Brown Complicity in White Supremacy: Toward Solidarity for Black Lives

• In Event: Civic Engagement and Corridors of Struggle and Meaning Across Domains

Abstract

Complicities and complexities in racialization and racial hierarchies simultaneously create possibilities and foreclose opportunities for cross-racial solidarities. Using critical co-constructed autoethnography, the authors reflect on feedback from a webinar they filmed on anti-Blackness in Brown (South Asian) communities and Brown-Black solidarities. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and anti-colonial framings, the authors present their analysis based on private conversations and various forms of critique following the webinar. Brown and Black scholars, educators and community members committed to racial solidarity would be well-served to take a two-pronged approach: first, making visible Brown lived realities, and healing from experiences of racism, and second, situating Brown racialization within the larger project and continuum of white supremacy that is explicitly designed to maintain anti-Blackness.

Authors

• Vidya Shah, York University

• Jeewan Chanicka, Waterloo Region District School Board