UC Berkeley

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to talk to and with others like myself with race, class, and/or academic privileges who wish to practice solidarity in the name of collective liberation. I respond to Black feminist thinkers such as Toni Morrison, who called for White people to look at their own complexes in the equation of racism, and Fannie Lou Hamer who proclaimed that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free” by demonstrating the spiritual harms of racial capitalism to people who materially benefit from it, and what can be done to heal from these harms. Treating the Poverty Scholars of POOR Magazine in East Oakland as primary theorists of solidarity to analyze four spaces of learning—across race and/or class difference, within sameness, and in mixed company—I practice Poverty Scholarship’s emphasis to share from self-observation, or “I Journalism,” by including stories and observations from people with race, class, and/or academic privilege practicing solidarity. A major contribution of this dissertation is its use of performance theory to address solidarity as an everyday performance that can be practiced and improved, towards our healing and collective liberation. Ultimately this dissertation offers examples of embodied study for people with race, class, and/or academic privilege to divest from racial capitalism’s extractive and spiritually harmful structures towards evolving and ongoing practices of solidarity, ethical relationality, and collective liberation.