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In 1968 a group of Appalachian migrants formed the Young Patriots Organization in “Uptown” Chicago. Brandishing Confederate flags and Black Panther pins, they rallied for the cause of oppressed white people, organized “survival programs” including free medical clinics, food pantries, and breakfasts for children, and claimed solidarity with oppressed people of color around the world. Then in 1969 the Panthers recruited the Patriots to join their Rainbow Coalition along with the Puerto Rican Young Lords.This dissertation is a historical sociological exploration of how the Patriots utilized the concept of “alienation” among poor whites to forge interracial solidarity with the Panthers, Young Lords, and other activist groups of color in several occupations, protests, and other attempts to push back at the oppressive institutions that dominated the lives of poor whites and people of color in Chicago. Through an analysis of archival material and interviews, it first outlines how the Patriots’ discourse and organizing of their “survival programs” stitched together poor whites’ experiences of exploitation and abuse at the hands of police, politicians, doctors, staff at city health clinics and service organizations, and student organizers to cultivate a sense of solidarity with people of color whom they recognized were oppressed by the same strategies of marginalization. While the rationalizations were different (anti-hillbilly and white trash stereotypes rather than anti-brown or anti-black), the exploitation experienced by people of color and poor whites alike, the Patriots argued, was the logical outcome of a capitalist system that depended on the exclusion of poor people from political and economic power. This dissertation puts the Patriots’ model in dialog with contemporary theories of whiteness and anti-racist practice and argues that their success in cultivating anti-racist ideology and interracial solidarity can be attributed to the degree that their organizing disrupted the social conditions out of which racial ideology is cultivated. This merits attention because, unlike the tendency among standard anti-racist practice to focus primarily on individuals and their ability to recognize and reject whiteness, the Patriots engaged race ideology at the structural level. Their anti-racist framework, which I conceptualize as materialist because of its emphasis on social conditions, thus warrants attention because, if incorporated into the toolbox of anti-racist practice, it might help us to engage race ideology as the sociological phenomenon that it is—the outcome of the interaction between individuals and the social, cultural, and institutional structures that they must navigate throughout their lives.

http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12279

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-vfx0-8g61

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