Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Though scholars and lay-people use the term “anti-racism” a variety of ways, emerging activity and thought speak to a more specified use of the phrase. Drawing on ethnographic data involving in-depth interviews with whites participating in antiracist activity, and participant observation data from several antiracist collectives, this paper highlights the growing realm of critical antiracist (CAR) thought and action. Central to that realm are recurring tenets that differentiate CAR from other antiracist orientations. Those include the position that race is socially constructed; that persons designated as white enjoy social status or “white privilege” denied members of non-white groups; the position that in order to effectively combat racism whites must reflect on their racial status, work against that status and “organize’ other whites to do the same; the position that racism has multiple manifestations which include individual, institutional, and cultural forms; and lastly, that CAR is fundamentally distinguishable from other race related efforts (i.e. diversity, multiculturalism).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper addresses the racial politics of the presence of catastrophe volunteers in the case of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. From Liberal Christians to young anarchists, white volunteers have deluged New Orleans, offering assistance, services, and advice. In a variety of relief centers, social movement organizations, and direct actions, local antiracist activists of color struggle to manage outsider white input, while attempting to foster the resuscitation of local, self-determined communities of color. Reflecting longstanding patterns of liberal racism, this phenomenon also offers opportunities for antiracist intervention. Data are drawn from ethnographic observations and interviews with local activists and outsider volunteers in New Orleans.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Race scholars and antiracist activists disagree about what constitutes white antiracism, and how to produce it. From ethnographic research among progressive race workshop trainers, I examine methodologies of white transformation. Race trainers who otherwise differ from each other philosophically and methodologically share the belief that cultivating white interest-convergence with antiracism is a necessary element in the production of sustainable white antiracism. In this paper I discuss workshop approaches to building interest-convergence, and suggest that its significance across racial projects indicates that it is an important element of a post-Civil Rights antiracist master frame.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I examine the ways the National Association of Black and White Men Together (NABWMT), a U.S. gay male organization, and its multi-ethnic membership developed and conducted antiracism workshops in the 1980s and safer sex workshops (targeting gay men with White, Black, Chicano/Latino, Asian, and Two-Spirited/indigenous identities) in the 1990s to conduct cultural and counterhegemonic forms of education. I draw upon the works of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and Paul Gilroy on culture, education, and social exclusion. Gramsci and Hall suggest that cultural education is a necessary component for any anti-capitalist struggle. However, hooks, Sandoval, and Gilroy point to the liberal tendency in such cultural work. In paricular, hooks, indicates the expressive salience of gay-ethnic masculinity in developing this liberal tendency. Using qualitative analysis of archival data, I find that these workshops did serve as a vehicle for organizing selected communities around certain progressive politics. However in the long term, the workshops were not as successful to go beyond the liberal tendency of improving interpersonal relationships regarding racial-ethnicity and gendered sexual identities. Consequently, this paper seeks to augment “multiple intersection” theorizing (such as by Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga) to “include” not only gay men of color, or to compare them in relations to standpoint theories by lesbian-of-color, but to highlight also the constitutive aspect of their gay-ethnic masculinity and gendered sexualities as part of a longer history of antiracist movements and emancipatory politics. In closing, I explore the emancipatory possibilities and contradictions of cultural education and NABWMT activities to address issues of gay-of-color sexual identities and antiracist socialist-feminist struggle.