The Politics of Educational Equity: Organizing as a White/Privileged Ally in Educational Racial Justice

• In Event: Toward Racial Justice in Education Policy: From Interrogating Thoughts and Actions to Organizing and Allyship

Abstract

This paper examines how a group of white and/or socio-economically privileged parents in Oakland, California, PFE, grapple with their relationship to privilege and power as they decipher what it means to be an ally in racial justice organizing work. This study reveals how the devolution of the state results in an opposing tension between the rise of the market and the rise of civil society in education (Dale, 1994; Meyer & Boyd, 2001). I reveal how the participants navigated the tensions of being white and/or privileged parents organizing for educational equity in a complex landscape of racial politics and ideologies related to public education.

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley