We Don’t Have To Do It Alone: For R06-FA01

Building an anti-racist organization is a responsibility that belongs to everyone. While recognizing the urgent need for dedicated spaces for comrades of color, the authors contend that anti-racist organizing cannot be siloed into a single body, and propose an alternative path that distributes the work across all of YDSA.

Racism exists in YDSA because the capitalist society we live in supports and replicates systems of oppression. Such systems of oppression are what drive society, organizations, and ultimately people to engage in behavior that perpetuates racism. It is an understatement to say that every member wishes to solve this problem; the question is not if but how. Structurally separating anti-racist work will not make YDSA less racist. It may even hinder our progress towards becoming an organization that is diverse in its composition and leadership, as well as safe and empowering for members of color.

In the 2026 YDSA Compendium, the resolution titled “R06. For A Global Majority Space in National YDSA” calls for the creation of a body, the “Global Majority Section,” acting as a de facto committee to address issues of anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Aside from replicating University of Cincinnati YDSA’s social space model (see: the whereas clauses of R06), the section’s purpose is: “to transform the relationship YDSA national has with the complex topics of antiblackness, white supremacy and racism by tackling it at its root through political education, recruitment, acknowledgement and working alongside marginalized communities and groups whilst maintaining socialist values and norms within organizing efforts.” Additionally, it endeavors to “[create] a national space where non-white chapter members can convene and trouble shoot their chapter’s diversity” and “[working] with YDSA national and local leadership to ensure that national priorities reflect the needs and perspectives of global majority members in its vicinity.” The creation of affinity groups in order to have safe spaces for POC members is a tried and true method, which we have no qualms about. However, organizing experiences from University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) and the Chapter Health and Intersectionality Committee (CHIC) demonstrate how an organizing separation strategy like the Global Majority section would fail to fix the larger problems they seek to solve. As we argue below, this attempted solution would isolate Global Majority members, cementing an unjust distribution of antiracist work onto people of color. This in turn would lead to burnout and even undermine the anti-racist praxis and organizing required to implement this urgent systemic intervention in YDSA. 

First, the Global Majority section’s membership is exclusively non-white, and it is the only body chartered by this convention that is responsible for tackling the issue of white supremacy. This would mean that Black and Brown comrades in the section are almost exclusively mandated with making YDSA an anti-racist organization, leading to a long-term alienation. To be clear, R06 is an understandable response to a real problem. Once harm is detected in an organization, the first instinct is to protect ourselves by making a separate space. Additionally, using this space to make an anti-racist organization also initially makes sense.  It is this approach, however, that may precipitate greater harm if we are not careful. Global Majority member leadership is certainly sorely lacking in YDSA (and the left at large), but in order for our leadership to be effective in counteracting racism, we must be connecting our efforts to the larger organization and not silo off organizing. Since racism in the left often takes the form of socio-cultural aloofness, classism, and other forms of subtle (and not-so-subtle) otherizing, organizing being separated between GM and non-GM members would prevent the organic intermingling and distributed work that is crucial. Undermining racism in our organization requires interaction, a culture of humility, and a standard of race consciousness, especially from our white members who otherwise do not usually think about their race and how it affects their interactions with others. The organizing separation tactic fails to protect marginalized members by detaching the work from the majority of the organization and ultimately placing the burden of organizing onto those most marginalized..  

Second, the organizational isolation of GM members would place the burden of combatting racism almost entirely upon these members – a strategy that would eventually overwork GM members and even cause burnout. It is unreasonable to expect the GM section to tackle such a huge problem on their own. By adopting R06 unamended, we would be pushing our global majority/POC comrades to overwork themselves on the multifarious challenge of fighting racism in YDSA, when it is clearly every single member who must take part in this project.

Our society teaches racialized people, especially those racialized as Black, to blithely tolerate our racialization while simultaneously pushing us to shoulder much of the burden in the fight against racism. This phenomenon has been well documented. For instance, the 2024 National Black Sport Participation and Physical Activity report from the University of Massachusetts Boston found that Black college athletes “feel the most compelled to engage in [activism or organizing] compared to their non-black counterparts who are unwilling and/or less likely to engage in similar behaviors at comparable levels” including on the issue of racial justice.  A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Black and Hispanic Americans were more likely than White Americans to look for rallies or protests near them. In short, the societal burden of dealing with racism already falls disproportionately on people within the global majority, and we ought not exacerbate this tendency by formalizing it within our organization. Put differently, the logic of the GM section conflates leadership relations (yes, we need leadership of color) with division of labor (no, we can’t do all the work ourselves). 

The consequence of this artificial division of labor was acutely felt at UTSA, where we and other leaders in the global majority felt alone in bearing the burden of antiracist work because we were the most prominent Black and Brown members of our chapter. We exhausted ourselves rapidly creating resources, making organizing timelines, and developing a collective analysis. By the time implementation rolled around, we did not have the capacity to properly disseminate and implement all of our hard work. This demoralized some of our comrades who felt that we were not doing enough or that the problems were beyond repair. At the end of our earliest attempt to address the issues in our chapter, we were significantly burnt out and unable to build the member buy-in needed to follow through on our proposals. 

This outcome isn’t unique to UTSA. CHIC also failed to deliver the promise of increased organizational diversity for similar reasons. At the 2024 Convention, CHIC was tasked with conducting trainings for improving diversity in YDSA and creating strategies for engaging diverse populations on campus. The following year, CHIC’s resolution tasked itself with mentoring chapters on building diversity through organizational relationship building and establishing diversity based committees. In both resolutions, the rest of the national organization was only nominally responsible for diversity, while CHIC held exclusive responsibility for leading the rest of the national committees. In practice, neither the NCC nor CHIC directed committees to regularly discuss and incorporate intersectionality and anti-racism into their work. When the Youth Growth and Development Committee discussed diversity, the body would default to making an ask of CHIC or collaboration via an NCC member on YGDC or CHIC going to the other committee’s meeting to discuss. Furthermore, CHIC (as per its defined role) was given the emotionally-laborious tasks of chapter mentorship in local crises around racism by other leaders who felt ill-equipped to wrestle with these issues collectively. CHIC had neither the capacity nor the training to conduct proactive chapter mentorship. All this without the support of the whole organization – the only vehicle actually capable of rooting out bigotry from its own ranks. In other words, dedicated committees and working groups can’t solve racism – it is only through the discipline and commitment of YDSA members at every level, in every corner, in every project & priority, that racism can be dismantled. Committees and working groups, even if renamed to a “section”, may seem capable of addressing the problem in the short-term, but amount to a shortcut in a project that admits no shortcuts.

R06 would unfortunately repeat CHIC’s past errors. It tasks the GM section with conducting political education on racism, working alongside marginalized communities and groups; troubleshooting isolation and diversity challenges in meetings, etc. These mandates are essentially a repeat of CHIC’s dedicated committee. Furthermore, the section’s resolution mandates “[working] with YDSA national and local leadership to ensure that national priorities reflect the needs and perspectives of global majority members in its vicinity.” Even though it may not be the intention, CHIC’s experience shows that the result would be shifting labor and responsibility onto the GM for the sake of “not duplicating work” and “cross-committee collaboration.” This is a strategy that has failed two years in a row. In conclusion, the Global Majority resolution replicates UTSA’s and CHIC’s siloing strategy. Just as YGDC is not the only committee who gives direction on recruitment, it is not the job of a single committee to give direction on combating white supremacy for the whole of YDSA. It is the responsibility of every committee, every NCC member, and every chapter, and it is the job of the National Coordinating Committee to do that coordination. 

In order to combat anti-Blackness and white supremacy, chapters and national must run campaigns which resonate with racialized communities, standardize and improve chapter grievance procedures and culture, conduct intentional leadership development of racialized comrades, build anti-racist education and practice into every chapter’s standard member onboarding, integrate that education and practice into every part of our national organization, and replicate the local successes of social spaces like GM without siloing work in their translation to national. Collectively, we must root cultural and political expectations in every member that they personally must foster an environment where people in the global majority are respected, developed, and critically engaged with and not spoken over, belittled, or devalued.

In order to see this perspective through, the authors of the article organized a cross-tendency coalition of YDSA members in the global majority and wrote a floor amendment for Resolution 6. This floor amendment corrects the issues identified by this article as well as issues identified by other coalition members. Vote yes on our motion to suspend the rules to consider an amendment to R06, and vote yes on the amendment itself!