No separate peace: On intersectional coalition solidarity and rights radicalism

Critical legal scholars have long argued that rights-based tactics adopted by social movements tend to individualize claims, narrow politics to identity recognition, fragment movements in ways that sustain privilege of some factions, and divert attention from economic redistribution. There is some evidence for those debilitating dynamics in some cases, both in the US and beyond. However, rights claims and legal tactics also have facilitated expansion of some movements toward broad coalition activity, intersectional solidarity, and challenges to material class hierarchies. The latter is especially common in cases of “novel” rights claiming, or what is often called “rights radicalism.” McCann’s chapter develops a theoretical analysis about the possibilities of these latter dynamics. The original empirical core of the argument focuses on multiple “episodes” of rights-based struggles by Filipino American labor activists and their multiple racial, ethnic, gender, and class-based alliances forged at various times and places over the Twentieth Century. “No Separate Peace” was their call for coalitional solidarity in challenging multiple interlocking dimensions of hierarchy endemic to racial capitalism.