“To Actually Change Our Way of Being or Existing”: Healing and Transformative Organizing in Racial Justice Youth Organizing Groups

• In Event: 3104 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session: Issues in Race/Ethnicity, Identity, and Group Experiences

Abstract

Social movements for racial equity can have contradictory impacts on participants. On the one hand, activists of color can develop empowering identities and win policy changes that improve conditions for their communities. But social movements can also take a gravely negative toll on participants who sacrifice their health and livelihood to both survive and combat pervasive inequalities in the face of backlash, alienation, and other dangerous conditions. My paper examines how youth organizing groups bridge this dissonance and grapple with racism as simultaneously fostering individually, intimately experienced socio-emotional harm and as requiring structural solutions. Drawing on 2.5 years of in-depth ethnographic observation with three youth organizations, 60+ interviews, and survey analysis, I highlight how groups engage in “radical healing”—a dual strategy involving both grassroots organizing outwardly aimed at rectifying the root causes of systemic violence and inward-oriented practices for individual and collective well-being (Ginwright 2015). I find that groups assert that individual transformation, including self-care, healing, and holistic well-being, is deeply integral to—rather than at odds with—long-term structural and policy change. Despite this expansive discourse, groups must make difficult choices about how they re-allocate limited time and capacity from activities more traditionally linked with organizing to strategies associated with healing and holistic well-being. Furthermore, they engage in embodied healing practices as alternative ways of existing, respites from structural contexts where young people’s bodies are disciplined and denied access to healthy conditions. My paper advances sociological frameworks of racialized social movements and emotional, embodied racialized forms of resistance.

Author

• May Lin, University of Southern California