Building Progressive Coalitions around Experience-Based Politics

This dialectic between experience and politics sheds important light on the possibility of building coalitions among disadvantaged groups. Such coalitions are possible when social groups use a normative-critical understanding of power to interrogate the assumptions and demands associated with their own and others’ experience-based claims. Doing this allows ABMS’ supporters to recognize that they, like their feminist critics, make emancipatory and oppressive experiential claims. They are consequently united by a conundrum - how to reap the benefits without succumbing to the limitations of their respective claims. The end of this chapter concretizes this vision of coalition building by detailing a specific circumstance - a roundtable on ABMS in which supporters and critics assess the risks and rewards of constructing black boys as intersectionally oppressed.