I went to a demonstration this afternoon in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Farmworkers Support Committee (CATA) based in South Jersey and the Kaolin Workers Union in Kennett Square. This part of rural (but increasingly exurban) southeast PA is a mushroom-growing area; it supplies 40 percent (!) of the United States' mushrooms. CATA and the Kaolin union are both fantastic worker- and immigrant-led organizations that, beginning with the Kaolin Strike in 1993 and culminating in successful unionization in 2002, have kept up the pressure both for workers' rights and migrant laborer and immigrant rights.

The purpose of the Equality Ride isn't to protest — it's to have a dialogue with the students. When colleges have let them, Equality Riders have had open discussions with students about LGBT and queer identities and religious perspectives in support of such identities. To me, this is one of the most important examples of radical activism I've seen in a long time. Equality Riders aren't trying to pass legislation, they're not trying to sue people in the courts, they're not running for Congress or working on a campaign — they're talking directly to those most directly affected by this oppression.

UfPJ and allied groups, which seemed early on to have strong connections to the global justice movement, seems to have been transformed — in the hopes of attracting more "mainstream" participants — into not an anti-war organization, but an anti-Iraq War organization; not a pro-peace movement, but a pro-better-war-policy movement. Few connections are made to "the soul of America," as King would describe it, and much attention is focused on those things that are at best cogs in the system — individual policies on the war, planning or lack thereof for the war, and particular Republicans in Congress and the White House. Yet these problems go considerably beyond Bush and Republicans.

When the important work of third-party nonviolent intervention is undertaken by people with relative privilege, it runs the risk of hindering the empowerment of the local movements they aim to assist by replicating racist or classist dynamics in the struggle itself. By relying on the status attached to the economic, cultural, and military dominance of the Global North, nonviolent intervention organizations can facilitate a relationship of dependency that offers short-term strategic advantages but that in itself is less likely to promote the nonviolent empowerment of local movements. Sensitivity training within intervention organizations may help activists strategize in ways that avoid some of the pitfalls of operating from positions of privilege.

Last Friday, more than 850 students from 46 states around the country came to Washington for the Power to Protect: D.C. to Darfur conference, sponsored by the Genocide Intervention Network and Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.