Creating Racial Structural Solidarity

The Example of the George Floyd Protests

Abstract

This article draws on recent transnational protests against police brutality to advance an understanding of anti-racist solidarity that aims to improve over Mara Marin’s ‘structural solidarity’ view. On Marin’s view, anti-racist solidarity is grounded in the racial structure. But Marin forgets that racial domination exerts a segregative influence on different groups, so that whites and middle-class blacks tend not to frequent the social milieux that would help them develop a sense of solidarity with working-class blacks. To address this problem, the article hypothesises that the conditions for anti-racist solidarity are not inherent in the racial structure but created by social movements, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter: to the extent that white and middle-class black participants in the George Floyd protests experienced the racist police brutality they were denouncing on behalf of the black working class, these protests functioned as non-segregated milieux that could ground the solidarity of the former with the latter at the national and transnational levels.