Authenticity and recognition: Theorising antiracist becomings and allyship in the time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter

Abstract

The confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd in America and a global Black Lives Matter response triggered anew the global struggle for racial justice. Using cyber, remote, and in-person ethnographic methods, this paper explores racial identity, allyship and processes of becoming during the spring and summer of 2020. Building on theories of ‘the struggle for recognition’, I situate becoming within the interplay of what I call epistemic, affective and reciprocal authenticity. Within this project, I address identity, redistribution and the reconfiguration of conceptual distinctions between justice and dignity. The analysis reflects a time of racial tension in a provincial Northeastern town in England, UK – a predominantly white and marginalised location. I amplify the personal testimonies, conversations and written words of three quite different activists to highlight the nuanced refractions of lived experience and a developing antiracism. These collaborators reveal how their antiracist becomings, in the light of 2020 events, incorporate affective, epistemic and reciprocal authenticities that bring to the fore new potentialities for racial justice, white allyship and recognition.

Introduction

The summer of 2020 in locations such as the UK, Europe, and the US, was a time of turmoil, illness and conflict that threw into question some of the fundamentals of human sociality and exposed the enduring violations inflicted by racism and anti-blackness. In this article, I amplify the personal testimonies and exchanges of a small sample of interlocutors to explore the intersections of authenticity, recognition and new becomings during this time.

I do this by deploying and interrogating the concept of authenticity. I characterise authenticity as having three interconnected dimensions: affective, epistemic, and reciprocal. Affective authenticity refers to the emotional processes that underpin and are shaped by the lived experiences of my interlocutors including intersections of race, class, gender, family, age and place. Epistemic authenticity refers to the different ways in which interlocutors seek a deeper understanding of their positionalities and the political implications of their positioning. Finally, reciprocal authenticity refers to the ways in which they have developed mutual relations of recognition that extend outwards beyond the confines of their immediate relationships. These relations developed through the interplay of both the affective and epistemic dimensions of actors’ becomings and the ways in which these dimensions are mutual and so understood by others.

In unpacking these three dimensions and their interrelations, I build on the social and moral philosophy of Axel Honneth who coined the term ‘the struggle for recognition’ in 1995 and Nancy Fraser's (1996) calls to combine the discussion of recognition with one of redistribution, class, status, economy, and an understanding of the impact of culture in particular. Fraser defined redistribution through the concept of parity of participation which stipulates that all adults in a society should be able to interact with one another as peers. Fraser takes this notion further by suggesting that in order for this parity of participation to be achieved, two conditions need to be met. First, that the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants’ independence and ‘voice’. Second, that institutionalised cultural patterns of interpretation and evaluation must express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem (Fraser, 1996: 5).

Going a step further than Honneth, this latter framing is particularly important when considering contemporary social justice movements that draw on intersubjective experiences of identity violation, be they about class, race or gender. Through the words of my interlocutors, I aim to move these theories forward into our understanding of recent struggles for racial equality in the UK.

The three young antiracist activists upon whose narratives I draw were, a second-generation Ghanaian black British man (Jeff), a white British man (Reggie) and a mixed-race (Pakistani British and white British) woman (Naaz). All three grew up together in a provincial town in the North East of England. Their reactions to the murder of George Floyd in America and the power of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) response provide insights into a process of antiracist becomings that coalesced around intersections of authenticity and recognition, both in activism and allyship. While these three interlocutors cannot be said to be representative of a ‘local community’, their voices contribute to my discussion about the accumulative impacts of racial injustice, and as part of a semi-autoethnographic accounting based on over 20 years of experience in antiracism work. I am weaving my interlocutors’ words into the raft of voices that have gone before.

At the same time, it is important to note that these three partners were also remarkable and deserve the prominence this paper accords them. Not only because they organised the only BLM protest in their area of County Durham in North East England but also because they encapsulate a burgeoning hope in a future where we may conceive authentic recognition and allyship as important ingredients for achieving social justice. All three young adults, whose perspectives underlie my theoretical ruminations, had been friends at school and grew up in the predominantly white, rural, and fairly affluent Northeastern town, which I shall call Holmdeen. This town is nestled within a very deprived, de-industrialised part of the country where white working-class identities rub up against more multicultural professional communities and international students, who inhabit the city centre.

The North East of England, the region in which my explorations of authenticity and recognition have been situated, has very low levels of racial diversity. The urban population is 93.6% white; the county in which the three interlocutors live is 98.2% white (ONS, 2020). County Durham has high levels of social deprivation and is currently ranked 48th out of the 151 most deprived upper-tier local authorities ¹ nationwide (Crown Copyright Ministry of Housing, 2019). Given its rural location, history of deprivation and the breakdown of its traditional industries, Holmdeen represents, on the one hand, an exceptional setting for such transformations among my interlocutors, yet on the other, it is a generative site that exposes particular sets of social relations and juxtaposing of experiences that have led to new becomings in racial identity, antiracism, authenticity and allyship. Moreover, the events of 2020 also signalled the re-emergence of my own quest for authenticity and recognition, as someone who has lived here and been shouted at by racists on its streets, yet also has experienced being perceived as an ambiguous other: A Pale, Mixed Race Black Woman With African Heritage.

Nothing could shake the feeling that on my limited forays out into the world under COVID lockdown, I saw so few black and brown faces and even fewer that looked like me. Where were we? I felt my jaw was permanently clenched and my body permanently tensed against any racist backlash or blame. I searched for solidarity in the black and brown faces I did see, giving ‘the nod’ ² and trying to communicate emotional synchronicity, solidarity and an understanding of the load we carry, which was hard for someone occupying a visually ambiguous racial identity. Whilst I have had an active antiracist upbringing thanks largely to my father and mother, as well as a career (on and off) in antiracism work for over 20 years, and more recently as an academic researcher and teaching on decolonisation, health inequality and race, I still felt bereft. It was these feelings grounded in my own lived experience and isolation during this confluence of COVID-19 and BLM activism that drove me to seek out local activists in the region.

There was a flurry of community development in Holmdeen and across the region during the period of June 2020 and April 2021, aiming to redress the isolation and alienation experienced by ethnic minorities in the region and raise the profile of the community in local decision-making. I carried out a brief survey of the civil society sector in County Durham, which highlighted the predominance of white-led secular, religious and party-political community work, none of which specifically addressed the intersection of race and marginality. At the time of my research, there were no black-led community groups operating across the county that had any prominence or real presence there. I was told flatly by local officials that ‘the numbers are so low; we’ve not felt it to be significant to report’. Indeed, such statements about the lack of ethnic diversity abound in the region and words to that effect can be read on some schools’ websites. Yet, there are quite a few black-led groups and some very well-established communities in the North East that date back a long way (Project African Lives in North England, 2021).

During my first exploration of the scene, I found a broad-based antiracist organisation, which at the time was an online network of individuals who, although predominantly white, were interested in antiracism work. It was through attending one of their virtual meetings that I met Jeff and Reggie who had been invited to talk about their involvement in organising the BLM event in the city. It was also through this meeting that I met an antiracist Labour Party campaigner who had been very active locally for several years on race matters. Through this contact, I was able to observe and participate in the founding of a BAME Labour Party network, now officially named BAME Network Labour North that aimed to connect rural black and minority ethnic communities in County Durham with other communities located in cities such as Newcastle, Darlington, Stockton and Carlisle. Although partly political, this kind of black-led community development and peer support that sits outside of mainstream provision and is generated out of a need to connect has a long history in the UK. What is interesting is that unlike in cities such as Bristol and London, where I had worked in black-led community organising, there was very little by way of a deep footprint to this kind of activity in the County and the footprints that did exist belonged to dispersed individuals rather than organised and well-funded groups.

Whilst partly driven by the historical need for greater representation and voice for a highly disaggregated minority community, the emergence of community organising at that particular time was propelled forward, as conversations with community organisers revealed, by the immediate sense of isolation from the international and urban BLM events developing after the murder of George Floyd. Moreover, the sudden and successful activity of Jeff and Reggie was also seen as a catalyst for further community organising and as such they were regarded as important figures for the movement locally.

Their narratives and testimonies not only speak to their own struggles and need for recognition in a predominantly white and largely working-class context, not only on a personal level from family members and immediate peers, but also from the broader society. This need stretches beyond the confines of their own lives to the wider ongoing global struggle for recognition of the injustices of racism. It constituted an orientation towards collective action. All three talk in both similar and different ways about an authenticity that lies within this struggle.

The struggle for recognition and the moral sites of change

Honneth (1995) understands the struggle for recognition as being a central dimension to all social conflicts. Taking Hegel's theory of recognition further, he argues that individual identity is not just an intersubjective experience requiring the uncoerced validation of others, but rather that identity itself is a structuring factor in its own right. The cornerstone of his theory is that the intersubjective processes of struggling to gain mutual recognition led to developments of self and what he calls relations to self. He suggests these struggles can be measured by the extent to which they generate the conditions for self-realisation in the form of three types of recognition. These are self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, and I would add love of self and others, which in turn form a structural basis through which social forms of life are maintained and reproduced. Individual identity or relations to self then becomes for Honneth the foundation that informs the moral basis of social conflict and therefore has transformative properties.

In addition to the three forms of positive recognition, he also outlines three forms of disrespect, which he argues provide the moral motivations for individuals to take social and political action towards expanding relations of mutual recognition. The three forms of disrespect have firstly to do with violations of the body, where one's physical integrity is violated by abuse, torture, and rape, through which one loses trust in the stability of one's identity. The second is concerned with one's moral self-respect that is violated through the systematic denial of the same rights that are granted to others. Lastly, the self-esteem of individuals can be violated by the denigration of one's way of life and a lack of recognition of one's capacities and capabilities. One could argue, very straightforwardly, that racial injustice from colonialism to the present has been based on the systematic application of these three forms of disrespect. With whiteness, among other associated features, as the central measure against which these forms of disrespect are justified. Indeed Hegel's own musings on recognition were shaped by the atrocities of colonialism and a consideration of what it is to be human, which he developed into a theory of individual freedom (Stewart, 2018).

Applying this model of disrespect to gender, Nancy Fraser (1998, 2001) shows that like race, gender inequality vis-à-vis women is crudely defined by the privileging of its opposite status, masculinity, and purported subjugation and even annihilation of the ‘feminine’ (Fraser, 1998: 2). In Fraser's view these injustices are the ‘harms of misrecognition’ and are somewhat independent of the political economy. She suggests false distinctions are made between redistribution and recognition, class politics and identity politics, multiculturalism and social democracy. For her, the harms of misrecognition combine both the issue of justice (redistribution of resources) and recognition (dignity). As such, redistribution of resources alone will not remedy the harms of misrecognition. Instead, she argues the injustices of gender and race are also situated in the domain of culture and identity and as such require additional remedies of recognition. Yet she is not in favour of Honneth's emphasis on self-realisation, which she understands as sectarian and problematic in our value-plural world. Her call to combine these elements is one that draws on the idea of ‘participatory parity’ – the interaction between people that is based on a shared understanding of value-pluralism. As such, she neatly draws the social contract together with rational choice theory.

The tolerant multiculturalism expressed by Fraser has inherent problems because it does not fully account for the historic interplay of power, dominance and subjugation. This is because a multicultural, value-plural stance does not address the ways in which values shape the distribution of resources. A shared understanding of value-pluralism carries the unwarranted expectation that a particular set of actions, driven by a positive valuation of worth, will be able to level historic power dynamics. I wish to retain Fraser's emphasis on combining the issue of justice (redistribution of resources) and the expanded conceptualisation of recognition (dignity) found in Honneth by speaking of authenticity (affective, epistemic and reciprocal). Power is addressed through the struggles for mutual recognition, redistribution and reciprocity as validating processes of long-term relatedness, of love and of humanity. In doing so, I champion the process this takes as one of becoming, of moving toward an ideal, however, fragile reaching it in practice may be. The general direction and recognition of that direction is what matters. As Deleuze (1992) notes, becoming is always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed. Moreover, struggles for recognition and their accompanying social movements, with their buoyant effervescence, ensuing becomings and demands for redistribution, often serve to highlight the ways in which power and culture are entwined.

There is a scholarship that goes beyond that of the liberal philosophy of democracy, on which we can build build. For example, Marxist social thinkers and anthropologists (Hall, 1987; Kalb, 1997) speak to the unequal power relations within neoliberal democracies and question the parameters of the social contract by asking who is it that defines the concepts of ‘justice’ (seen as redistribution) and ‘dignity’ (understood as recognition) that are said to underpin societal norms and who benefits from these concepts? Taking justice as an example, there is a power dynamic between those who get to define and enforce justice and those who are to be the recipients of it. This was brutally encapsulated by the murder of George Floyd that took place under the knee of a police officer (an enforcer of justice). As such, we have to unpack the ways in which the social contract itself is not an objective or altruistic social fact. It is a product of historical power relations that serve to benefit and maintain that power in the hands of a minority. The power to define justice and dignity or what redistribution and recognition look like, in the context of a neoliberal democracy, has by and large been held by a few predominantly white men of Northern European origin. As such, the social contract ostensibly aims to protect the rights of that small group who hold significant economic and/or property rights and whose justifications for such power-hoarding are rarely scrutinised.

Whilst an account of the role of power is missing from Nancy Fraser's theorising, her emphasis on the ways recognition and redistribution are interconnected is useful. As she points out, we should use what she calls ‘perspectival dualism’ to understand the ways in which these two concepts overlap and are mutually constitutive and can be said to exist for any domain of social life. For example:

These perspectives [recognition and redistribution] can be deployed critically, moreover, against the ideological grain. One can use the recognition perspective to identify the cultural dimensions of what are usually viewed as redistributive economic policies. By focusing on the production and circulation of interpretations and norms in welfare programs, for example, one can assess the effects of institutionalised maldistribution on the identities and social status of single mothers. Conversely, one can use the redistribution perspective to bring into focus the economic dimensions of what are usually viewed as issues of recognition. By focusing on the high ‘transaction costs’ of living in the closet, for example, one can assess the effects of heterosexist misrecognition on the economic position of gays and lesbians. (N Fraser, 1996: 8–9)

In the context of race, we can see how by focusing on the ways race has been defined, redefined and put in motion, one can assess the accumulative impact of the harms of maldistribution. For example, from the contexts of enforced labour extraction and enslavement to the racialised pay gap and job security between black and white university academics (Arday, 2022), the legacies of misrecognition are concordant with maldistribution. Through looking at recognition claim-making, such as that developed through the civil rights movements and BLM, we may additionally assess the junctures at which there is a move towards redistribution.

What is needed is a decolonial view of recognition such as that provided by J. A. Fraser (2018) when he considered power in his response to critiques that are often levelled at claims of recognition. In his discussion of two case studies in Brazilian Amazonia, Fraser argues that post-colonial studies of recognition are usually carried out in contexts where there are clear settler/indigenous distinctions, in which the emphasis on recognition politics serves as a form of neoliberal multiculturalism (Coulthard, 2014; Povinlelli, 2002; Simpson, 2014). He instead draws on David Scott’s (1999) reworking of Franz Fanon (1961) to stress that a decolonial theory of recognition contains both the legal aspects of securing power through institutions and the intersubjective requirement of obtaining acknowledgement by other people.

J. A. Fraser (2018) demonstrates in his ethnography that the legal and intersubjective elements of recognition can coalesce to achieve territorial freedoms. This is because by drawing on the community-building knowledge of grassroots activists, the legal structures, often generated at a distance by more powerful actors, become localised and intimately bound together through processes of hearing the affective and epistemic narratives of those seeking liberation. Thus the success of these movements is generated by a reciprocal process of learning at the grassroots that can remedy the harms of misrecognition.

Underlying J. A. Fraser's theorisation is what John Clarke (2014) has called a conjunctural analysis that seeks to situate the distinctions made among state, society and community as they occur over time and within specific locations. A conjunctural analysis according to Clarke (2014) is to critically assess ‘the forces, tendencies, forms of power, and relations of domination that exist at any moment in history’ (Clarke, 2014: 115). As Nina Glick Schiller (2016: 3) elaborates: ‘Rather than examine the concepts of society and community as unchanging and unrelated to relations of power, an analysis of each conjuncture denaturalises views of social order and challenges the hegemonic, common sense of a particular point in time’.

In the context of the UK, the recent antiracist movements, sparked by the very graphic video recording of George Floyd's murder, explicitly revealed the racialised relations of domination as they have marked the current conjuncture. The BLM movement and subsequent impact of this on scholarly work, activism and policymaking have set forth a discourse that aims to dismantle the hegemonic ideologies of dominant white society and the unequal power relations that underpin it. Notwithstanding discussions on the relative success of these activities (and there is always more to do), the BLM movement can be seen as responding to the interplay of state, society and community at the current historical moment by highlighting the fundamental importance of recognition and redistribution.

As I will demonstrate, my three interlocutors speak to their own antiracism requirements that are in the spaces of self, relatedness, shared solidarity, of love and of humanity. It is on these highly slippery rocks that authentic antiracism and the recognition of identity clings because, such as race, and indeed we may say of gender/sex too, authenticity is an unstable signifier. My attempt here is to give authenticity in antiracism struggles of recognition some substance by unpacking the different elements of racial becomings among my interlocutors. I call these forms of becoming because they chart the conscious registering and articulation of the injustice, the unequal power relations and the different expressions of racism that my interlocutors share. They speak of it as a process of understanding what it means to struggle for justice, either as an ally or as someone who has experienced racial injustice firsthand. It is the expression of this process that comes to define the elements of their authenticity. It is an exploration of the authenticity, be it affective (the emotional love: negation of love dyad), the epistemic (the knowledge, experience, and politics of action), and the reciprocal (the relatedness between the two: affective and epistemic), of this becoming that I focus on next.

Theories of decolonial recognition, such as that offered by J. A. Fraser (2018) expand and strengthen the analysis of recognition and its relationship to history and authenticity. In this regard, it becomes essential to draw on Stuart Hall's notion of race as a ‘floating signifier’ for it specifies how race is understood within a specific time and place of recognition (Hall et al., [1997] 2021). For my interlocutors, these sites or places come in various forms: the family and the self, the hometown, life away from home, their experience in the wider society, as well as less tangible spaces such as online, or in the relatedness they feel towards the events unfolding around them. Moreover, the sites of practice that expose racism for my interlocutors are central to the forming of their racial identity, because it is in these spaces that the struggle for recognition and the moral grammar underpinning them, takes place, be it openly or covertly, collectively, or on an individual level.

Honneth (1995) proposes that the struggle for recognition is morally motivated and can be found across many social movements. It is not, for Honneth, one of self-preservation as liberal social theories of methodological individualism so often posit but rather the struggle for establishing relations of mutual recognition. In this way, due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe each other. It is instead a vital human need that binds us together in sociality (Taylor, 1992: 26). The struggle for recognition, according to Honneth, is concerned with a critical perception of injustice that is rooted in the lived experience of being morally violated. In a continuation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory, emancipatory critiques are generated in the everyday domain of human experiences of domination and the struggles for emancipation (Corradetti, 2017). For example, Horkheimer (1972) a former Director of the Frankfurt School proposed that critical theory ‘has for its object [human beings] as producers of their own historical form of life’ (Horkheimer, 1972: 244).

The setting of the everyday: Changing conjuncture of time and space

Whilst the spring and summer of 2020 could be considered far from ordinary, it did, however, shine a spotlight onto the scope, depth and variety of everyday racism. The types of questions these summer events generated, including amongst the dominant group, spoke to a framing of authenticity, recognition, and the becoming of antiracism. The becomings that we could observe across the media were based on a conjunctural moment of globe-spanning recognition for people who were confronted with an injustice that was made visible. They signalled a recognition of the everyday intersubjective and structurally rooted experiences of living in a racialised society, the different sites of those experiences and the ways in which they are manifest. As such, the point of departure from the everyday was centred on what happens when those everyday racisms are reconceived, exposed and then validated on a large scale through the ensuing BLM movement. As Hall et al. ([1997] 2021: 362) notes:

There is always something about race that is left unsaid…always someone – a constitutive outside – whose very existence the identity of race depends on, and which is absolutely destined to return from its expelled and adjected position outside the signifying field to trouble the dreams of those comfortable within it.

But building on Gramsci's discussion of ‘the crisis of authority’, Stuart Hall (1987) also noted that with conjunctural change the previous forces of order erupt:

Not only in the political domain and the traditional areas of industrial and economic life, not simply in the class struggle, in the old sense; but in a wide series of polemics, debates about fundamental sexual, moral and intellectual questions and freedoms, in a crisis in the relations of political representation and the parties – on a whole range of issues which do not necessarily, in the first instance, appear to be articulated with politics, in the narrow sense, at all. (Hall, 1987: 20)

Both the murder of George Floyd and the events that followed generated a series of actions that placed race back on centre stage and in some of the most unlikely places. These acts began to ‘trouble the dreams’ of those either deeply appalled by the murder, concerned with the image of complacency towards or complicity in racism, and by those who on some level genuinely wanted to express solidarity with the BLM movement that followed. There was a flurry of antiracism pledge-writing, black squares going up all over social media, and discussions concerning the role and authenticity of white allies.

Critical whiteness: The BLM movement and white allyship

The BLM movement was sparked by the death of Trayvon Martin in July 2013 and the acquittal of his killer (Morrison, 2023). It rose to prominence in the US again after Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri (USA) was gunned down a year later by a white police officer. Since then, the movement has grown, and the first UK chapter of BLM was established in Nottingham in 2015. Beginning in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, whose dying moments under the knee of a police officer had been filmed and broadcast, we saw a new and global rise of the BLM movement. Fuelled largely by social media, the BLM movement generated public displays of allyship and commitments to antiracism from a wide variety of sources.

Seeing allyship as the process of affirming, recognising, and taking positive action on behalf of a subjugated group, Brown and Ostrove (2013) suggest that social movements aiming to address racial injustice must have the support of both the dominant and subjugated groups. According to the authors, most studies looking into allyship, particularly around race, do so from the point of view of dominant groups and within workplace settings. Similarly, Robinson (2022) and Bourke (2020) highlight the need for allies to be agents working towards social justice to avoid tokenism. Authenticity becomes important here because for allyship to be recognised there needs to be not only a validation through practice, but also a validation given to it by the subjugated/non-dominant group. Validation in allyship works to cement reciprocal authenticity and mutual recognition.

This need for validation from the non-dominant group was expressed well by Reggie. He had a strong need to know that his actions as an ally were validated.

I didn’t want it to be about guilt as a White man. I was so pleased Jeff reached out because I didn’t want to be the White guy organising a BLM protest – that felt like it was getting off on the wrong start. (Reggie)

Validating white allyship is also premised on a critical reflection of whiteness. It requires recognising and understanding white privilege. Meredith Clark (2019) explored digital white allyship after the murder of Michal Brown in Ferguson. She noted that white allies actively repurposed the self-perceptions of their social, economic and political privilege in order to raise the profile of their antiracism efforts. In this sense, they used their privilege to platform the struggle for racial justice.

Clark (2019) emphasises that to be accepted as allies by the non-dominant group, potential allies must reflect on the premise of their privilege. In doing so, they repudiate what Feagin ([2009] 2020) calls ‘The White Racial Frame’. Here, white is set as the default for individual humanity. Feagin suggests that the concept of the white racial frame is essential for understanding black oppression because it becomes embedded in people's minds/brains/cognition, collective memories and histories. Recognising and dismantling the white racial frame then becomes a central aspect of authentic white allyship and a critical understanding of whiteness. As part of this, we must also be wary of generalised assumptions about the nature of whiteness and white identity more broadly and spend time unpacking the ambiguities of these identities, particularly as they relate to class.

John Hartigan (2000), for example, highlights the ways in which antiracism discourse can construct a generic white subject, both privileged and unconscious of the extent of their privilege, and whilst this construction is likely to be applicable to a majority of white folk, it potentially undermines the nuances of racialised positioning. In this respect, both whiteness and blackness are socially constructed and particularly so in contexts of claim-making.

Whilst it is important to recognise that any form of racialisation be it white or black is constructed in response to localised questions of power and justice, we cannot ignore that the racialisation of whiteness affords privileges that radiate beyond immediate political contexts and travel both back and forth in time as privileged identities. This is why the middle-class black banker is still likely to be stopped and searched more frequently than a white working-class manual labourer and black people in the UK are seven times more likely to die than white people, following restraint by police (Prasad, 2023). We must ask, then, in what spaces does understanding of racialised power struggles and injustice emerge and how are we to make those realisations matter? Having worked through the conceptual landscape that allows us to explore racialisation and privilege, we can return to the discussion of authenticity and recognition. The questions I asked of my interlocutors are how do representations of race feel? How often is it that you think or feel trapped by these notions and how do they shape your actions?

New becomings and the struggle for recognition

It is the themes of authenticity and the struggle for recognition that frame the ways in which my interlocutors talked about their own becoming and by extension their role in antiracism work. Occurring at the time of the confluence of the pandemic and the outpouring of rage at the injustice and persistence of racism, the three young people upon which this paper rests began their own journeys into their spaces of recognition.

In their early years of study at their respective higher education institutions – in Liverpool, London and Newcastle – Jeff, Reggie and Naaz returned to their provincial city during the first lockdown in March 2020 in England. Their return to their hometown, after their first experiences of living away from home, highlighted for all three a palpable tension between their new experiences outside Holmdeen and their new selves looking afresh on their home town. In Jeff’s words:

In Liverpool it's just so much more diverse, I just didn’t realise [it could be like this], then I go back home and it's like such a difference. Your circumstances growing up as a kid, it can blind you from reality and lead you/ people down a certain path.

Reggie noted:

[I] became aware of all the shortcomings and particularly of the way I was [as a young White man] in the past. Holmdeen was like a watcher [of the BLM movement and its messages], so far away from things, detached from the problem. We wanted to do something.

This sense of detachment comes from the memory of a lack of recognition. Their new experiences generated a particular set of understandings of plurality and an epistemic recognition of how they had been in the past. In this sense and particularly for Jeff, it exposed the dual consciousness he had lived with as a black boy growing up in Holmdeen. This was encapsulated by the sense of being watchers, of having to survive through the lens of the white majority. In talking about their childhood together, Jeff discussed an influential black YouTuber that all the children were watching and how he felt he had to go along with the jokes.

There was that Youtuber when we were growing up. He was so successful and when you see people like that become successful using that racial language and no one to call him out about it – you think it's not that bad then. White kids copied it and that was what it was like on the yard. I was always the butt of the joke. It was always directed at me and as a kid I used to just take it. (Jeff)

Audre Lorde ([1984] 2019) adapted the concept of ‘double consciousness’ that was first put forward by Du Bois (1903) in ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ to show how black people in America (and elsewhere in majority-white societies) had to occupy two contradictory spaces, whereby you had to view the world through the lens of the white majority and continuously measure yourself against it. The devastating consequence is the denial of authentic recognition, of an affective love, even from those who look like you. This is perhaps one of the most dangerous forms a lack of recognition can take for children of colour. Not only does it legitimise the racism expressed by their white peers, but it also serves to destabilise their own development of self, their relationship to the offending other and their relationships towards other people of colour. This is particularly so in contexts where there are unlikely to be many positive black role models.

Honneth shows how the intersubjective recognition of injustice or acts of denigration may not be immediately realised as a denial of recognition. In the case of Jeff, he had to navigate both the racist taunts of his peers, but also that the basis of those taunts originated from a Youtuber who was black. For Jeff, seeing a popular YouTuber that looked like him in effect giving permission for racist insults led to further harms of misrecognition.

For Honneth, the denial of recognition is dependent on the different types of denigration and the corresponding level of a person's intersubjectivity they injure or even destroy (Honneth, 1995: 54). Naaz discussed the ways in which she felt she had been confronted with this denial of recognition from her family.

None of my family on my mum's side are like me: they look different, have different surnames. Not looking like my mum was really difficult for me. It was these issues that started my own issues with my race, being mixed heritage. I’m not sure I had a lot of people to look up to.

My Gran refers to the corner shop in a way she shouldn’t. I think so much is ingrained in the vocabulary. She calls it ‘the Paki shop’ and when I’m there, she's like ‘oh sorry’. What do I do – do I let that pass? The hardest thing has been growing up and not having anyone to talk to that looked or felt like me. (Naaz)

What Naaz describes are the ways in which straddling two understandings of her heritage causes both an epistemological and affective challenge to self and her identity. The level or site upon which this occurs is the family. In her own words, she is questioning the degree to which she can challenge the denial of recognition she has faced. Similar to Jeff (influenced by an older black Youtuber), it was the authority given by the negative role model for Naaz, in her case an older white relative, that created conflict over how she experienced denial on an affective level, but also limited her ability to act on those feelings. The impact of intergenerational representation then, has a huge part to play in how identity is understood and representations of it are challenged. Thus the double consciousness serves to reproduce that uncertainty and maintains the lack of affective and mutual recognition. The perpetrators, in turn, lack or chose to not display the epistemic authenticity required to engage with those they have harmed.

Both Naaz and Jeff must reconcile conflicting parts of their identity, one as a mixed-race woman of Pakistani and white English heritage and the other as a Black British man with Ghanaian parents. For both interlocutors, the multiplicity of their experience is bound up in space, nationality, gender and race. They must traverse the contours of a white, English patriarchal normativity, which leads to the perpetual confrontation of their various elements of self.

In talking about his family life Jeff says:

We [Jeff and his sisters] don’t know our parent's tribal language (Ewe). ³ They speak that language at home together but then speak to us in English so we’re all sitting around having dinner and our parents are talking in that language and we don’t understand it. Our cousins live half-way around the world and when our parents are conversing with aunties and uncles… it is difficult to feel close to them. [We] all get on and love each other as a family and all that, but then there is this guilt like you know more about British culture [than them] but they know more about where we originate from and where our parents have such great memories and where they see as home.

Sometimes you feel a bit lost as if you don’t have that culture. That's been part of growing up for me. What I want to do now is make up for lost time, if you will; try and tie those bits together; be more knowledgeable of my family's background; and kind of regain that thing I feel I’ve lost. When I’m home, [back from university], my parents are like, ‘this [our family] is Black culture’. But when I go to Ghana, my cousins, they see me as being part of white culture. This for me felt really strange because I am the same as them [both parents are from Ghana]. But I’m in a totally different part of the world and they’re saying something totally different to me.

Jeff's description of his experience draws in some way on multiple experiences of recognition and authenticity with his parents further supporting the claim that the family is the site of his ‘Black culture’. Yet this does not quite hold true for Jeff because he straddles a less obvious connection to the homeland and the authoritative source of his parents’ identity. Jeff's musings highlight a struggle for both authentic and epistemic recognition. He feels he has lost something of his origin and an epistemic disconnect through not knowing the language that his parents speak. As such, his connection to Ghana is vicariously constructed through his parents. Yet it is withdrawn as a connection when he speaks to cousins in Ghana who are of the same generation as him. This leaves him again in a liminal place not able to claim that identity for himself. In this sense, Jeff's diasporic identity is viewed quite differently from those living in the place of departure – Ghana. As such, the claims of an authentic Ghanaian identity are heavily problematic for Jeff, which in turn shapes his particular racial becoming and strategies to locate his own position in the world.

The idea of constructing one's own positionality is firmly articulated by Naaz when she says:

I’ve realised that it's not a question of which one I belong to, it's that I’m both of them and that I am my own person and that I don’t have to be either Asian or White but that I can be both. (Naaz)

Gordon (1995) in developing a critical mixed-race theory, makes the claim that mixed-race identities are a significant counter to the purity-based binary of black/white racial identities. The problem, as seen by Gordon, is that continually discussing the ins and outs of race and racial identity catches mixed-race people in the trap of having to perpetually seek out some authenticity to our claims, an issue not present for white or for more ‘visibly’ black communities. Echoing the notion of double consciousness, Fanon noted in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, that all people of colour have to grapple with the question of identity: ‘…because it is a systematic negation of the other, a resolute decision to refuse the other all the attributes of humanity, colonialism [and associated racism] compels the dominated people constantly to ask the question: in reality, who am I?’ (Fanon, [1963] 1991: 249). Both Naaz and Jeff in their own and slightly different ways are trying to answer this question. As Jeff notes,

I think about it [racism] a lot. Socially, people may not mean to do anything or not even do anything at all. You just get that felt thing, you know, someone will give you a funny look, or they’ll say something out of their car, or they’ll spit on the floor next to you, and you’ll be like that's not actually common [normal]. Is that because I look different or because of this or this or because of that or that? I want to change things, it's so hard.

There is an affective dimension to the question, who am I, and this is born from the inhumanity or complete dis-affection inherent in racism. That is the alienation of affection, the dehumanising of the dominated, and the persistence of the white racial frame. What is more, this dehumanising need not even be conscious. As Reggie points out, his own awareness of racism has been triggered by his move to London.

I became aware of how White the North East was when I went to university and came back. I could see how I had put up a wall between racism, [not seeing] that it was about me or [thinking] that we didn’t have it up here. I’ve started to think about it [racism] more and starting to clock it more. Like clock the representation of it, you know, like I’ll be watching something and notice there are no Black or Brown people in this shot on TV or an advert and like everyone in it will be White. This was interesting, new to me since BLM, because like that was just something I was consuming my whole life. Coming to London has changed things a lot. Being with my friends [diverse backgrounds], I witness the micro-aggressions. I just notice it. It's just surreal like I see my friend not allowed into a fitting room with two items, when I’ve just been let in [by the same person] with three or four. (Reggie)

For Reggie, his growing antiracist allyship is generated from the visible differential treatment he experiences as a white male, which has led to a critical reflection on whiteness and his own white privilege. The site of the racial incident is a retail outlet in London, but it is only because Reggie now has a more diverse friendship group and has begun developing his own epistemic authenticity that he ‘clocks it’. Reggie's becoming draws on several sites of practice that interweave notions of place and the deprivation of the North East. This deprivation is both in terms of its perceived lack of cultural diversity, but also its economic deprivation and that many young people lack the same opportunities to move away or gain the different experiences that Reggie has.

It's been interesting coming back and I’m like doing more looking into this, I now realise how much work there is to do. Agree. Being back up North all my friends up here are straight White men, and they use language that I just wouldn’t use. I have even used that language in the past, but now coming back, how they talk is just not politically correct across the board. They just haven’t left the North East. Racism comes from the top down rather than bottom up.

The idea that racism comes from the top down in Reggie's account is compelling because he directly links it to exposure and the fact that many of his friends have not had the opportunity to leave the region and thus be exposed to more multicultural environments. Here the intersections of class and race are evident because if the environment does nothing but reproduce the white racial frame, the development of the ingroup/outgroup dyad never gets disrupted.

Whilst the issue of authenticity is important to those experiencing the harms of misrecognition, it is perhaps even more important for the dominant group. Not least because the burden of being authentic and perpetually having to answer the question, who am I, in relation to the other, is not a consideration. Instead, perhaps we should flip this so that the question is better bounced back to the white majority as, ‘who am I that has perpetuated these harms’?

The power of protest: Dismantling the white racial frame through authentic allyship, political action and reciprocal authenticity

Much of the literature on racial identity focuses on the development of black identity and little has been done on the racial becomings of white people with some notable exceptions (Becker, 2017; Spanierman and Smith, 2017; Suyemoto et al., 2021). What is interesting in Reggie's accounts are the various spaces in which he is confronted by the reality of racism and how that makes him question his own positionality. Allyship requires the movement from one status to another for the purpose of challenging the status quo, which is often sparked by a turning point moment or an awakening of some kind. It is clear in Reggie's statement above as well as his recollection of his advance into allyship was that he moved from being unaware or ignorant of racial injustice to a new position of understanding.

It was such an overwhelming moment with George Floyd. But I felt guilt. I didn’t want it to be like I’d organised it [the protest] because I felt guilty or to clear my conscience as a White man. My motivation was like – I’m now aware of all this, having been ignorant to a lot of it before. You can only go forward. I was thinking, what can I do now I’m in Holmdeen for the next 2 weeks of lockdown. What can I do that has an impact?. (Reggie)

Addressing what he calls ‘white racial awakening’ in the aftermath of the events in 2020, Elijah J. Robinson (2022) notes that these moments have different impacts. For example, complicity or non-complicity with the racial status quo, depending upon whether experienced through typical white experiences (exposure to diversity or education) or what he calls uncommon white experiences (exposure to protests and diverse families). Like Reggie's turning point narratives, those collected by Robinson highlight the role of diverse peers, witnessing racism, and the events of and following the murder of George Floyd. For Reggie, it is his own struggle to be recognised as antiracist that motivates him to act. As such, Jeff's engagement in organising the protest gave Reggie the validation he required as an authentic ally.

Noting the reciprocal nature of authenticity, Karen Suyemoto et al. (2021) refer to the need for white allies to engage in a relationship that validates the experiences of racism. A multiracial interlocutor defines authenticity in white allyship through a powerful set of questions:

I think what we mean here by deeply authentic is like, can I be a whole person with you? Can I share my full experience, including my experience of oppression, or the ways in which our relationship mirrors the systemic oppression? Can I share with you my uncertainty about a micro-aggression I experienced, or will you come down like, ‘Yeah, it was really not that bad, you know they didn’t intend that’? Can I share with you my uncertainty about a micro-aggression I experienced from you? Can I be angry about oppression? The pain gets connected to the anger because turning it into anger helps to place it outside where it belongs. The rage is real, it's justified—but is it tolerable to you. (Suyemoto et al., 2021: 20)

These questions sum up that mutual need for validation, the mutual recognition of oppression and violation, which in turn relates to an acceptance of or seeing the ‘whole person’ by the white other. The fear and anxiety of violation and the preempting and obfuscating of its occurrence is a lived reality for most people of colour, including for those of us who straddle racial boundaries.

Whilst Reggie's concerns centre on not being recognised as authentically antiracist, Jeff's concerns about the protest tap into black surveillance and the often assumed synonymy of black masculinity and criminality (Browne, 2015; Smiley and Fakunle, 2016) and a fear of violation, not just to the self, but also to the movement and the struggle for recognition. As Jeff put it:

I was worried that we minorities could get scapegoated again. If we were going to do something big that was against the COVID advice given, it had to give an impact that we respected it. Had to obey social distancing and be positive for the community otherwise could put the movement on the back burner and build hatred. It was all about changing views, challenge, give a moment where it clicks in their heads.

Naaz had similar concerns to Jeff about the protest, but in the end, highlighted its success. She recalled:

There was a counter-demo, which was a bit hard, we had to walk past that, and a few nasty words were spat at us. We felt we were representing our generation and we had to do that well. I think they thought we were there to be violent, but we were just there to hear each other speak. My mum didn’t want me to go. She was worried I’d get arrested, and she’d seen all these images on the news about other protests. There was a boy there who read a poem and he had a placard saying, ‘racism is a pandemic’ and I remember thinking – yes, I should definitely be here.

The turning point narratives and the ‘clicks in their heads’ are important for understanding the affective and intersubjective elements of authentic recognition. As Naaz notes:

I never had many positive [Mixed Race] role models. I do now though with the Black Lives Matter movement. People are talking about their experiences, and I feel I was influenced by that. I’d written lots of things about these issues but kept them to myself, but then after the BLM [activities in the summer of 2020] I felt I could share them. I wrote a letter to my mum, which is on my blog. BLM has made such a big impact; people are coming out and speaking about their experiences. It makes you feel proud to be a bit different now. [It's] made me self-reflect, think about who I am and to be happier with myself. ⁴

It is in those moments of coming together in communal action that the affective dimensions of people's experiences of direct or vicarious racism come to the fore. People talk before, during and after protests and it is in those dialogues that a deeper understanding can be achieved, as we saw in the flurry of antiracist work being done in a wide variety of settings across the UK and internationally.

Epistemic, affective and reciprocal authenticity: A concluding discussion

The three dimensions of authenticity that stand out in the testimonies and narrations of Naaz, Jeff and Reggie represent the differing positionalities of each actor. Jeff, having grown up as a black man in a predominantly white environment, spoke of the complexities of diasporic identity and a strong desire to reclaim and own a part of himself that he feels lacking or misunderstood. He embodied the diasporic tension of not belonging in either world and the struggle to be accepted by both. As such, his is as an epistemic struggle for self-knowledge, which is that need to recognise for himself and have recognised and validated by others, who he is as part of the Ghanaian diaspora.

Jeff, in fact, hid his involvement in organising the protest in Holmdeen from his parents because he felt they would not understand and ask him not to attend. However, on the day of the protest, Jeff appeared on local television and was subsequently ‘outed’ in front of his family. Jeff recalls how that moment led to a mutual recognition of Jeff's need to be involved in the movement, and although his parents were worried, they respected his decision to be involved.

I didn’t tell my parents that I was going to do the protest. I didn’t tell them I organised it and then it got on the local news, and we were all sitting together watching it and they were like ‘wait, you organised that’? I didn’t know how they would respond and the only way I could control it was not to tell them. I was worried they wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t want their voices in the back of my head knowing they didn’t want me there. Their response in the end was positive, they were worried, but positive.

Whilst Jeff does talk about the gulf between himself and his family, he never presents them as insurmountable; indeed what he creates from it is an epistemic space to explore his identity as a Black British man, both similar to and different from his parents. As such, epistemic authenticity is a generative process that leads to greater mutually authentic relationships within his family. In fact, he has subsequently found out from his parents that his grandfather had been very active in the Ghanaian liberation movement.

Both, through thought-provoking prose on her blog and her conversations with me, Naaz highlights an engagement with affective authenticity through her struggles with racial identity. She foregrounds that deeply perplexing state of racial indeterminacy common among those who combine different phenotypic characteristics of their parents (Gilroy, 1993; Lionet, 1989; Mullard, 2021). She talks intimately and with passion about her struggles with racial identity and in her blog about the volatility of her relationship with her parents. She does this through a discussion of distance – both physically through her differing body and emotionally in her physical and cultural dislocation from her mother (white) and father (Pakistani Muslim).

Much has been written about the complexity of mixed-race identity (Adhikari Adhikari, 2005; Aspinall and Song, 2014; Campion, 2019; Daniel et al., 2014; Ifekwunigwe, 1997, 2004) but a key theme that comes across in Naaz's journey of racial becoming is the idea of occupying what Mahtani (2001) calls a ‘mobile paradoxical space’, where knowledge of both sides of yourself can generate new understandings of self and injustice that transcend racialised divides. The understanding Naaz was able to reach through expressing her feelings to her parents and having them respected and recognised, led to a deeper sense of epistemic authenticity. Through a reciprocal recognition and validation of her intersubjective experiences by both her parents, Naaz developed an authentic reciprocity and a form of what Remi Joseph-Salisbury (2018) calls a ‘post-racial resilience’.

The young adults I spoke to had just emerged from a post-racial compulsory and further educational experience in the UK at a time when post-racialism was the doctrine de jour. This perspective was encapsulated in the form of a report that explored racial and ethnic disparities in the UK (Sewel et al., 2021). Published by the Government's Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities, the report known as ‘The Sewel Report’ highlighted the prevalence of the post-racial mindset. It played down the existence of racism in the UK, arguing that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have a more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism (Sewell et al., 2021: 8). Antiracism commentators argued that the report failed to acknowledge that the principal factor that underpins the limiting effects of these other factors is racism (Mirza and Warwick, 2022; Tikly, 2022) and obfuscated, not only racialised underachievement, but also the lived experience of racism more broadly.

Both, Jeff and Naaz had to negotiate the contradictory messages of a colour-blind state, on the one hand, and their lived experiences of racism and otherness on the other hand. Moreover, this obfuscation (dubbed the ‘culture wars’) was publicly running alongside the growing antiracist movement in the UK at the time of this research, through which the dominant classes aimed to limit or complicate understandings of the role of racism and white dominance in generating the conditions of racialised inequality. Whilst certainly the messages and actions post George Floyd had given voice to their becoming, for Naaz, Jeff and Reggie, it would be wrong to present this as a singular moment or as in any way complete.

The dangers of a narrative case study approach like the one I have adopted is that it can read as representing what Polkinghorne (1995) describes as an ‘epiphanic moment’ of recognition. Suki Ali (2003) shows that whilst there may be influential moments that lead to self-reflection, these reflections are ongoing processes of racialisation that are changing and not constant and are often open to significant reinterpretation (Ali, 2003: 170). However, the events of the summer of 2020 laid bare in no uncertain terms the persistence of racialised brutality, disrespect and institutional racism. The global recognition of this blew the lid off the post-racial doctrine and clearly showed the continuing struggle for racial recognition and the need for radical change.

Reggie's testimonies reveal how this struggle is not confined to black and brown people, but rather can take on a powerful affective, epistemic and reciprocal dimension for white people. Reggie's strong discourse of the turning point, ensuing allyship and the importance of validation signals the ways in which he has been confronted by the absurd and arbitrary injustice of racism, expressed in his example of the disproportionate treatment in the changing rooms in a fashion retailer. He reflected on his deep sense of recognising his own racialisation and complicity in racist encounters on the affective level of guilt, and even shame, then feeling ‘moved’ and ‘overwhelmed’ by the events of summer 2020 and his new dedication to pursuing a path of antiracism. Active in allyship education at his university, he has embarked on an epistemic journey to understand more of the history of race and the ways white allyship can be generated.

More recently, white racial identity scholars predominantly working in the fields of psychology, counselling and psychotherapy education, have focused on the role of awareness of racialised injustice. A key component, which creates that awareness, is the development of empathy through affective engagement in racialised encounters (Chao et al., 2015). Youth scholars have similarly focused on the affective dimensions of white guilt in generating paths to action for social justice (Dull et al., 2021).

In talking about the demonstration, Reggie is careful to show how uncomfortable he felt ‘being the white guy organising a BLM demo’ and was ‘relieved’ when Jeff got in touch. Their collaboration highlights the power of reciprocal authenticity that mutually recognised the differing positionalities and claims of epistemic authenticity on behalf of each other.

All three talked of the effervescence of the protest organised by Reggie and Jeff in Holmdeen. Jeff, Naaz and Reggie in their differing ways show how the BLM movement had great significance for the continuing development of their identities. Their involvement in organising gave them the opportunity to further explore their own epistemic life histories. At the same time, the collective action itself led to having individual epistemic authenticity mutually recognised and by doing so their interactions with each other and their wider families took on a reciprocal authenticity. This reciprocity enabled them to move beyond the ‘I’ as placeholder for epistemic and affective forms of authenticity towards a collective, intersubjective understanding of the struggle for shared recognition. As such, forms of mutual recognition that extend collective action beyond the protest events can generate innovative ways to propel social transformations. This is because they leave in their wake a better understanding of the relationship between recognition, redistribution and reciprocity. Indeed, such interrelations are explored by Oche Onanzi (2019) to identify a new approach to disability justice that utilises particular African understandings of community. By highlighting the horizontal reciprocal obligations inherent in terms such as ubuntu he draws on a range of African moral philosophy to highlight how mutual reciprocity is not generated by self-realisation in isolation but in an intrinsic appreciation of our relations with others (Murove, 2012). What is more, these relations can be mobilised to create the conditions for greater equality and redistributive justice.

It is important to see social movements, not as discrete phenomena, but as processes that situate them within ongoing projects of transformation (Touraine, 1988). Delaporte, Huang and Ussakli (2020) similarly draw our attention to the unfinished nature of social movements that generate novel coalitions between actors that rotate around particular ideas of historicity that take them forward in reclaimed ways into the future. As such, we should look to the ‘horizon’ of possibilities these movements point towards rather than fixating on them as historical events. The words of the three actors in this article, clearly show the unfinished nature of their own struggles for recognition and in epistemic, affective and reciprocal ways, to have the wider struggle for racial justice recognised as one that involves dismantling the historical forces of white dominance.

As such, the struggle for authentic and mutual recognition is also a project of reimagining the boundaries of groups that are perceived to be stable (Benhabib, 1992). For authenticity and recognition to become both mutual and reciprocal, they must extend beyond that reference group to encompass validations from those that exist outside of it. The words of the collaborators in this research broaden these concepts to accommodate a series of three intra-references that draw on the following: (1) internal struggles to do with knowing oneself, one's history, and the relationship between self, wider power struggles, and their connection to maldistribution; (2) understanding the emotional process that both underpin and unlock the epistemic journey; and (3) acknowledging that these processes must be collectively and mutually understood, validated and recognised externally through reciprocity and redistribution. Together these three dimensions, epistemic, affective and reciprocal, are part of understanding in a self-conscious way the relationality between racialised experiences, historical power structures, racial becoming, and a project of antiracist transformation.