For Full Article: MULTIRACIAL COALITION BUILDING

Multiracial coalitions and alliances are necessary to dismantle racial hierarchy and end racial disparities. But because this hierarchy unfairly distributes access to opportunities, it places ethnic groups in competition for limited resources and creates real tensions which can impede coalitional work. Census projections indicate that increases in the number of non-white immigrants will lead to a majority “minority” nation, presenting enormous opportunities and challenges for the transformation of US society into a truly inclusive one. These demographic changes, however, will not lead inevitably to the end of racial hierarchy without strong coalitional efforts across racial and ethnic groups.

Despite structurally produced conflict between racial and ethnic groups in the United States , multiracial coalitions exist and have been successful. Strategic multiracial alliances have won meaningful policy reforms to break down structural barriers to opportunity through their collective resources and political strengths.

To better identify when and understand how multi-racial coalitions and alliances have worked effectively in the face of structurally produced tensions, the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School retained Maya Wiley, CSI’s Director, to conduct case studies of successful multiracial coalitions.

The study examines three successful multiracial coalitions in different regions of the country. These coalitions are successful because they:

• have racially/ethnically diverse constituencies;
• attract significant political attention;
• have sustained political cooperation; and
• won an important reform or sustained collective work on structural reforms that could impact low-income communities of color.

THE COMMUNITY ALLIANCE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

The Community Alliance for the Environment (CAFÉ) is a New York City neighborhood-based coalition of Latino, African American and Hasidic Jewish organizations working on environmental justice issues. These groups have long had tremendous tensions, which have periodically exploded into street demonstrations and riots. They have fought over neighborhood control and limited resources, particularly around affordable housing, schools, and policing. Despite these tensions, with deliberate and intentional commitment from community leaders for all the racial and ethnic groups involved and hard work developing a coalition code of principals, these communities were able to come together to fight powerful corporate and government interests to bar the operation of a garbage-burning incinerator in their neighborhood and to work on asthma in their community.

LOS ANGELES METROPOLITAN ALLIANCE

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Alliance (Met Alliance) is a citywide coalition of African American, Latino and Asian organizations and individuals working on job training and job creation. A group of long-time community activists founded the Met Alliance to develop long-term solutions to the underlying causes of racial economic disparities in South Central Los Angeles, where tensions among Latinos and African Americans have been high around access to jobs and political representation. Committed to working together, the coalition formed and created a strategic planning process to jointly identify the most pressing issues for the coalition – jobs. A truly unique aspect of this coalition is the leadership and central role that a grassroots, community organizing group based in South Central Los Angeles, AGENDA, plays in the coalition. The Met Alliance has won a major job training and placement program from the City of Los Angeles .

CONCERNED CITIZENS FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS IN EDUCATION

CCQSEP is a Mississippi-based statewide coalition of Mississippi Delta based African American activist community organizations and predominantly white, statewide disability rights groups working on educational opportunities for disabled children. This cross-racial collaboration is historic in Mississippi , a state still marked by a segregated school system, extreme poverty and a sorely under-resourced public school system. The coalition is structurally informal compared to CAFÉ or the Met Alliance. Although racial tensions existed within the coalition, the groups’ ability to unite into a bi-racial coalition created an unprecedented opening with the state legislature and Department of Education to confront long-standing resource inadequacies in the state’s public schools and to enforce and actually improve a thirty year old consent decree requiring the State to provide supportive learning environments for its special needs children. This coalition’s success is also marked by the ability of a Delta-based, African-American grassroots organizing group, Citizens for Quality Education, to increase their capacity to impact education policies and to begin to influence the white organizations to open up to discussing discipline issues in schools.

CONCLUSIONS

In all three case studies, structural arrangements limit access to economic and political resources, which create tensions between racial and ethnic groups. Yet, despite these tensions, multiracial coalitions formed and have sustained joint work. In each case, the multiracial character of the coalition was an important political strength leading to meaningful policy reforms. Visionary leadership that had its own constituencies and deliberately worked to build trust among groups was vital to the formation and sustainability of all three coalitions. Leadership also played the critical role of helping their communities identify the right issue around which groups could unite despite tensions. A deliberate focus on building capacity in each community and an emphasis on group strategy development and decision-making were critical to maintaining coalitional work. In each case, groups continued to work in coalition, although alliances have shifted due to differences in the structural context of each locality and the degree of a shared ideology.