White Flank - by Chandra Russo

Book Synopsis

Racial politics in the United States are as tumultuous as ever. A resurgent white nationalism finds broadening support while the Movement for Black Lives marks a newly consolidated and highly visible iteration of the centuries-long Black Freedom struggle. The question of what it would take to get more white people to fight for racial justice is as urgent as ever. Chandra Russo takes up this question in White Flank.

White people's participation in antiracist action has always been fraught, with competing narratives about what meaningful allyship looks like, and what one should do with their white privilege. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) has emerged as the largest national effort explicitly seeking to organize white people. Beyond just book clubs and discussion circles, and against the seductions of virtue signaling, SURJ invites and equips white communities to take part in concrete antiracist action and to organize for lasting change.

Using the case of SURJ, 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. White Flank documents the promises and complexities of antiracist organizing. Russo argues that shifting white communities' understanding of antiracism away from a focus on individual morality and towards collective action is a crucial achievement.

Growing the white flank of a multiracial justice movement is bound to be messy. Yet our present moment requires that white people join with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the fight for collective liberation.

Review Quotes

"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

"What is the role of white activists and groups in organizing for racial justice and universal human dignity? In this timely study, Chandra Russo documents the challenges, lessons, and commitments of this work, as it unfolds in local communities around everyday issues. These stories have much to teach us about humility, strategy, and hope for our shared future." --Daniel Martinez HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone

About the Author

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).