Dilemmas of Allyship - White Anti-Racists and the Challenges of Social Justice

"White allyship" is at the forefront of reignited, extended, and intensified debates about the future of racial progress. But as scholars and activists have long recognized, it comes with a set of personally destabilizing challenges that are at least as likely to turn whites away from anti-racism as they are to inspire them to participate in social change.

Dilemmas of Allyship investigates the contemporary phenomenon of social justice allyship from a novel perspective. Departing from evaluative analyses, in which only "success" or "failure" can be seen, Zachary Sunderman argues that today-s movement is best understood as a set of socially mediated dilemmas, involving contradictions between mutually exclusive sets of motivations and interests. Based on interviews with American activists, Dilemmas uncovers how allies experience, understand, and manage these difficulties, and explores the ways in which they can both threaten and strengthen the project of whi