Abstract

This article considers the role of white people in multiracial social justice movements through an examination of a community event by white antiracists in Los Angeles in 2008 called The Ballot Box and Beyond: Race, Elections, and the Making of History. The event is examined in relation to the question of the white voter in the 2008 presidential election, the rise of diversity workshops and the academic study of whiteness, and the resurgence of white supremacist and radical right-wing organizing. The article places the event within a long, but relatively unknown, history of white people organizing other white people against racism in the United States as part of a larger, multiracial movement to challenge the white supremacist system, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the ways white supremacy and antiracism operate to bring otherwise disparate racial histories and groups into conversation and alliance.

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