Walk the Walk but Don't Talk the Talk: The Strategic Use of Color‐Blind Ideology in an Interracial Social Movement Organization

Abstract

In this study, I examine the strategies interracial organizations use in the twenty‐first century, where color‐blind ideology dominates. Much theoretical work on racism examines how it has evolved during different historical periods, but this work does not address how these changing forms of racism affect social movement organizations, particularly those on the left. While the literature on color‐blind ideology has examined how it is expressed by African Americans and European Americans separately, my work investigates how color‐blind ideology operates when European Americans and people of color are working together in the same organizational setting. Studies of social movements have examined how organizational culture affects strategies but have neglected how external racist culture and color‐blind ideology impacts organizational strategies. Findings from 3 years of ethnographic data collected on an interracial social movement organization and its corresponding coalition suggest that activists in interracial organizations use racism evasiveness strategically to maintain solidarity. I conceptualize racism evasiveness as the action resulting from color‐blind ideology within a larger system of racism. While activists perceive advantages to these strategies, there are also long‐term negative consequences. Without explicitly naming and addressing racism, progressive organizations may be limited in their ability to challenge systemic racism.

Beyond Color-blindness: (Re) Theorizing Racial Ideology

“…This explains, for example, the findings of various researchers that elements of color-blind racial ideology are supported by African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans (Bonilla-Silva [2003] 2014; Manning, Hartmann, and Gerteis 2015; O’Brien 2008). Likewise, it also explains the prevalence of aspects of color-blindness among political progressives and antiracist activists (Beeman 2015; Hughey 2012). This point was not lost on anticolonialist and antiracist writers and activists who understood that part of the struggle for liberation included oppressed people ridding themselves of the internalized ideologies of the oppressor (see, for example, Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Fanon [1963] 1968).…”

Advancing a sociology of ignorance in the study of racism and racial non‐knowing

“…For example, “conceptual misdirection” uses language to shift attention away from racism as a system of domination toward victims of racial oppression; while “conceptual obfuscation” involves using terms so vague and imprecise as to be meaningless (e.g., “the race issue”). Similarly, Beeman () finds that Black and White activists in an interracial social movement are able to maintain solidarity, in part, by using racism‐evasive discourse, but with destructive consequences to the group's antiracist efficacy.…”

Boundaries and barriers: Racialized dynamics of political power

“…Glenn, ; Schwalbe et al, ). While research within this paradigm is underway (e.g., Hughey, ; Beeman, ), further research is needed on how racialized barriers and boundaries are employed , fortified, and challenged within such varied spaces and contexts as social movements, political organizations, polling locations, governmental deliberations, and political parties. Political ethnography, when properly sensitized to interactional, performative, and discursive processes related to racial oppression and contestation, will thus provide a crucial tool for understanding the micro‐ and meso‐level processes that undergird and reproduce macro‐level racial dynamics of political power.…”