Organizing Majority White Communities Towards Carceral Abolition: Reflections on Participatory Action Organizing-Research

Background and Purpose: During the U.S. Civil Rights era, several prominent Black leaders - including Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X - advocated for a shift from multiracial organizing to a race-focused approach: Black activists were to organize in Black communities and a call was put out for white people serious about ending racism to organize in white communities. While there have been a variety of Black-led and focused organizing strategies in the decades since, strategic organizing of white communities has been rare. The emergence of Showing Up for Racial Justice(SURJ) came as an attempt to answer this call and organize white people in support of racial justice. Envisioning, implementing, and evaluating strategies for this particular type of organizing are particularly needed.

This project’s use of PAR aligns with the highly political origins of the approach in the Global South; PAR is a central component of broader political strategy development and assessment of organizing approaches. While PAR typically focuses on organizing and research led by and in oppressed communities, this project’s context is unique, then, in that it focuses on organizing with white people to address structural racism.

Methods: A PAR project was conducted with members of the Los Angeles SURJ group, White People for Black Lives, between October 2018 and June 2020. The group mobilized over 600 volunteers to “deep canvass” in predominantly white neighborhoods to increase support for Measure R, a county ballot initiative that seeks to advance decarceration by reallocating resources from jail incarceration to community resources. Reflection memos were written throughout the project and notes were taken at PAR team meetings. These data were then analyzed and used to write this process paper.

Results: The key themes addressed in this paper answer the following questions: what are tensions that arise in working with white people to address structural racism? More specifically, how do members of a PAR team make decisions when organizing and research interests of the project have competing interests; when election-focused outcomes are at odds with longer-term transformative goals; and when the white-led sector of the movement have differences of opinion with the broader multiracial Black-led movement of which it is a part? This paper finds that a clear, shared understanding of longer-term change goals and strategy beyond research aims provided a framework for the PAR team to navigate tensions that arose. The PAR team made complex decisions to forego planned research, to prioritize an approach of depth over breadth, and to respectfully hold a difference of opinion on organizing strategy with the broader campaign.

Implications: While particular decision-making moments were challenging, they were navigated in ways that kept intact the integrity and vision of the project. Such an approach allowed for a deepened commitment among the group to continue a PAR approach to organizing moving forward.