“Sincere White people, work in conjunction with us”: Racial minorities’ perceptions of White ally sincerity and perceptions of ally efforts

Social justice movements often consist of both targets of bias (e.g., Black people) and nontarget allies (e.g., White people). However, little is known about what factors shape minorities’ perceptions of allies and their ally behaviors. Across four studies, we investigated Black participants’ perceptions of Whites’ motives to engage in ally behaviors. In Study 1, we found that Black participants perceived nontarget allies as both highly internally and externally motivated, suggesting ally motives may be ambiguous to Black perceivers. Studies 2–4 examined the effect of Black participants’ suspicion of Whites’ motives on perceptions of White allies’ sincerity and support for their ally efforts. As predicted, suspicious Black participants perceived White ally protestors, confronters, and political candidates as less sincere than similar Black targets and, in turn, were less supportive of White allies’ efforts. Discussion focuses on how perceived motives of White allies impact perceptions of allies and their ally efforts.

Police Labor and Exploitation: Case Study of North India

This chapter analyzes data collected over more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork with police in north India. It argues that subordinate police personnel in this decolonizing world region often experience exploitation as laborers, even as they routinely deploy excessive force and sometimes misuse their authority to intervene in everyday life. The analysis reveals an imbrication of official police rank hierarchies with broader forms of social inequality (especially socioeconomic class, religion, and caste) through observations of interactions among police personnel of various ranks and interviews with current and former officers in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. It also develops methodological concepts of “strategic complicity” and “critical empathy,” and suggests directions for future ethnographic research on policing that may help us discern the complexities of both local and global social justice movements and power relations.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter documents the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline movement on reducing suspensions and challenging policing practices in schools. It then highlights the features that help explain the growth and success of the movement and its emerging intersectional nature—like centering the participation of people most impacted by injustice. It draws lessons from this study for reconceptualizing social justice movements as ones that “nationalize local struggles.” It considers the enduring challenges facing the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, including the persistence of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline, tensions between local and national organizing, and the difficulties of implementing restorative alternatives that serve to transform deep-seated racialized processes. It ends with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities to building racial and educational justice movements powerful enough to fully transform entrenched systems of racial inequity and educational injustice, particularly in an era that has witnessed the rise of white nationalism.

Black Lives and Asian Medicine

This essay examines the intersections between Asian medicines, racial healthcare inequities, and social justice movements, and explains how they are illuminated by the interviews and essays in this special issue. Important themes include: how the protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 spurred US organizations of alternative, complementary, and integrative medicine to undertake antiracist initiatives; how acupuncturists have been working to properly acknowledge the contributions of African American practitioners in their historical narratives; and how acupuncture may be a useful tool for mitigating racial health disparities.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Liberation

To highlight the significance of Freire’s pedagogy, this article draws from the work of decolonial thinkers in Latin American and Enrique Dussel’s philosophy in order to understand Freire’s pedagogy of liberation. Two concepts in Freire’s work, conscientização and praxis, are key to understanding how awakening the consciousness of teachers and learners can empower them in transforming an unjust world. For Freire, the collaboration between teachers and learners is essential to the self-transformation of leaners for their own liberation. This innovative and transformative pedagogy inspired literacy campaigns and social justice movements around the globe and constitutes Freire's legacy.

North America needs Youth, Peace and Security: young people shifting tides for positive peace

The United Nations' Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda ensures and demands the protection and recognition of young people's roles in peace and security. This article focuses on why domestic YPS implementation is needed with the rise of social justice activism by young people in North America. The rise of youth activism and youth leadership in social justice movements has given a space for the global political agenda to challenge traditional approaches to "peace and security" frameworks. This includes challenging pre-conceived notions of YPS - and its policy frameworks - as a 'foreign' agenda by North American and other Western countries. We argue that this global shift in youth social justice activism demonstrates the need for critical domestic implementation and policy priorities for the YPS agenda within traditional donor- or Western- States, using Canada and the United States as case studies.

Organizing and Facilitating Critical Conversations around Systemic Racism: Opportunities and Challenges

The Coffee and Critical Conversations Series was organized by Emory Libraries Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) subcommittee on Professional Development for library employees to engage in dialogue and build community around DEI topics. The subcommittee sought to foster understanding and inspire fruitful discussion on institutional racism in libraries, allyship, and the legacy of racialized trauma pervading African American life. The conversation series began virtually in summer of 2020. Each session was based on a curated collection of shared media (film clips, news articles, TED talks) and was facilitated by volunteers via Zoom. Attendees were given reflection questions to help guide conversation in small breakout groups. As the sessions wrapped up, the facilitators provided further resources for participants to continue their exploration of the topics. We assessed participant responses with an open-ended survey and solicited feedback from participants to inform future sessions. Like many of our peers, not everyone in our organization has felt informed enough to engage with social justice movements in the library. Our goal was to transform the organizational culture and relieve anxiety around discussing racism and oppression both in our institution and beyond. Coffee and Critical Conversations offers a space for folks to demystify their emotions, find language to express their feelings about current events, and foster authentic connections on our path to creating a more equitable institution.

A Conceptualization Framework of Allyship: Bidirectional Allyship Between Black Heterosexual Women and White Gay Males

Allyship is a complicated idea laden with multiple, layered assumptions. One should not presume that allyship conceptually permeates all social justice movements. One should not presume that allyships develop to combat or dismantle a predefined socially constructed ism. A critical interrogation of allyship and allyship constructions necessitates recognition of broader, universal tenets of allyships anywhere. This must go further to embrace the nuanced, situated, dynamic, critically problematic, and complex dimensions rooted in individual lived experiences intersecting multiple marginalizations which contribute as praxis toward an actualizing of individual allyships. Although we will blur constructed distinctions as we progress, here, we endeavor to surface and deliberate upon the derivations and functions and shapes of allyships between two demographic categories, made arbitrarily distinct here for the purposes of engaging in discursive analysis: cisgender heterosexual Black women and cisgender gay White men. In short, we are proposing a way to view this allyship as bidirectional allyships, grounded in social justice frames of existing: a way to see each respective group as traveling within their own lane down a collectively traveled highway. Each traverses the space along their own course, traveling down “their own road.”

Covid-19 and mutual aid: Prefigurative approaches to caring?

With over 2,000 support groups listed in Britain at the time of writing at the beginning of 2021, the growth of mutual aid has been among the more positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic. So much for the neoliberal view of humans as rational individuals focused on the pursuit of their own self-interests, whatever the needs of others. For Marxists, though, the recent growth of mutual aid groups needs to be set within the framework of critical understandings about civil society, the respective roles of civil society, the market and the state, and the potential for building alternatives within capitalist societies. The Covid-19 pandemic has been highlighting the failures of market-led approaches to meeting people’s needs, demonstrating the need for more rather than less public provision, including the need for a national care service. Meanwhile, the voluntary and community sectors have been struggling to fill the gaps between shrinking public services on the one hand and growing social needs on the other. This has been the context for the emergence of the mutual aid groups that are the focus of the final section of this article, exploring their potential contributions, promoting values of mutuality, cooperation and care within these contemporary constraints. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of such prefigurative community-based initiatives more generally, their contributions as well as their inherent limitations as component parts of social justice movements.

Terra Incognita : Degrowth, community and performance

We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the “good life”, we must make a choice; will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This paper is written in support of the performance documentary, TERRA INCOGNITA and the formation/creative process of the Terra Incognita Collective (TIC). It will explore the environmental, social and psychological impacts of a growth-oriented culture through a degrowth lens. Furthermore, this paper will explore art as an access point to high consumption cultures and artists as important social actors within environmental and social justice movements. Terra Incognita, its audiences and artists, explore growth histories through embodiment and collective authorship.