Enemies of the State: Poor Whites, Black Power, and the Politics of Solidarity

In 1969, the Chicago chapter of the Illinois Black Panther Party announced the beginnings of a Rainbow Coalition to fight back against poverty, police brutality, and entrenched racism in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. This Coalition included the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords Organizations and two neighborhood-groups largely composed of working class white youth, Rising Up Angry (RUA) and the Young Patriots Organization (YPO).
Although scholars have described how RUA and the YPO shared similar material and political interests with Black, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples in the Rainbow Coalition, I argue that their organizations illustrate how white radicals can build an anti-racist political future through what I call epistemic solidarity. The three distinguishing features of epistemic solidarity are (1) a suspension of a closed or already constituted self, (2) learning about the world from the perspective of those who experience more pronounced or multifaceted forms of oppression and (3) a deferring to and following the judgment of oppressed groups in certain contexts. Each feature is key to cultivating and practicing epistemic solidarity because individuals with more limited or unidimensional direct experience of oppression—whether class, ethnic, gender, or racial—must recognize and “renounce” their previously naturalized presumptions of epistemic superiority (Scholz 2008, 164, 181). I argue that RUA and the YPO exemplify a critical white identity using a phenomenological approach to understanding their own racial identity in the past and present, and its potentialities for the future.