Direct Action through a Racial Lens

When examining what is and what isn't effective in provoking social change, the topic of direct action always takes center stage. Highly public and dubiously legal (or outright illegal) protests and political actions garner the most media attention and often generate the most public support. However, it is necessary to consider direct action campaigns through a racial lens, especially when we consider who is permitted to participate in such groups.  Groups that are not explicitly focused on racial inequality, such as ACT-UP and more recently Occupy Wall Street and Cascadia Forest Defenders, have been unsurprisingly dominated by white men. 

When the most privileged members of the group occupy most of the leadership positions and are heard most frequently (as is and was the case in all of the previous examples) the overall direction of the group tends to reflect their specific needs. Entering the group as a member outside of that privileged elite can be both personally and politically daunting. Ann Cvetkovich addresses this in her piece "AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP's Lesbians". She quotes the activist Tracy Morgan as saying, "but I think the women in ACT UP, who were there from the start, must have trusted men politically in a way that I didn't." The sidelining and erasure of women and people of color in ACT UP did not only occur within the movement, but also followed the movement, manifesting themselves in its perceived legacy 20 years later. The contributions of lesbians and POC to ACT UP remain routinely ignored both in positive representations and in critiques of the movement.

Direct action as a political tactic relies on a certain leniency on the part of authority motivated by racial bias; it favors white activists who are less likely to face severe penalties due to lawbreaking or political disobedience. It also often relies on its participants being seen as nonviolent, which creates problems in a society where social nonconformity by nonwhite actors is seen as inherently violent. In comparison to a group of white actors, a group of black or arab men storming a government building carries an highly racially charged set of cultural connotations, regardless of their political or social aim.

The fact that direct action is currently seen as the ultimate or most desirable form of social protest by social justice activists reflects this racial bias. Those forms of political protest most accessible to white activists become valorized, even when similar forms of protest by nonwhite activists (such as the early activities of the Black Panthers) are seen as overly radical or even militant. The 

Furthermore, the group cohesion required to organize a direct action campaign also allows for prejudices to propagate unchecked for fear of "splintering the movement". Additionally, self-identified radicals often assume that they have examined their own positionalities in regards to gender and race when in fact that is rarely the case. On In Front And Center, user shergawia writes, "social justice people, by virtue of being people intensely involved in the struggle for equal rights and universal human dignity, assume themselves immune to the prejudices common to The Masses. ... For people so immersed in the fight to eradicate inequality, it’s so easy to forget that we are *equally* capable of instituting it ourselves."