From Anti-Racist Pedagogy to Grassroots Organizing

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1) Blackness, Community, and Resistance

Abstract

In this paper I engage in a critical examination of anti-racist pedagogy, focusing in particular on the theoretical framework of an organization that provides weekend-long anti-racism workshops for organizers and community leaders. I am critiquing this framework by drawing on insights from both historical materialism and the Black Radical Tradition. Methodologically, I am doing a self-ethnography of a period of six years during which I participated in the food sovereignty movement within Detroit, Michigan. I selected this organization for my study in this paper because they set an agenda for anti-racism programming more broadly, and because their approach is reflective of wider tendencies within social movement contexts. My argument is that while these trainings are intended to give participants tools to uproot racism, their political strategies end up reinforcing many of the same power relationships that they are seeking to dismantle. In this paper I focus in particular on how these issues show up in their theoretical framework. I contrast the tendencies and limitations within this theoretical framework–particularly in relation to how racism is understood conceptually on one hand, and how power is theorized on the other hand–with the insights from the long history of Black anti-capitalist thinkers that have committed themselves to the simultaneous examination of race- and class- based oppression. In doing so I offer suggestions and comments that I hope may be relevant for all of us who seek to dismantle oppression and build anti-racist praxis.

Author

• Sarah Chelius, Binghamton University