Self-interest and Shared Struggle: The Role of Cultural Individualism in Multi-issue Social Justice Activism

• In Event: 226 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. How Political Culture Matters

Abstract

Research on political culture and civic engagement identifies individualistic cultural preferences and commitments as major impediments to widespread social and political change. Scholars have argued that cultural individualism reinforces explanations of social problems that focus on individual choice, dampening efforts to reform the structural and systemic conditions that produce and sustain inequalities. This study takes an alternative approach by demonstrating that individualism is central to diverse, multi-issue social justice movements in the field of faith-based community organizing. Drawing upon two qualitative datasets, we illustrate how one movement organization uses a range of cultural practices to affirm, reorient, and ultimately co-opt members’ individualistic cultural commitments and preferences. Through practices that link individuals’ subjective self-interest to an overarching cultural framework that interrogates and condemns institutional racism, our case organization brings members to internalize a moral worldview that encourages multi-issue activism by situating the interests of individuals and families within a collective cultural framework. The coalition thus combats segmentation among progressive movements by unifying activists across racial and socioeconomic differences and linking discrete movements that protest systemic injustice in policing and sentencing, immigration, education, the labor market, and other institutional contexts.

Authors

• Jack Delehanty, University of Minnesota

• Michelle Oyakawa, The Ohio State University