abstracting shared traits, while allowing space for difference to flourish” (15). Via an astute reading of a diverse slate of French-language writers, Tolliver shows that an articulation of transnational, transracial solidarity took hold in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, decades when independence was at the forefront of leftist politics. Chapter one, “‘Interior Geographies’: Solidarity Locations of Aimé Césaire’s Poetics,” considers the ways in which “Césaire’s plays express his solidary convictions, trace possible ways of constructing or reaching for solidarity, and alleviate the lack of linguistic articulations of solidarity” (25). Tolliver thus argues that while the plays studied have solidarity as their center, linguistic and racial divisions nevertheless haunt Césaire in his egalitarian quest. It is here that she also examines Césaire’s 1972 Quebec City lectures, offering an analysis in which the Martinican author “shows a willingness to express solidarity in spite of difference, in spite of the racial hierarchies that continue to structure the French-speaking world” (74). The book’s second chapter, “Interlace, Interrace: Anticolonialism and White Babies in Hubert Aquin’s Trou de mémoire,” tackles “Trou de mémoire’s unstable metaphorizations of interracial solidarity as experiments in articulating a desire for connection that remains always potential or asymptotic” (76). Interestingly, Tolliver’s analysis of Trou de mémoire posits that “the novel endeavors to debunk the myth of a white Quebec” (77). In so doing, the reader learns of Quebec’s relative isolation from the rest of the Francophone world and the ways in which Trou de mémoire attempts to build a bridge of solidarity between the province and other French-speaking areas. Chapter three, “Publishable Offense: Simile, Solidarity, and Mongo Beti’s Quebecois Main basse sur le Cameroun,” provides a most enthralling look at the para-texts present in Beti’s 1972 essay and the controversy surrounding its publication. [End Page 223] The text was banned in France, and its Montreal publication in 1974 led to a pronounced interest in “attempting to relate the Quebecois independence struggle to Cameroon’s anti-neocolonial struggle” (163–64). In the fourth chapter, “As through a Canadian Fog: Mort au Canada and Other Moroccan Mysteries,” Tolliver discusses how “Quebecois political effervescence inspired the Canadian novels of Driss Chraïbi (1926–2007), the Moroccan French novelist, in spite of his own scorn for nationalism” (165). She argues that because Quebec—where Chraïbi lived for a time—existed outside the France/Maghreb binary, it provided him with the space necessary to “reimagine human connection as well as his country of origin” (166). Moreover, we read that Chraïbi’s defense of the use of French in Quebec sees him “articulating the northern province’s nationalist struggle for independence” (213). The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures intelligently rethinks the relationship between Quebec and other parts of the French-speaking world. Its insights will be of interest to scholars of literary and social science backgrounds. Tolliver’s book is one that I undoubtedly recommend. Cameron Cook University of Minnesota cook0353@umn.edu Copyright © 2022 The Trustees of indiana University

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Profiles of Racial Socialization Messages from Mothers and Fathers and The Colorblind and Anti-Black Attitudes of Asian American Adolescents.

Racial equality requires coalitions and solidarity across racial groups, but there continues to be racially colorblind and anti-Black attitudes within the Asian American community, a diverse community consisting of individuals with ancestral origins in East, Southeast, and South Asia. However, there is limited research on the factors that contribute to the development of these attitudes among Asian Americans. Parents could potentially play an important role in perpetuating or challenging the colorblind and anti-Black messages that pervade U.S. society. Thus, the current study investigates how 309 Asian American adolescents’ (M age = 16.8; SD = 1.15; 50.5% female) perceptions of parents’ racial socialization messages about race and racism relate to the youth’s racial attitudes. Latent profiles of youth’s perceptions of mothers’ and fathers’ racial socialization messages and their associations with colorblind racial attitudes and anti-Black attitudes were examined. For mothers, three socialization profiles were identified: Race Avoidant, Race Hesitant, and Race Embracing; for fathers, two socialization profiles were identified: Race Avoidant and Race Embracing. Adolescents with Race Embracing mothers reported less anti-Black attitudes compared to those who had Race Hesitant mothers. For fathers, there were no differences among the profiles and anti-Black attitudes. However, surprisingly, adolescents with Race Embracing fathers were more likely to have colorblind racial attitudes compared to those with Race Avoidant fathers. The findings highlight the importance of racial socialization in the development of Asian American adolescents’ racial attitudes to continue fighting for interracial solidarity.

The Homoerotics of “Negrotarian” Patronage in Langston Hughes’s “The Blues I’m Playing”

This essay argues that Langston Hughes’s acclaimed short story “The Blues I’m Playing” (1934) offers provocative feminist and queer insights into “Negrotarian” patronage of the early twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, the discussion sets out to define an interracial, intergenerational homoerotics of patronage between the white widowed elder, Mrs. Dora Ellsworth, and young Black pianist, Ms. Oceola Jones. The discussion places in stark relief the patron’s erotic competition with her protégée’s working-class African American fiancé. The article also grapples with topics like racialized obsession, the role of community in a black artist’s self-concept, and the best avenues for interracial solidarity across planes of difference. Understanding mature women’s legitimacy as sexual subjects and the persistence of queer loneliness (despite class and race privilege) also come to the fore.

A new measure of Asian American Racial Identity Ideological Values (AARIIV): Unity, interracial solidarity, and transnational critical consciousness.

A new measure of Asian American Racial Identity Ideological Values (AARIIV): Unity, interracial solidarity, and transnational critical consciousness.

From Inter-Racial Solidarity to Action: Minority Linked Fate and African American, Latina/o, and Asian American Political Participation

Recent literature in race, ethnicity, and politics has assessed how minority linked fate, defined as “the idea that ethnoracial minorities might share a sense of commonality that extends beyond their particular ethnoracial group to other ethnoracial groups (Gershon et al., in Politics Groups Identities 7(3):642–653, 2019),” shapes attitudes toward descriptive representation and support for coalition building. However, scholarship has yet to examine the influence of minority linked fate on political participation. We argue that similar to those who view the interests of co-ethnics as a proxy for their individual interests, Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans who express linked fate with a more expansive minority community are more likely to take political action. This political participation results from senses of obligation to and solidarity with other racial minorities outside of their own. Results from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey show that controlling for conventional measures of linked fate, minority linked fate is associated primarily with more system-challenging modes of political activity for Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans. We conclude by positioning minority linked fate as a complementary heuristic to traditional notions of intra-racial linked fate and note how shared inter-racial linked fate informs our understanding of recent political activism among people of color.

#YELLOWPERILSUPPORTSBLACKPOWER: MEMORY WORK FOR INTERRACIAL SOLIDARITY

As various racial justice movements emerged under the “Black Lives Matter” slogan after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Monyee Chau posted some artwork on Instagram with the slogan, #YellowPerilSupportsBlackPower. The artwork—symbolizing Asians with a yellow tiger and African Americans with a black panther—ignited Asians’ activism in support of African Americans and became circulated via multiple social media platforms. In this study, I view the #YellowPerilSupportsBlackPower movement (YPSBP) as digital activism, and I analyze how Asian Americans project their “Asianness” to advocate for the Black community. In particular, I focus on memory work among Asian participants when they demonstrate their solidarity with the Black community. By analyzing mediated memory work on Instagram, I identify the three types of memory work in which Asian participants engage. I conclude that this memory work plays a key role in legitimatizing a process through which Asian Americans can produce affective ties with the Black community that build a multiracial identity extending beyond color lines. This exploration of interracial solidarity enriches both the social movement and digital activism scholarship by illustrating how memory work mediates and amplifies affective solidarity.

The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922

The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922