1. I am drawing my conception of solidarity partly from Tommie Shelby's discussion inWe Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), especially pp. 67-71.
2. To say that adversity is required for solidarity is not to say that solidarity occurs only among disadvantaged, oppressed, or stigmatized populations. Solidarity requires only a belief among the group that it is facing adversity, and privileged people can feel this. Wealthy people who band together to stop an attempt to increase their taxes may have a sense of solidarity in doing so, insofar as they regard the tax increase as adverse to their interests. So the adversity required by solidarity is not measured by an objective standard, but is in the eyes of members of the group. We might say that the wealthy people's sense of solidarity is unjustified, meaning that they are wrong to oppose the tax increase. But they may nevertheless have a sense of solidarity.
3. Bill Lawson, in a comment on a previous draft, points out that another possible scenario is that the Asian-American student experience a sense of vulnerability as a potential victim of a hate crime, but without feeling solidarity with the other Asian Americans. There are several distinct options here, and I mean only to bring out the difference between solidarity and community. In a previous paper, I have referred to the Asian-American students' form of group consciousness as an "anti-discrimination identity." See my "Ethnicity, Identity, Community," inJustice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education, eds. M. Katz, N. Noddings, and K. Strike (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 127-45.
4. The perpetrators were a white supremacist group who also targeted Native Americans and African Americans in the town. Other forms of solidarity were proffered to those communities. For example, when hate messages were painted on a Native American family's home, many members of the community came to the home as a union group and painted over the hate messages. "Not in Our Town" (aired on PBS in December 1995).
5. Ewa Berberyusz, "Guilt by Neglect," inMy Brother's Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Anthony Polonsky (New York: Routledge, 1990), 70.