Investigating Mutual Interest: White Peoples’ Stake in the Fight for Racial Justice

Background

White antiracist organizers aim, as part of a larger Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led movement, to bring more white people into the movement. Mutual interest is an essential value and tool for these white folks. Organizing from mutual interest requires white people to grapple with what racism has cost them and what they have to gain in the fight for racial justice. Mutual interest is an antidote to racism's divisiveness and central to rigorous and principled white antiracist struggle. Still, there is a tremendous amount unknown in regard to how white people connect with mutual interest. Thus, the current study aims to address this research question: How do white people understand their mutual interest in the work to dismantle white supremacy?

Methods

I formed a PAR (participatory action research) team to co-plan and co-implement the qualitative study; all members were part of a national antiracist organization. We recruited 26 white antiracist organizers who were part of the same organization for the study using purposive and convenience sampling. Some sample demographics include: 36% between 30-39 years old; 61.5% employed full-time; 57.7% female; 42.3% middle class. The PAR team and I made an interview guide and demographic form. I conducted semi-structured interviews via Zoom, phone, or in-person. Analysis was done using thematic analysis. One PAR team member co-coded 7 of the interviews to increase trustworthiness. The PAR team reviewed data and themes at several stages to provide input and feedback.

Results

We identified six themes. Theme 1: “Arriving to the work...but not from mutual interest,” includes the learning, experiences, values, and emotions that led people to white antiracist organizing. Theme 2: “Challenges to identifying mutual interest” is about the barriers that participants faced in naming their mutual interest, including personal, structural, and cultural. Theme 3: “Disconnection from others and self” names barriers to connection and loss of humanity as sources of mutual interest. Theme 4: “Experiences, identities, and understandings that anchor mutual interest” captures concrete sources of mutual interest, such as having a marginalized identity. Themes 5 and 6 are: “Building community and staying in relationship” and “Imagining the world we all need and deserve.”

Conclusions and Implications

Significantly, this research begins to address a scholarly gap with regard to the role of mutual interest organizing among white antiracists. The findings indicate that many white people may not arrive to a racial justice organization because of their shared stake – that comes later. Moreover, the findings show that mutual interest makes people stick around for the long-haul, highlighting the importance of mutual interest in growing a large, strong base of people to take action. Thus, additional qualitative research can be done to understand, with greater detail, the processes that cultivate mutual interest in an organization so that those processes can be replicated and strengthened. The findings also indicate that political education is critical to help white people make connections between their marginalized identities, experiences, or observations and how those directly relate to racism when it’s not immediately evident.