Description: There has been a push by BLM and other racial justice and Black liberation activists for white people to move from a position of verbal and intellectual allyship to a more active position of solidarity in the Movement for Black Lives, often referred to as co-conspiratorship or accompliceship. It is important for white people to think about various ways we can invest in Black lives and work in true solidarity with people of color. What does it mean to act in conspiracy with? What kinds of trust and self-knowledge are required for becoming an accomplice to the work? For this workshop we ask participants to read chapter 5 of Dr. Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive* and watch Dr. D-L Stewart’s 2018 UNT Diversity Conference keynote talk on moving from allyship to accompliceship (citation below), and to come with questions about what Stewart and Love have to say, ideas about what accompliceship and co-conspiracy might look like, barriers to achieving a practice of anti-racist solidarity with Movement leaders, and goals for your own movement toward accompliceship and co-conspiracy.

Goals:

-To develop shared understandings of the critiques of some forms of white allyship by activists of color.

--To create a list of strategies for enacting accompliceship or co-conspiracy.

--To discuss our own barriers to working in full solidarity with people of color, and strategies for breaking those barriers down or shifting how we perceive them to function.

--To build a collective set of actions toward accompliceship that we can support each other in and hold each other accountable to.

A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent out shortly before the meeting begins.

Stewart, D-L, Hobson, K. & Attar, N. (2018) Equity and Diversity Conference - Dr. Dafina-Lazarus (DL) Stewart, Social Justice Speaker, video, February 22, 2018; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1152244/: accessed April 7, 2020), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting University of North Texas.

*Here is a link to a list of Black owned bookstores from LitHub:

https://lithub.com/you-can-order-today-from-these-black-owned-independent-bookstores/