Description
Despite 40 years of efforts to provide access and support to African students at Historically White Institutions, these students still must cope with racial microaggressions due to institutional Whiteness. The prevailing multinationalist perspective does not take into account the worldview of minoritized students and requires students to suppress or renounce their culture to achieve academic success, which is also defined within Whiteness. Only through student demands have changes been implemented for African students, such as ethnic studies or support programs. However, these programs were quickly co-opted to ensure that students could not organize for meaningful change. This study proposes that Euro American students have a responsibility to support the interests of African students at HWIs in the form of transformational action. A new type of ally—the Solidarity Ally—addresses the problems found in current literature about racial and social justice allies, using the framework of the grass roots theory of African Internationalism. A phenomenological approach was used to illuminate the lives of 11 Euro American student allies by exploring their definitions of allyhood, how they became allies, and the actions they took. Students from four colleges in the southwest region of the United States participated in semi-structured interviews. Four major themes emerged: (a) what it means to be an ally, (b) development as an ally, (c) the practice of being an ally, and (d) organizing as allies. The findings from this study have implications for practitioners, as well as research implications for future inquiries on allies and social justice.
