White Organizers and White Organizations? Activism and Allyhood in Multiracial Campaigns for Educational Justice

• In Event: Power, Intersectionality, and Solidarity Within Youth and Community Organizing

Abstract

What happens when a campaign for school integration is itself racially and socioeconomically diverse? We know that community organizing spaces act as crucial sites of youth development (see, e.g., J. Conner & Rosen, 2016; Terriquez, 2015) and participation in organizing has important outcomes for young people’s civic skills, knowledge, and identities (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Rogers et al., 2012). Here, I explore the ways in which young people take on roles as ‘empowered stakeholders’ (Su, 2009) in a youth organizing group, analyzing the implications for both young people’s development and multiracial movements for educational justice.

This paper is situated at the intersection of theories of civic development (Kirshner & Ginwright, 2012; Rogers et al., 2012) and critical youth studies approaches to racial identity development (Hagerman, 2017). Building on theories of praxis (Freire, 1993) and justice-oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004), I approach young people as “active participants in our racialized world” (Hagerman, 2017, p. 2), situating their involvement in education organizing as one of many influences on their civic learning.

This group portrait (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) follows Teens Take Charge (TTC) from strategy sessions to public actions to meetings with the New York City Department of Education. In under five years, TTC has rapidly become a well-recognized player in the fight for NYC school integration (Shapiro, 2019). TTC’s racially and socioeconomically diverse membership offers young people opportunities to navigate social differences that are not available in many organizing or school settings. The dataset includes 57 field observations and 32 interviews to date.

Even as many white teens celebrated TTC as one of the most diverse spaces in which they’d ever learned, some teens of color critiqued the group as feeling “too white.” White members generally joined the group with an abstract, depersonalized desire to fight for educational justice; they had limited exposure to the under-resourced schools they denounced as the products of a segregated school system. As they listened to their peers, many named their own privilege and developed identities as both white allies and young activists. At times, these emerging identities – of supportive ally and youth leader – conflicted. These processes highlighted tensions related to the group’s policies, practices, and priorities and challenges underlying Teens Take Charge’s explicit values of diversity, youth voice, and educational justice.

This study extends previous studies of how white young people make sense of their social contexts (Hagerman, 2018, 2019; Lewis, 2003; Perry, 2002) arguing that, for the teens in this study, these worlds include not only home and school, but also an organization that is itself racialized (Ray, 2019). In doing so, I consider how “practices of critique and collective agency” (Kirshner, 2015, p. 51) may shape the developmental trajectories of both individuals and social movements. By examining the role of whiteness in young people’s personal identities and the organization’s work, this project highlights broader tensions related to solidarity and power in youth organizing for educational reform.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut