This blog post is adapted from our article: Emejulu, A., and Bassel, L. (2025) ‘Moral Subjects in White Spaces: Impossible Solidarities’. Sociology
Introduction
In our six-nation comparative research project, Women of Colour Resist, which examines how women of colour activists in Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, Madrid and Paris organise and mobilise against austerity, against the far right and for migrants’ rights, we found activists struggling to build and sustain solidarity in their activist spaces. This is to be expected. Solidarity is the emotional connection and political practice that binds activists together so that they can work collectively to make radical change. Solidarity is both an ethical disposition and a series of acts. Developing and maintaining solidarity is one of the most difficult challenges that activists face. Although solidarity is highly prized, the emotions that make solidarity possible are fraught. Working collectively, activists must try to develop a shared identity and a common purpose. However, these negotiations about who activists are and what they should do are beset by unequal power dynamics between activists; derived from hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and legal status. These intersecting inequalities are further overlaid by difficult emotions such as fear, anger, frustration and distrust as activists seek to resolve how power operates between and among their comrades.
Impossible Solidarities?
Solidarity is both an emotional and practical problem that activists must confront to build a new world. To do solidarity, activists must feel it. In feeling solidarity, activists must address pragmatic questions about leadership, decision-making, dissent, strategy, tactics, organisational form and coordinated action. We argue that focusing on emotional expressions of solidarity can fatally undermine the pragmatic work required to build solidarity. Practising solidarity through emotions distracts from structural and organisational problems that weaken the solidaristic bonds between activists and unhelpfully encourages individualised and personalised responses that deepen alienation between activists. In our project we found that women of colour activists fail to build solidarity in their activist spaces because their practical demands for intersectional recognition — taking race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and legal status seriously as both a political analysis for understanding a particular grievance and as a viable strategy for collective action — were misinterpreted by their white comrades as an emotional plea for caretaking.
We have long argued that women of colour’s misrecognised demands are a form of epistemic injustice. This blog post identifies how this injustice manifests in activists’ organisations and networks, such as those explored by the CCINDLE project. We argue that the majority of the activist spaces we studied operate as ‘white spaces’ which reproduce white supremacy whilst simultaneously claiming to be non-racialised. White spaces are defined as a ‘social space where whiteness goes unquestioned… They are spaces where culture is deployed in ways that secure white racial interests and subordinate non-whites’. These white activist spaces (re)produce white moral subjects who, by the very nature of their activism, self-define as ‘good people’ who are self-evidently ‘egalitarian’ in their social relations. As a result, these white moral subjects are deeply resistant to both women of colour activists and their intersectional demands because they threaten white activists’ moral accounting of themselves as radical egalitarians and their self-interest in maintaining their power in activist spaces. We argue that solidarity is not merely unlikely under these circumstances, but impossible, and that women of colour activists cannot and should not attempt to transform these spaces to make them genuinely open and democratic for different kinds of activists.
One way of exploring women of colour’s activism is through their interactions with like-minded activists working on similar issues. We have particularly focused on multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-class left-wing spaces and large coalitions which link together different activist networks to try to better understand how women of colour activists position themselves in these spaces and negotiate complex dynamics with different kinds of comrades. A persistent theme across all six project sites is how women of colour activists are deeply frustrated with their relations with their white comrades and ultimately leave the space because they find it hostile and unwelcoming. Although all activists find coalition work threatening because it entails conflict and compromise, we argue that women of colour activists are subjected to racialised conflict through the defence of white space.
For example, this mixed race migrants’ rights activist organises with a multi-racial, multi-class group focused on anti-deportation and migrant survival work in Madrid. Speaking in 2019, she argues that solidarity is impossible when anti-racism is understood on such narrow terms which centre white activists’ feelings:
We are in Spain right now at a turning point. We’re moving very slowly. We are starting to talk about race. And very slowly there is an interest in hearing other voices…. But there has been like zero real solidarity… because what I’ve seen here, is that white feminists … see anti-racism as an opportunity for personal growth or personal enrichment through knowledge, but not actually the liberation of people of colour. So I don’t think that we can talk about solidarity on these terms.
As this Afrofeminist activist in Paris notes, what she finds most galling about operating in white activist spaces is that deliberative dialogue was the norm in trying to make changes to her network’s culture — until she brought up racism and white supremacy. Instead of critical debate, her white comrades dismissed her and refused to listen:
In the very beginning I thought I could change everyone’s mind, that through debating, you can change everyone’s mind. And above all I learned that in fact, that there are people [who] you can’t [convince]! In fact, you can speak to them for hours and hours, you can show them studies, you can show them statistics, you can share personal experiences, and nothing works! The fact of debating with people to change their minds, I find it is much more [effective] with Black women like me [who have similar experiences], than with white people… So as things have progressed, I mainly concentrated my energy on my community.
As per usual in these frustrating and exhausting situations of not being listened to or taken seriously, women of colour activists opt to leave white activist spaces and organise separately with other activists of colour.
Conclusion
The ways in which white activist spaces operate are nuanced and complex. Sometimes the activist space is open to discussions about racism, white supremacy and intersectionality, but only on narrow terms which personalise the problem and find solutions in white people’s emotional repertories. Other times, the space, even though it is nominally anti-racist or, at least, non-racialised, is closed to any discussions and seeks to force the exit of activists of colour. Regardless of how these white activist spaces are configured, the outcome is the same: women of colour activists become increasingly frustrated and disillusioned in trying to change the space and then ultimately leave to work with those activists more amenable to intersectional analyses and practices.
We are pessimistic as to whether both the construction of white activist spaces and their trenchant defence can be resolved. The rejection of solidarity condemns white activists in these spaces to repeat a failed history of political morality that excludes and dominates while claiming to emancipate all. Within, outside of and despite these spaces, women of colour activists struggle for a different now and tomorrow, knowing that inaction is not an option. Solidarity may be, in this moment, an impossible necessity in the context of the multi-crises we all must confront.
Authors: Akwugo Emejulu, University of Sheffield, and Leah Bassel, Coventry University. 3rd February 2025