SOS Racisme’s success rested on disguising partisanship as non-partisan antiracism

Evidence

As Phillipe Juhem has argued, SOS’s achievement was precisely its façade of an apparently non-partisan antiracism, tailor-made to attract media attention in the 1980s, but which would have been impossible during the more heavily politicised years before 1981. SOS activism appealed in part because it did not entail the personal sacrifices often demanded by traditional left-wing militancy. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1375

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard founding myth: the movement’s power came from masking its political instrumentalization behind an apolitical façade, and from deliberately low-cost participation.