Using and Disputing Privilege: Young U.S. Activists Struggling to Wield "International Privilege" in Solidarity

Abstract

The role of white privilege in multiracial coalition building has been discussed extensively in both activist and scholarly discourse. In a seminal treatment of the topic, "The Myths of Coalition," Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton argue that in the coalitions they explored, whites have failed to see the flaws in their own attempts to act in solidarity with the oppressed, and that this lack of attentiveness to power differentials doomed the coalition. A more recent body of scholarship suggests that cultivating white people's consciousness of their "privilege" is critical to antiracist action.1 Yet even activists hypercritical of their privilege can participate in its reproduction. This paper analyzes a subset of participants in the "International Solidarity Movement" (ISM), a network of activists from around the world traveling to the West Bank and Gaza to support Palestinian nonviolent civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation, in order to examine how even activists struggling self consciously wtih privilege in multiracial, international coalitions can reinforce the very privileges of race and nation they critique. From its inception in 2001 through this study in 2004-2006, ISM's self-labeled "international" contingent was disproportionately comprised of young, white, middle-class North Americans and Europeans. In the movement's efforts to prioritize coalition buildings across national boundaries, activists explicitly mobilized the visual privilege of Europena and North American whiteness in their activist strategies, asking "internationals" to travel to Palestine to support nonviolent Palestinian activism with their disproportionately white, international bodies. This article examines activists' frustration-and their learning process-as their privileges of disproportionate visibility, voice, safety, and access to public sympathy reproduced in many of their attempts at coalition. Wrestling with privilege and its pitfalls came to seem a process without end. Even among the most self-critically privileged, activists found, "solidarity" efforts were routinely plagued by Carmichael and Hamilton's prediction: "coalition between the strong and the weak ultimately lead[s] . . . to perpetuation of the hierarchical status: superordinance and subordinance."2