White Flank

Chandra Russo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University. She is the author of Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest to the US Security State(2018).

"Russo's White Flank is an incisive examination of what anti-racist organizing is, isn't, and has the potential to be in the U.S. Through extensive interviews, careful fieldwork, and impressive theoreticalacumen, Russo presents a nuanced picture of what people are doing and what more it will take to organize an antiracist politics that goes beyond ethical positioning and extends into practical, political action that can make possible the egalitarian, multi-racial American democracy that freedom-fighters have been pursuing since Reconstruction." --Deva Woodly, Brown University "This exciting work takes readers into the organizing trajectories, the inner lives, and even the quandaries of linked white antiracist groups, urban and rural. Written from extensive ethnographic research and with a firm sense of traditions of struggle, White Flank reflects profound insights from its author and from activists to whom she has listened so well. Describing campaigns building on specific mutual interests across color lines, but also aiming to foster broader interracial solidarity among whites, this study will be as useful in social movements as it is in classrooms." --David Roediger, University of Kansas and author of An Ordinary White "What is the role of white activists and groups in organizing for racial justice and universal human dignity? In this timely study, Chandra Russo documents the challenges, lessons, and commitments of this work, as it unfolds in local communities around everyday issues. These stories have much to teach us about humility, strategy, and hope for our shared future." --Daniel Martinez HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone