Of vigils and vigilantes: Notes on the white witness

Abstract

This ethnographic study examines what happens when white allies bear witness to Black suffering. Through participant observation of Black Lives Matter Austin vigils for African Americans killed by police (2016–2018), I found that, while bearing witness, white and non-Black allies at times centered our own pain; criminalized insurgent forms of Black dissent; and engaged in a metaphorical slipping-on of blackface, in which activists imagine ourselves occupying the Black body. My findings suggest that allies’ gestures of solidarity may lead to the unintended consolidation of anti-Blackness. I offer the framework of vigilante racial justice for considering the tenuousness of bearing witness as a practice of allyship.