We Organize Because We're Black First: Racializing Resistance of Black Student Activists in the Black Lives Matter Movement

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: African American Social and Political Engagement

Abstract

Employing semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I investigate the meaning-making processes of Black student organizers who have participated in both on campus and off campus organizing and campaigns over the last 3 (2014-2017) years through racial formation theory. My central research question is, in what ways do Black student activists and organizers in the Black Lives Matter movement imagine their role in continued Black liberation struggles? Emerging themes from the interviews have demonstrated that Black student activists see themselves as both educators and students of the larger Black liberation struggle, and they see themselves as resource brokers who funnel university resources, labor, and energy into dispossessed communities.

Author

• David Charles Turner, University of California - Berkeley