Resistance-based solidarity leaves common meanings unexamined and imported from outside

Evidence

The problem with lauding ”resistance” is that at the country-western clubs, it meant disorientation, racist jokes, dogs trained to bite blacks, unsatisfying weddings, and face-to-face silence. Jokes invoked a commonsense racism, sexism, and feeling of being someone’s market; but resistance to the dominant pieties surrounding race made the group more violent and uninclusive than the sum of its individual members. When the group’s focus is only on reversing and resisting, common meanings must come from elsewhere, unquestioned. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 930

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Sharp inversion: celebrating subversion as liberation misses how pure resistance groups import their common meanings uncritically, making them less inclusive, not more. Complications to the reader’s anti-out-group theory of solidarity — resistance-group solidarity may be built on unexamined external norms.
• XREF: Bears on the reader’s core question: a solidarity built on resistance-to (not positive project) cannot generate its own content, forcing dependence on external, unexamined meanings. — connects to: Solidarity arises from how groups culturally cultivate their relation to powerlessness — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 85; Transnational protest movements traded strategies and replaced pity with solidarity; Anticipated depression fragmented unions from socialist solidarity into defensive postures — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 412 (+3 more)