By Anonymous PZ ’25

Roughly a month ago, I decided to skip my Friday morning class to attend a vigil honoring the Palestinian lives lost at the hands of war and settler violence. Dozens of students fashioned in all black stood around the Coop Fountain. Handwritten notes hung from the fountain walls, displaying messages of solidarity and support. White roses and yellow daffodils plucked from campus bushes lined the fountain’s basin. A teddy bear with a bow sat propped against a cardboard sign with “LAND BACK NOW” plastered across in bold red lettering. Representatives from the cross-coalition  passed around educational pamphlets and spoke at length about the nature of settler-colonialism, detailing the collective struggle of Palestinian people for liberation. After picking up a sign and adjusting my face mask, I followed the group of students as we began marching, a symphony of chants echoing through the campus corridors.  

A similar sequence of events occurred just one week later. I walked with my co-workers to the lawn in front of Scripps and was surprised to see not dozens, but hundreds of students gathered. The overcast sky captured the distinct essence of this gathering — something thunderous was brewing. New faces were among the speakers who spoke eloquently about their lived experiences as Palestinian, and a more precise policy agenda was communicated: occupy Pomona’s administrative offices to pressure the college to disclose their endowment and divest from companies which fund apartheid. I shuffled silently into Alexandar Hall with several hundred other students and listened as one student expressed demands to stakeholders. Five minutes later, I exited along with the hundreds of other participants.

As I reflect on my recent activism, I feel compelled to draw a parallel between the Claremont Palestinian liberation movement (CPLM) and the #RhodesMustFall movement at Oxford (RMFO). While the circumstances of each movement remain unique, the decolonial ambitions and particular leadership models of these movements converge. RMFO advertises itself as a leaderless movement with a horizontal structure, and it appears that CPLM has taken a similar form — there is little evidence or presence of official SJP leadership on the organization’s social media accounts and throughout campus events, speakers were constantly rotating to include a broad cross-section of student activist organizations. It is critical to understand that a movement can still have leaders even with the absence of official leadership. Indeed, the remarkable feats produced by both CPLM and RMFO reveal that a strategic agenda can be constructed and executed even without the use of traditional leadership roles. Horizontality is helpful in avoiding the rigidity associated with traditional hierarchy, but it can also leave movements and organizations more susceptible to manipulation by outside forces — particularly the media.

In the case of RMFO, according to the book, Skin Deep: The Black Women of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, written collectively by key members of the RMFO movement, having no official leadership allowed the British media to falsely pitch certain individuals as leaders of the movement wholesale. The British media portrayed Ntokozo Qwabe as the leader of RMFO because “in white-dominated Great Britain what you want is a scary Black man from Africa who is trying to destroy the delicate and beautiful thing that you have.” Cherry-picking leaders, isolating them for criticism, and accentuating racist stereotypes is one way in which the media crafted a counter narrative against RMFO. Counternarratives are ultimately easier to construct against organizations that utilize horizontal leadership because they have less control over the particular directions in which they develop.  

 A recent polemic published under a pseudonym in the Claremont Independent on Nov. 2 may represent a warning that similar events could unfold with the CPLM. Condemning a recent statement released in support of CPLM, this opinion-piece intentionally name-drops the Pitzer Queer Trans Alliance, Prison Abolition Collective, and Divest Claremont while omitting the names of the nine other student organizations that also signed onto the statement. The involvement of these particular organizations in CPLM is unclear, but this article still subjects them to additional scrutiny. Associating these organizations with terrorism, evilness, and violence not only antagonizes RMFO as a whole, it also contributes to harmful narratives against LGBTQ+ communities and formerly incarcerated peoples. Furthermore, this article underscores the fact that without a visible or publicly advertised leadership structure, CPLM and associated organizations remain more susceptible to narrative manipulation by opponents. The Claremont Independent does not go as far as to directly criticize the Pitzer Queer Alliance, the Prison Abolition Collective, or Divest Claremont, but considering the role of media in RMFO this is still a concerning pattern nonetheless.

I remain deeply inspired by RMFO and CPLM, and fascinated by the internal operations of these movements. If CPLM continues to follow a horizontal structure, activists and advocates alike will have to continue navigating the complex challenges that the media poses. This is not to say that traditional hierarchy is the answer, it is more to highlight the inevitable difficulties of horizontal leadership.