White People Rising Up For Racial Justice

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FEATURING CHRIS KUTALIK - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Chris Kutalik, Director of Communications for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) joins us. Chris is also the former communications director of DSA, editor of Labor Notes, and was a union officer.  

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's begin first with what SURJ is. It is, as I said, it stands for Showing Up for Racial Justice. How do you summarize the goals of your organization, and how you go about achieving those goals? It sounds like it's fairly obvious from the title. 

Chris Kutalik: It's obvious, but there's certainly some nuances to it. We were founded as an organization explicitly to sort of flank Black people in motion, the Black movement, people of color movements, and the movement against racism. And our explicit mission was the very hard task of organizing white people out of their racism and around shared interest into support in getting rid of their, and ditching their racism, and supporting the fight for a multiracial democracy. So, for about 20 years, we've been moving around that very specific goal of moving white people out of racism.