Anti-Racist Social Change Organizations as Race-Makers: How French and American Anti-Racist Organizations Reproduce Dominant Racial Ideologies

• In Event: 3161 - Critical Studies and Social Movement Frameworks

Abstract

While the scholarship on anti-racism generally traces the processes by which individuals, groups and organizations challenge racial structures and ideologies, in this article, I demonstrate how anti-racist organizations are, instead, leaders in the reproduction of dominant racial ideologies. I ask, how do these organizations do race? And how do organizational actions lead to the reproduction of dominant racial ideologies? To answer these questions, I analyze the work of 52 anti-racist social change organizations working on the issue of racially biased policing in France and the United States. Drawing upon 30 months of fieldwork including ethnographic observations, 72 in-depth semi-structured interviews, and analysis of hundreds of pages of printed and digital data, I leverage the comparison to show how organizations draw on their respective countries’ national racial ideologies. These organizations construct racialized organizational identities through their names, mission statements, and organizational histories to signal their legitimacy and racial authority. They deploy their racial authority to reframe societal issues as racial issues in ways that align with French and American ideologies of race. This study extends the scholarship on how organizational identities inform organizational action by explaining how these identities shape racialization processes. The study also contributes to the scholarship on anti-racism by illustrating how anti-racist efforts reify dominant racial ideologies.

Author

• Nicole Arlette Hirsch