The Shadow of Solidarity: A Micro-Analysis of Student Activist Conferences on the Left

• In Event: 187 - Regular Session. Political Culture

Abstract

Social movement scholarship points to the significance of young people, particularly college students, in Civil Rights and New Left movements in the United States, but it also highlights the challenges that these groups faced in organizing, engaging racial and gendered difference, and finding consensus on ideological and tactical grounds. In a vastly different historical period, are young activists encountering these same challenges? How might past forms of stratification across axes of difference inform current modes of organization and interaction in student activist spaces? This study utilizes participant observation at student activist conferences, one of majority Black students, the other of majority white students, in order to examine micro-mobilization processes of group deliberation and strategizing; and formal and informal inter- and intra-group interaction, in order to study the socio-political organizing spaces of student activists on the Left. Findings point to the ways in which the rhetoric of solidarity can obscure ideological conflict, gender stratification, and social tension around queer politics, in the conference of Black students; and a white patriarchal culture unwilling to recruit racial minorities, antagonistic to women, and detached from queer politics, in the conference of mostly white students. Both conferences reveal the uncertainties and challenges student activists face in engaging difference, agenda setting, mobilizing, and sustaining long-term activist efforts in the current socio-political era.

Author

• Amaka Camille Okechukwu, New York University