Americanization [has never been] just about nation but always about race and nation. …Often while themselves begrimed by the nation’s dirtiest jobs, new immigrants and their children quickly learned that “the worst thing one could be in this Promised Land was ‘colored.’ But if the world of work taught the importance of being “not black,” it also exposed new immigrants to frequent comparisons and close competition with African Americans. The results of such clashes in the labor market did not instantly propel new immigrants into either the category or the consciousness of Whiteness. Instead management created an economics of racial inbetween-ness which taught new immigrants the importance of racial hierarchy while leaving open their place in that hierarchy.
—James R. Barrett and David Roediger, Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class (1997, p. 6)
Let me throw down the gauntlet: my challenge is to think about immigration from the standpoint of [the] black figure, crouched on the ground as others pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity. Dare we also read the immigration literature – the celebratory narratives of immigrant progress and triumph against adversity – from the point of view of ‘the man farthest down,’ to borrow a phrase from Booker T. Washington? It goes without saying that this is only one among many standpoints for thinking about immigration and immigration policy. My only contention is that it is one that must be considered, and that doing so is an intellectual and moral imperative.
—Stephen Steinberg, “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse” (Reference Steinberg2005, p. 43)
INTRODUCTION
Were it not for their use of past tense and the outdated term “colored,” one might easily mistake James R. Barrett and David Roediger’s (Reference Barrett and Roediger1997) analysis of immigrants’ century-old negotiation of their place within the country’s racial hierarchy for musings on the present state of affairs. The foreign-born population is rapidly growing across the United States. By 2010, the country boasted 40 million foreign-born residents, with over half hailing from Latin America and one in six arriving in the preceding five years (U.S. Census Bureau 2010; Walters and Trevelyn, Reference Walters and Trevelyn2011). In recent decades, newly arrived migrants have increasingly eschewed traditional gateway cities in favor of nontraditional rural and suburban destinations (Massey Reference Massey2008; Mohl Reference Mohl2003; Murphy et al., Reference Murphy, Blanchard and Hill2001; Odem and Lacy Reference Odem and Lacy2009; Singer Reference Singer2004; Smith and Furuseth, Reference Smith and Furuseth2006; Winders Reference Winders2005; Zúñiga and Hernández-León, Reference Zúñiga and Hernández-León2006). This shift in migration patterns has been most notable in areas of the country where the immigrant presence is the newest, such as the Southeast and the Midwest (Fink Reference Fink1998; Fink Reference Fink2003; Kandel and Parrado, Reference Kandel and Parrado2005; Marrow Reference Marrow2011; Millard and Chapa, Reference Millard and Chapa2004; Stuesse Reference Stuesse2016; Stull et al., Reference Stull, Broadway and Griffith1995). While many more traditional immigrant-receiving destinations have long histories of accommodating diverse people and cultures (cf. Waters and Kasinitz, Reference Waters and Kasinitz2013), in both old and new locales people are grappling anew with the complexities that expanding diversity brings. Experts now predict that the United States will be a “majority minority” country by 2042.
At the same time, despite the country’s growing ethnic, racial, national, and other forms of diversity, the fundamental location of Blackness at the bottom of the pyramid of structural racism endures (cf. Alexander Reference Alexander2010; Vargas Reference Vargas2006; Warren and Twine, Reference Warren and Twine1997). “When we arrive here in the U.S. we quickly learn to stay away from Black Americans,” mused an Afro-Caribbean immigrant we interviewed. Now, as 100 years ago, immigrants struggle to position themselves for a chance at the “American dream” so many find elusive. Often these moves are racialized, complicating immigrants’ relationships to the notion of Blackness and to African American communities.
In attempts to overcome the real and perceived tensions that characterize these relationships, community organizations, worker centers, unions, educators, religious groups, and others are creating space for interpersonal connection between immigrants and African Americans. Across the country, organizers, educators, and activists have initiated dialogue, designed workshops, experimented with activities, and created materials to help members of their communities get to know one another and build a shared analysis of the structural inequalities that impact their lives.
Angela Stuesse found herself in this position a decade ago as her research on the poultry industry—which had turned to recruiting a new Latinx Footnote 1 workforce in order to quell African American labor demands across the South—revealed that a first step to strengthening workers’ abilities to advocate for themselves was to help them get to know one another (Stuesse Reference Stuesse, Odem and Lacy2009, Reference Stuesse2016; Stuesse and Helton, Reference Stuesse and Helton2013). In collaboration with the Mississippi Poultry Workers’ Center, she developed a series of workshops to facilitate workers’ understanding of each other’s histories, everyday lives, hopes, and challenges. Dismayed by how few relevant curricular materials they were able to find even after an extensive search, Stuesse led the workers’ center’s creation of its own.
Around the same time, Cheryl Staats, Andrew Grant-Thomas, and colleagues at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity conducted research on the dynamics of African American-immigrant alliance formation, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that characterize collaborative efforts between Black- and immigrant-led groups in the United States (Grant-Thomas et al., Reference Grant-Thomas, Sarfati and Staats2009). This key insight emerged from the work: Even when the focus of the cross-racial alliance is on policy advocacy and change, learning experiences that increase understanding of each group’s culture, history, and worldview are critical to alliance-building. Without them, even well-intentioned efforts are likely to founder on the shoals of misunderstanding and mistrust. But with them, groups may begin to see one another in a new light, identifying commonalities of experience upon which to build the power necessary to effect change.
In 2009 the authors’ intersecting interests gave life to a collaborative research project in which we sought to locate and analyze initiatives from around the country that engage immigrants and African Americans in processes of dialogue or political education on the issues of globalization, immigration, race, and power. We explored the frameworks they use to approach the work, the pedagogies they employ, and creators’ and facilitators’ reflections on the successes and challenges of their efforts.
This article examines a portion of these findings using a racial justice lens. As we detail in greater depth below, this perspective emerged as part of a shared analysis between the research team, led by two U.S.-born White women and a 1.5 generation Black man, and its majority-POC advisory committee. Footnote 2 Our framework is reflected in Steinberg’s challenge to consider “the standpoint of [the] black figure, crouched on the ground as others pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity” (2005, p. 43). Taken literally, Steinberg asks us to see through African American eyes. The literal interpretation is problematic, of course, because (among other limitations) the identity category of “African American” intersects with many other axes of being, and there exists no one African American perspective to adopt (cf. Collins Reference Collins2000 [1990]; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; hooks Reference hooks1989; Lorde Reference Lorde, Andersen and Collins1998; Smith Reference Smith2000). We interpret Steinberg in more literary fashion. The African American positioning he calls for, reflecting the authors’ analytical lens, represents a critical race perspective that is shared by many people of color in the United States and may be accessed, at least partially, by listening to the voices of those who live and experience U.S. Blackness as part of their everyday existence. These are the very voices that have helped to shape the analysis we share here.
In this article, then, we draw from our personal perspectives, our interdisciplinary training, the scholarly literature, and, most critically, the insights of our research collaborators to consider the current state of intergroup relationship-building efforts among immigrant- and racial justice focused organizations. We begin with a discussion of methods, highlighting our engaged research approach and the crucial role of the project’s advisory committee. We then review the literature on the challenges facing immigrant-African American coalition-building efforts, with a focus on economic competition and displacement and immigrants’ insertion into U.S. racial hierarchies. A presentation of our findings follows, in which we classify intergroup relations initiatives into those that focus on interpersonal understanding and those that guide participants toward a critical analysis of structural inequalities. We offer a discussion of the different pedagogies used in these approaches, illustrated with examples. In the ensuing discussion section, we analyze the current state of intergroup relations efforts. Adopting an anti-racist standpoint, we discuss their strengths and shortcomings. While these initiatives have created spaces for interaction across difference and the building of a shared analysis and we find evidence of transformative effects at the intra- and interpersonal levels, we identify two crucial problems from an anti-racist, African Americanist perspective.
First, immigrant-centricity in relationship-building efforts blinds immigrant-focused organizations to broader frameworks that could facilitate the formation of greater mutual understanding. Second, a failure to engage immigrants in self-reflection about their relationship to racialized privilege and oppression, both in the United States and in their home countries, ignores the “elephant in the room” during intergroup relations efforts. If most immigrants’ racial identification and relationship to the U.S. “color line” has yet to solidify, engagement with their relationships to Whiteness and Blackness is vital for defining the future of relationship building and the creation of political coalitions with African Americans. Finally, in our conclusion, we call upon engaged academics and other committed intellectuals to help address the needs of intergroup relationship-building efforts.
METHODS
With a commitment to politically engaged research and a focus on immigration, racialization, and structural inequality, we began by recruiting an advisory committee of advocates and organizers from across the country with extensive experience in intergroup dialogue and curriculum development. We extended invitations to a range of key leaders in the field, seeking to assemble a diverse group based on their experiences, geographies, and relationships to the topics of immigration and race. The eleven who joined the advisory committee engaged with us in the research design process, drew upon their networks for the identification and recruitment of participants, granted us interviews, and participated in phone and in-person discussions of our research findings. This collaboration and ongoing dialogue was vital to our activist research approach, grounding theory in the everyday lived experiences of people organizing for immigrant and racial justice while contributing to and furthering these very efforts (Gordon Reference Gordon and Harrison1991; Hale Reference Hale2008; Scheper-Hughes Reference Scheper-Hughes1995; Speed Reference Speed2006; Stuesse Reference Stuesse, Beck and Maida2015).
After reviewing over 200 scholarly articles, reports, monographs, and edited volumes on issues related to immigration, race, intergroup relations, and Black-Brown coalition-building, over 15 months in 2010 and 2011 our research team conducted seventy-five unstructured and semi-structured phone interviews with individuals selected for their experience leading intergroup relationship building efforts. We generated our initial list of potential participants and key organizations from knowledge of the field acquired through our literature review, advisory committee input, personal engagement, and previous research. In addition, we employed participant-driven recruitment to expand this list based on interviewees’ recommendations (Tiffany Reference Tiffany2006). With diverse case selection in mind, we identified individuals and organizations across a wide range of organizational attributes and differing approaches to building intergroup relationships in order to illuminate the range of variation that exists in the field (Gerring Reference Gerring2007).
The seventy-five interviewees, forty-two women and thirty-three men, represented sixty-two unique organizations/institutions. They represented community and “grassroots” organizations (30), training and technical assistance providers (13), worker centers (8), unions (4), university-based institutes (3), and other types of groups, such as research centers (4). Gathered from across the United States [Northeast/Mid-Atlantic (20), West (17), Southeast (14), Midwest (8), Southwest (3)], the geographical reach of these entities varied (15 worked locally, 9 state-wide, 12 regional, 20 national, and 6 international). In a few cases, participants were independent community activists. While we did not explicitly ask them to identify racially, ethnically, or by national origin, many participants revealed their positionality over the course of our conversations. Based on this data, we can sketch rough estimates regarding some aspects of our participants’ identities: Roughly one-third are immigrants, and at least one-sixth are children of immigrants. About one-third identify as African American and one-sixth are White Americans. Over one-third have roots in Latin America, and smaller numbers have Asian, Pacific Islander, Caribbean, or African heritage. These categories are not mutually exclusive, nor are our numbers exact. We offer them to provide the reader with a general picture of the breadth of racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds of participants. Many were the creators of formal curricula, dialogue guides, or other types of political education materials, while others had experience facilitating relationship-building efforts. In all cases, they were identified because of their work to strengthen communication and understanding among people of diverse backgrounds through the creation of multiracial, transnational, and intercultural coalitions.
In order to limit the scope of inquiry, we focused on organizations and individuals working with adults and, with few exceptions, did not follow leads related to K-12 education or youth empowerment. To further bound the project, we pursued people, materials, and programs that expressly included immigrants as one of their central demographic groups. This excluded many relationship-building efforts targeting a diversity of U.S.-born populations alone (the most common being Black-White dialogues). Most of the efforts we learned about were between Latinx immigrants and African Americans, and while we sought out initiatives that expressly included other immigrant groups, they were limited in our sample. This limitation is less a reflection of the research process than of the state of the field, in which the vast majority of intergroup efforts between U.S.-born people of color and immigrants have been developed with African American and Latinx communities in mind. As our literature review attests, these two populations are situated at the heart of both media and scholarly interest in the topic.
Interviews generally lasted between sixty and ninety minutes. We audio recorded them with participants’ permission, indexed the recordings, and transcribed key sections. Questions centered on the needs leading to intergroup programs’ creation, their varying approaches to the challenge of relationship building, and their outcomes to date. Participants shared generously regarding the structural inequalities that drive their work, the pedagogy of popular and political education, the challenges to prioritizing relationship building in their work, and the strides their organizations and members have made toward a more just world. Their rich descriptions and thoughtful insights were brought back to the advisory committee and discussed at length during a two-day, in-person meeting in spring 2011. By validating and critiquing our preliminary analyses, and refining these with their own interpretations, the advisory committee played the vital role of helping us articulate our emerging collective analysis. This collaborative process of knowledge production and movement building infuses the article throughout and is reflected in the analysis we present.
Throughout the interview process we requested copies of the curricula, dialogue guides, and other materials our research participants used to forge intergroup relationships. These efforts yielded fifteen curricula, nine dialogue guides, and twenty-seven other educational materials, such as participatory exercises and training manuals. We analyzed these resources to uncover key pedagogical innovations, underlying themes, and approaches to crucial topics such as race and racism, immigration, globalization, the role of the state, and power, among others. This content analysis complemented the experiences and insights of our interviewees, providing us with a rich body of data not only about the materials themselves, but also about their genesis, implementation, and outcomes.
While we offered confidentiality to all research participants, several asked that we use their names. Many expressed pride in their work and were happy that their labor, as well as the lessons they had learned from it, would be shared broadly with others and help to build a stronger field of practice. We circulated all quotes to participants for internal validation and critique. Where we received permission to cite them, we do; where we didn’t, we attribute the quote to a “participant” or “interviewee.” We do not use pseudonyms in this article.
FRAMING THE PROBLEM: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON CHALLENGES TO COALITION-BUILDING
Much has been made among social scientists regarding how new (particularly Latinx) immigration is changing the demographics of the United States, the impact this is having on African Americans, and how immigrants’ racial identifications might affect the country’s political makeup. Indeed, recognition of the intimate relationship between racial identification and political identification—and a desire to impact these in ways that will increase the potential for immigrant and racial justice in the United States—undergirds many of the intergroup relations efforts we encountered. The scholarship we review here represents an important contribution, not least because it moves research on race relations in the United States past its traditional focus on Black and White, seeking to understand the complexities of interracial and interethnic relations among communities of color. We review the literature on challenges to intergroup solidarity between African Americans and immigrants, focusing in particular on the frameworks that undergird the approaches and analyses of our research participants. We divide our review into two areas: 1) immigration’s racialized impact on economic competition and displacement of African Americans; and 2) the role of structural racism in the social and political positioning of immigrants, with a particular focus on Latinx populations.
Economic Competition and Displacement
The arrival of large numbers of immigrants over the past several decades adds a new dimension to race dynamics across the United States. With many settling in areas populated by communities of color, cross-racial encounters are increasingly commonplace in schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and other venues. Many interactions are mundane; however, others are strained, plagued by hostility and tension. A generalized lack of understanding between U.S.-born and immigrant groups regarding the circumstances of the “other” manifests itself through reliance on racialized stereotypes and misperceptions, which are reinforced by the media (Bristor et al., Reference Bristor, Gravois Lee and Hunt1995; Dixon Reference Dixon2008; Kelley Reference Kelley1997; Martin Reference Martin2008). Frequent exclamations such as “they [immigrants] are taking our jobs” or “we [immigrants] are hard workers; they [African Americans] are lazy” reflect feelings of competition for scarce resources, particularly among low-wage workers (disproportionately of color), during times of economic hardship. These discourses are sometimes used without much thought given to the veiled structural racisms they reference. Immigrants are often only mildly aware of the histories of racial oppression upon which this country was created, and most U.S.-born individuals of any background have much to learn about the causes of immigration and experiences of immigrants in their home countries and in the United States (Gordon and Lenhardt, Reference Gordon and Lenhardt2007b; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2007; Saucedo Reference Saucedo2008). Nevertheless, the literature suggests that the use of these stereotypes is too often indicative of immigrants’ general buy-in to dominant anti-Black racisms (Alvarado and Jaret, Reference Alvarado and Jaret2009; Betancur and Gills, Reference Betancur and Gills2000; Briggs Jr. Reference Briggs2003; Carson Reference Carson2006; Cashin Reference Cashin2005; Gordon and Lenhardt, Reference Gordon and Lenhardt2007a; Institute on Race & Poverty 2003; Johnson and Hing, Reference Johnson and Hing2007a; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann, Nelson and Monforti2005; McClain et al., Reference McClain, Carter, DeFrancesco Soto, Lyle, Grynaviski, Nunnally, Scotto, Alan Kendrick, Lackey and Cotton2006; Mindiola et al., Reference Mindiola, Flores Niemann and Rodriguez2002; Piatt Reference Piatt1997).
Employment competition heightens tensions, and some employers pit immigrants and African Americans against one another, furthering a sense of competition among low-wage workers (Hayduk and Jones Reference Hayduk and Jones2008; Ribas Reference Ribas2015; Stuesse Reference Stuesse2016). Neoliberal policies have only furthered this sense of economic antagonism by consolidating wealth at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, thereby leaving few resources to be divided among those at the other end of the spectrum (Harvey Reference Harvey2005; Lyon-Callo Reference Lyon-Callo2008; Neubeck and Cazenave, Reference Neubeck and Cazenave2001; Williams Reference Williams, Collins, di Leonardo and Williams2008).
Indeed, competition over scarce resources and African American concerns about displacement caused by immigration are a central focus of the literature on relations between immigrants and Black Americans, much of it focused on Latinx-Black antagonisms. Scholars identify competition as both individual (for low-wage jobs, affordable housing, and university admissions slots) and collective (over wage rates, support for public schools, elected positions, and funding for community organizations), and frequently refer to the perception of a “zero-sum” situation in which working communities of color are forced to fight over crumbs. (Barth Reference Barth1969; Bean and Bell-Rose, Reference Bean and Bell-Rose1999; Betancur and Gills, Reference Betancur and Gills2000; Briggs Jr. Reference Briggs2003; Browne-Dianis et al., Reference Browne-Dianis, Lai, Hincapie and Soni2006; Carson Reference Carson2006; Cornelius Reference Cornelius and Suárez-Orozco2002; Cramer Walsh Reference Cramer Walsh2006; Doherty Reference Doherty2006; Fink Reference Fink2009; Foner and Fredrickson, Reference Foner and Fredrickson2004; Gay Reference Gay2006; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2007; Klor de Alva and West, Reference Klor de Alva and West1997; LeDuff Reference LeDuff2000; Lee Reference Lee2008; McClain et al., Reference McClain, Lyle, Carter, DeFrancesco Soto, Lackey, Cotton, Nunnally, Scotto, Grynaviski and Alan Kendrick2007; Pastor et al., Reference Pastor, De Lara and Scoggins2011; Raphael and Ronconi, Reference Raphael and Ronconi2007; Saucedo Reference Saucedo2008; Telles et al., Reference Telles, Sawyer and Rivera-Salgado2011)
A focus on job competition is salient in the literature. Black America suffers from a dual labor crisis involving both over-concentration in low-wage work and unemployment (Pitts Reference Pitts2007). Survey results such as those from the Pew Research Center highlight the significance of personal experience and perception, as 22% of Black respondents indicated that “they or a family member have lost a job, or not gotten a job, because the employer had hired an immigrant worker” (Doherty Reference Doherty2006). On another question inquiring whether immigrants take jobs from African Americans, 53% of Black respondents stated that immigrants take jobs that Americans do not want, 34% thought that immigrants were taking jobs from U.S. citizens, and the remaining 13% responded both/don’t know (Doherty Reference Doherty2006).
Scholars disagree regarding the extent to which immigrants displace Black workers. Some assert that immigrants displace relatively few African American workers because they fill new niches that have emerged in the neoliberal economy (Bean et al., Reference Bean, Bachmeier, Brown, Tafoya-Estrada, Telles, Sawyer and Rivera-Salgado2011; Borjas Reference Borjas1990; Johnson and Hing, Reference Johnson and Hing2007b; Waldinger Reference Waldinger2001). Others argue that Black displacement is a very real phenomenon (Johannsson and Shulman, Reference Johannsson and Shulman2003; Mohl Reference Mohl1990; Schwartzman Reference Schwartzman2008; Steinberg Reference Steinberg2005). The most convincing studies suggest that displacement is a localized and industry-specific reality (Alvarado and Jaret, Reference Alvarado and Jaret2009; Borjas Reference Borjas1999; Pastor et al., Reference Pastor, De Lara and Scoggins2011). Moreover, research provides evidence that employer bias and preference for immigrant workers is real, and not just a perception of the economically disadvantaged (Ciscel et al., Reference Ciscel, Ellen Smith and Mendoza2003; Gomberg-Munoz Reference Gomberg-Munoz2012; Gordon and Lenhardt, Reference Gordon and Lenhardt2007b; Johnson and Hing, Reference Johnson and Hing2007a; Pitts Reference Pitts2007; Rose Reference Rose2008; Steinberg Reference Steinberg2005).
The scarce and often contested resources in marginalized communities, combined with the uneven geography of opportunity (powell et al., Reference powell, Reece, Rogers and Gambhir2007), creates a context that serves to heighten Black Americans’ feelings of competition. However, with a focus on the concentration of African Americans in low-wage occupations, only a select few analyses shed critical and much-needed light on the logic and mechanics of neoliberal capitalism that have created the conditions of resource scarcity in the first place (Ciscel et al., Reference Ciscel, Ellen Smith and Mendoza2003; Pitts Reference Pitts2008; Smith Reference Smith, Ansley and Shefner2009; Stuesse Reference Stuesse2016).
But concerns over economic competition only partially explain the real and perceived tensions between African Americans and immigrants. A dearth of personal relationships with individuals who are different from us heightens misperceptions and allows stereotypes to shape attitudes (McClain et al., Reference McClain, Lyle, Carter, DeFrancesco Soto, Lackey, Cotton, Nunnally, Scotto, Grynaviski and Alan Kendrick2007; Stuesse Reference Stuesse, Odem and Lacy2009; Weise Reference Weise2009). While social psychologists have long advocated the circumstances under which contact between different groups can help build relationships of empathy and trust, such conditions can be difficult to come by. Footnote 3 As a consequence, “real” competition and displacement works in tandem with perceived cultural and other forms of difference to divide new immigrant and African American groups from one another. Engrained social hierarchies of race make relationship building across communities even more challenging, as the following section illuminates.
Whiteness and Blackness in U.S. Racial Hierarchies
Echoing Barrett and Roediger’s (Reference Barrett and Roediger1997) concern over earlier European immigrants’ jockeying for space within the country’s racial hierarchy, the scholarly literature on immigration and race in the present reflects great preoccupation with how immigrants will identify and be identified racially in the United States. This is represented most centrally by sociological research examining Latinx identifications vis-à-vis the U.S. “color line.” This body of scholarship asks: What will become of the Black-White binary? Will the category of Whiteness expand to include (certain) Latinxs and Asians? Who will be considered Black? Will another racial category emerge to house those who don’t fit into the social categories of either White or Black? And how will the color line’s new positioning shape the contours of American politics and social relations? (Alba Reference Alba1990; Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2014; Duncan and Trejo, Reference Duncan, Trejo and Borjas2007; Foner and Fredrickson, Reference Foner and Fredrickson2004; Frank et al., Reference Frank, Akresh and Lu2010; Hartigan Reference Hartigan2010; Lee and Bean, Reference Lee and Bean2007; Marrow forthcoming; Marrow Reference Marrow2009; Mohl Reference Mohl2003; Rodrigues and Segura, Reference Rodrigues and Segura2004; Simmons Reference Simmons2008; Steinberg Reference Steinberg2005; Vickerman Reference Vickerman2007; Warren and Twine, Reference Warren and Twine1997; Waterston Reference Waterston2006; Wilson Reference Wilson2005; Yancey Reference Yancey2003)
Such questions compel us to consider how Whiteness and Blackness shape social relations, how the power imbued in these categories influences individual and community identification, and how many ways have people’s racial identification been construed by others. George Lipsitz’s book, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), broke ground as part of a scholarly movement that named Whiteness as a racial category that grants its holder social, economic, and political privileges. But Whiteness only holds meaning in opposition to the denigrated and degraded racial category of Blackness. “[African Americans] remain the defining other despite how much they conform to ‘White standards’… For [some others] …there exists a cultural space in which they can reposition themselves as White by distinguishing themselves from Blacks and adopting the cultural diacritica of Whiteness,” (Warren and Twine, Reference Warren and Twine1997, p. 208). In other words, this racialized system incentivizes people of diverse backgrounds to invest in the workings of White supremacy in hopes of reaping its benefits at the expense of (Black) racial minorities.
A question at the forefront of much of the literature asks what sorts of racial allegiances immigrant groups are making, the extent to which these are self-initiated or dictated by broader society, and how these impact race relations broadly or the power of Black Americans and people of color specifically (Alba and Nee, Reference Alba and Nee2003; Barrett and Roediger, Reference Barrett and Roediger1997; Bayor Reference Bayor2009; Briggs, Jr. Reference Briggs2003; Carson Reference Carson2006; Cashin Reference Cashin2005; Cherry Reference Cherry2003; Delgado Reference Delgado2003; Dzidzienyo and Oboler, Reference Dzidzienyo and Oboler2005; Foner and Fredrickson, Reference Foner and Fredrickson2004; Fraga et al., Reference Fraga, Garcia, Hero, Jones-Correa, Martinez-Ebers and Segura2010; Hayduk and Jones, Reference Hayduk and Jones2008; Institute on Race & Poverty 2003; Johnson and Hing, Reference Johnson and Hing2007a; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2003, Reference Kaufmann2007; Klor de Alva and West, Reference Klor de Alva and West1997; Koelsch n.d.; Loewen Reference Loewen1971; McClain et al., Reference McClain, Carter, DeFrancesco Soto, Lyle, Grynaviski, Nunnally, Scotto, Alan Kendrick, Lackey and Cotton2006; Mindiola et al., Reference Mindiola, Flores Niemann and Rodriguez2002; Piatt Reference Piatt1997; Rodrigues and Segura, Reference Rodrigues and Segura2004; Rogers Reference Rogers2004; Rose Reference Rose2008; Sanchez Reference Sanchez2008; Saucedo Reference Saucedo2008). Not surprisingly, given the contours of Whiteness, Blackness, and power discussed above, a majority of scholars report that new immigrant groups are distancing themselves from Blackness (and Black people) (Foner and Fredrickson, Reference Foner and Fredrickson2004; Frank et al., Reference Frank, Akresh and Lu2010; Hayduk and Jones, Reference Hayduk and Jones2008; Klor de Alva and West, Reference Klor de Alva and West1997; McClain et al., Reference McClain, Carter, DeFrancesco Soto, Lyle, Grynaviski, Nunnally, Scotto, Alan Kendrick, Lackey and Cotton2006; Mindiola et al., Reference Mindiola, Flores Niemann and Rodriguez2002; Vickerman Reference Vickerman2007; Waterston Reference Waterston2006; Yancey Reference Yancey2003). Most attribute this to the advancement strategies of immigrants and the workings of White supremacy in the United States—a vital piece of the puzzle. A few encourage us to explore how racialization operates in immigrants’ countries of origin and the implications of that racialization for alliance-building with African Americans, an important contribution we will discuss in greater detail in our analysis of our findings (Delgado Reference Delgado2003; Dzidzienyo and Oboler, Reference Dzidzienyo and Oboler2005). The question of how new immigrant groups will choose to identify racially and politically, their relationships to Whiteness and Blackness, and the opportunities they encounter to build meaningful relationships with African Americans are all central to the work of our research participants, to which we now turn.
FINDINGS: APPROACHES TO INTERGROUP RELATIONS EFFORTS
The approaches to strengthening intergroup relations we analyzed for this project can be roughly parsed into two broad categories. On one hand, many programs focus on encouraging groups to better understand one another using activities such as cultural exchange or storytelling, or by loosely structuring a guided dialogue. On the other, organizations are developing political education curricula that help their members identify parallel experiences with power and oppression, encouraging them to build a shared analysis of structural inequality. Often, intergroup relations programs incorporate both objectives into their work, making it difficult to separate the two. For purposes of analysis, however, in this section we discuss the contours of each approach separately, drawing from our data to highlight key examples and cases. In the discussion section that follows, we consider these approaches in light of our participants’ own analyses and the scholarship presented above.
Understanding One Another: Cultural Exchange, Storytelling, and Dialogue
Many programs focusing on helping groups of culturally and racially diverse individuals understand one another are minimally structured, relying on informal sharing to prompt the nurturing of interpersonal relationships. The most basic of these is what some participants refer to as “cultural exchange,” or the sharing of food, music, dance, and other artistic and cultural forms. One participant said her organization always starts dialogues with food: “Breaking bread together is such a port of entry. We let people know what’s being served and its origins. It provides an atmosphere of warmth and hospitality. Questions like, ‘What kind of food is this?’ are so neutral to ask; even the most shy people are comfortable asking them.”
Music and dance are also used to increase individual and group energy, bring down walls, and inspire change. In the 1990s the membership of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers was roughly equal parts Haitian, Mexican, and Guatemalan. Footnote 4 Some Haitian members formed a drum group, and the organization celebrated traditional festivals from its members’ cultures. “You were a part of each other’s cultures because you were a part of the CIW,” remembers co-founder Greg Asbed.
Jenny Arwade of the Albany Park Neighborhood Council shared how her organization found poetry to be a powerful avenue for building cross-cultural bridges. Footnote 5 She recalls youth leaders creating poetry linking the struggles of immigrants and African Americans for a large-scale event that celebrated the Day of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Another organization created slides using art from Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series” about the Great Migration and used these to structure a conversation comparing the mobility of African American and new immigrant groups.
Storytelling is another crucial avenue being used to bring culturally and racially-distinct groups together. In Chicago, for example, the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations (UCCRO) organized Lived Experiences, a series of gatherings in which community leaders shared the stories of their communities with one another. Footnote 6 The presentation of stories was organized by racial/ethnic group, and leaders within each group collaborated in advance to create their presentations. One participant noted:
It was everything from a Korean organization staffer that spoke about the model minority myth and breaking down some of the stereotypes of the Asian American community… to an undocumented Latino mother who spoke about the fears she has about being deported and fear of leaving behind her U.S. citizen children… to young people from the Philippines who spoke about family separation and the visa backlogs that separate families. These were all powerful stories, and out of that specific dialogue came the focus around family separation as the uniting theme across races and religions.
Luz Zambrano and Trina Jackson, representing the Center to Support Immigrant Organizing’s Network of Immigrants & African Americans in Solidarity, noted that they started off their first session by asking participants to bring something that would help them tell others who they are and where they come from. Footnote 7 “We use people’s own knowledge and history. We don’t rush, because it’s very important that we get to know each other. It is time well spent, because that’s ultimately how we’re going to build relationships.”
Initiatives of Change facilitates community dialogue and often starts by asking participants “Can you tell us about your grandparents’ neighborhoods and where you live now? How are they alike or not?” Footnote 8 Cricket White explained that this type of storytelling not only helps participants recognize similarities and differences they may have with each other, but also lets them begin to see one another as individuals, and not as an expression of an entire group.
In 2008, the Garden State Alliance for a New Economy (GANE) conducted a dialogue among African American and immigrant construction workers involved in the creation of a new union local. Footnote 9 Some African Americans spoke of having served jail time. They shared feeling like they “carry the felon label on their forehead” and how it effects their ability to access work. Immigrant workers talked about the experience of being undocumented, and how it, too, impacts access to work. Facilitators reflected on the emotion in the conversation and how it enabled both groups to better recognize their common struggles as criminalized workers of color.
Finally, the African Diaspora Dialogues, which create space for dialogue between African Americans and African or Afro-descendant immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, allow Black folks of different backgrounds to learn about one another’s experiences of race and identity and grapple with the utility of and limits to Blackness as a framework for solidarity across national or ethnic difference. Footnote 10
While some programs, like those discussed above, operate under the belief that political education and dialogue should happen with all parties “at the table” from the start, others place a premium on the value of first doing work in “affinity groups.” This work is done within more homogenous identity groups and is guided by the belief that a conversation between people of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds is a necessary place to begin political education and dialogue. Affinity group work aids participants in coming to terms with stereotypes and discomforts in a “safe” space and establishing a set of shared values and goals before coming together with others.
We found several examples of programs that use affinity groups in compelling ways to inspire self-reflection, encourage empathy, and aid participants in seeing another group’s humanity in new ways. The vast majority of these work with African Americans, drawing upon their experiences with mobility and domination and asking participants to recognize points of intersection with the experiences of present-day migrants. For example, participants commonly recognized parallels between twentieth-century African American migration out of the South and present-day immigration. The UC Berkeley Labor Center’s C. L. Dellums African American Union Leadership School shows a film to stimulate participants’ reflections on why African American families migrated out of the South and into California as a segue into discussing contemporary immigration. Footnote 11 Black Workers for Justice has used an activity that reenacts the Middle Passage—the experience of being transported on a slave ship across the Atlantic. Footnote 12 This activity humanizes a historical system of oppression in visceral ways, opening opportunity for discussion of African American experiences of human trafficking and its parallels with the issue of trafficking in the present-day. The Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network, for example, conducts an activity to explore how anti-immigrant organizing in the South parallels White supremacist organizing. Footnote 13 By focusing on the discriminatory elements of immigration policy and other domestic policies, the organization encourages its (mostly African American) participants to consider the notion of global citizenship.
In contrast to the ample use of affinity groups to create safe spaces for African Americans to consider points of intersection between their experiences and those of new immigrants, our research found limited examples of parallel efforts with immigrant groups. In one example, the Mississippi Poultry Worker Center screened the documentary film A Time for Justice, in which historical photographs are accompanied by narration to vividly depict the violence that southern Black communities endured during the Civil Rights Movement. Footnote 14 The audience of new Latin American immigrants reported shock at the level of racist violence endured, as well as inspiration at the courage of those involved in the movement. Organizers hoped that this would increase immigrants’ empathy with their African Americans co-workers by introducing recent histories of racism and struggle in Mississippi and the South. The fact that we uncovered so few models for affinity group work with immigrants is analyzed in our discussion below.
Building a Shared Analysis: Political and Popular Education
In addition to the often informal approaches to cultural exchange, storytelling, and dialogue represented above, our research also uncovered another type of initiative aimed at helping participants build a shared analysis of structural inequalities that impact the lived experiences of immigrant and African American communities in the United States. These programs tend to have more formal scaffolding: most outline specific learning objectives and detail activities and follow-up prompts designed to help participants achieve these ends. Importantly, they also typically articulate a concrete political agenda, often having the explicit goal of creating shared political understandings, recognizing common experiences with power and oppression, and envisioning a common future. They help participants name and come to terms with the problems produced by neoliberalism, globalization, and racism, for example. They are more likely to be created by a union, worker center, or other labor organization, and they often embrace popular education techniques that encourage active participation and use participants’ own experiences as a foundation for learning.
To these ends, many include thoughtfully designed curricula that are meant to unfold over a series of meetings, classes, or workshops. They identify where participants “are at” and seek to move them, over time, to a new position on topics of immigrant and racial justice. Published in 2004 by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of the earliest and most widely recognized of these curricula is BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy. Footnote 15 BRIDGE’s most well-known module is a historical timeline, comprised of large images with brief, descriptive captions that participants typically install along the walls of a room. Each image represents a key moment in the political, economic, or social history of an identity group—African Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, Irish Americans, women, LGBT people, etc. They focus on policies that have disproportionately disadvantaged or harmed “others” in the United States over time, and the timeline encourages participants to add their own personal or family histories in order to draw connections between personal and broader histories. In depicting the highlights of policies and their effects on communities, this curriculum encourages participants to explore the experiences of different groups, draw connections between historical events, and recognize the parallels and convergences of experience, oppression, struggle, and resilience that they represent. The BRIDGE timeline has been adapted by many organizations over the years and has inspired others to develop their own historical timeline activities as part of a larger political education or dialogue initiative. Often adaptations have added key moments in a community’s history to the timeline, thus increasing its relevance to a particular location or identity group.
Another curriculum, Crossing Borders, collaboratively developed in 2007 by the Center for Community Change, Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), and CASA de Maryland, addresses race, language, class, ethnicity, and other forms of difference that structure people’s relationship to power and to one another. Footnote 16 It guides participants through in-depth considerations of U.S. demographic change, structural racism, and labor exploitation. One module engages directly with racial stereotypes that impede intergroup relationship-building, including the discourses of “they’re taking our jobs,” and “Blacks are lazy,” and asks participants to share an experience in which they were either a victim or a perpetrator of racial bias. Another furthers consideration of competition for scarce resources by introducing an analogy involving a “jobs ladder,” in which several rungs at the bottom are broken or missing. This image provides a catalyst for discussing why different groups have had difficulty “climbing” the ladder to gain access to good jobs and on how to work together to repair the ladder.
Not all approaches to political education we encountered involve curricula. Some—particularly those that seek to illuminate how neoliberal globalization disproportionately burdens working people across the world—are structured around international labor solidarity and experience. A few research participants had taken their organization’s U.S.-born members to visit factory workers in Mexico in order to bring to life the connections among African American and Latin American experiences of disenfranchisement and low-wage work. One such partnership, the South by Southwest Experiment, was a multi-year interorganizational collaboration between Southern Echo (Mississippi), the Southwest Organizing Project (New Mexico), and the Southwest Workers Union (Texas) that involved a series of regional convenings between the groups’ members. Footnote 17 A highlight for the Mississippi participants was a trip to a General Motors (GM) assembly plant just across the United States-Mexico border while they were visiting the Southwest Workers’ Union. The delegation, former GM factory workers who had lost their jobs when the company left Mississippi in search of lower-cost production, was gripped to see first-hand the dismal working and living conditions faced by their Mexican counterparts. Leroy Johnson, Executive Director of Southern Echo, recalled:
Approximately 50 people attended. A few people crossed the border and had conversations with poultry plant workers; two realized they had worked in the same factory in Mississippi. What they found was that the problems, no matter what the location, remained the same—underpaid workers, discouraged unionizing, and mistreatment. That experience strengthened their resolve to not allow for the “they are taking our jobs” philosophy to flourish.
This trip and other international labor exchanges we encountered resulted in a profound and deeply personal understanding of the logics, mechanics, and effects of unregulated capitalism on a global scale.
The above comprise a representative sample of the types of initiatives this research discovered for building intergroup relations between African Americans and immigrants in the United States. From cultural exchange, storytelling, and loosely-structured dialogue to the structured facilitation of political consciousness-raising on issues of globalization, immigration, structural racism and labor exploitation, these “experiments” are a vital and necessary piece of the foundation needed for successful coalition-building across these communities. They use affinity groups to work through difficult subjects and bring more diverse groups together to talk face to face. Some encourage critical analysis of the societal structures that uphold White privilege, concentrated wealth, and other forms of power. Others lift up the transformational potential of meaningful dialogue with people who are different from you. Many weave these various approaches together, encouraging both personal transformation and a critical challenge to the status quo, building safe spaces and venturing beyond our comfort zones. The activists, organizers, and educators who lead these efforts spend their days theorizing and problem solving with the goal of strengthening relationships and building power across ethnicity, race, and other markers of difference. In the section that follows, we draw upon the collaborative analysis we developed, framed by the relevant scholarship and in dialogue with our research participants and advisory committee, as we consider the successes and shortcomings of these efforts at building meaningful and productive intergroup relations.
DISCUSSION: SUCCESSES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS EFFORTS
Given the challenges to intergroup coalition-building outlined in the literature—misplaced blame for the lack of good jobs; perceptions of economic competition for an ever smaller piece of the pie; racial othering; lack of quality contact; and the proliferation of damaging stereotypes, to name a few—the initiatives reviewed by this research make important strides. Crucially, they represent efforts from across the country to nurture spaces in which immigrants and African Americans can begin to encounter one another on supportive ground and recognize one another’s common humanity. They are also developing opportunities for members of these groups to learn about one another’s history, culture, and parallel struggles, breaking down stereotypes. Moreover, they are refocusing participants on the causes of resource scarcity, thereby creating the conditions under which African American and immigrant communities might articulate a shared analysis of the structural inequalities that disproportionately shape their lives. In all of the above ways, these initiatives are addressing key challenges to intergroup relations. Our interview data suggests that, in every case, these efforts have had transformative effects at the intra- and interpersonal levels, deepening both emotional and cognitive connections among people of different backgrounds. Broader effects are difficult to measure and typically beyond the reach of the programs we studied.
Despite these crucial advances in intergroup relations, if we take seriously the need to consider these efforts from the position of Booker T. Washington’s “man farthest down,” (Steinberg Reference Steinberg2005) two critical shortcomings come into sharp focus. Footnote 18 We characterize the first shortcoming as one of “immigrant-centricity” in relationship-building efforts and the second as a reluctance to engage immigrants in self-reflexive examination of their own positioning vis-à-vis racialized power and privilege. We have developed these critiques not from the outside looking in, but in close dialogue with the very creators and users of the initiatives we have studied. Thus, many of the most cogent critiques were first articulated by our African American and Afro-descendant colleagues involved in the conception, implementation, and ongoing refinement of intergroup relations materials. Indeed, they are at the front lines of identifying and addressing these problems, as evidenced by their work highlighted in this section.
Immigrant-Centricity
As noted in our discussion of our findings, we discovered many more instances of African American affinity groups engaging with intergroup dialogue and political education resources than we did immigrant groups. Why aren’t more programs centrally engaging immigrants, particularly in affinity groups, on these issues? We assert that the answer lies, in part, in the immigrant-centricity of coalition-building efforts. By this we mean it is more common for intergroup relations initiatives to grow out of the efforts of immigrant rights organizations seeking a broad base of support for “their” issues—detentions, deportations, border enforcement, workplace enforcement, documentation, legalization, access to services, family separation, promoting immigrant-friendly legislation, and combatting anti-immigrant policies at the state and local levels—than it is for African American groups to seek out relationships with immigrant-focused organizations. Interestingly, we did not encounter this trope in our review of the literature, and our findings suggest this could be an important area for additional research. Our participants repeatedly made the assertion, and highlighted several problems with its lopsidedness.
First, if they generally understand the need for building coalitions as one of broadening support for immigrant rights, immigrant organizations may not be convening immigrant affinity groups because they feel they already “get” the issues. In this way, immigrant-centricity blinds immigrant organizations to broader frameworks through which they might come to understand their own struggles. Second, immigrant-centricity makes it harder for immigrant-rights groups to grasp the reasons some African Americans may hold feelings of ambivalence toward immigrants. Third, the success of relationship-building efforts is jeopardized when African Americans feel they are being “talked at” about immigration policy or that the flow of assistance moves only in one direction. “I haven’t seen immigrant rights organizations aligning themselves with Black political and economic issues,” one research participant noted. As this comment suggests, the immigrant rights movement risks alienating potential allies when its analysis of the issues and strategies it seeks to implement exclusively privilege the “immigrant perspective.” Footnote 19
Several research participants approaching their work from the immigrant rights perspective recognized these shortcomings. Jason Selmon, who represented Sunflower Community Action at the time of our interaction, shared, “We were going to go into Black churches and hammering them with the issue of immigration. [Eventually we learned] that before you can really move people into action on issues together, you have to get some understanding and relational things going on.” Footnote 20 “The way that issues around migration are framed within the U.S. and within particularly the immigrant rights movement,” said Monica Hernandez, formerly of the Highlander Research and Education Center, “makes it difficult to approach non-migrant communities in order to have a dialogue because people feel that when we just talk about immigration our intention is that we just care about immigrants.” Footnote 21 Ironically, while these reflections call for a different approach to relationship-building, we find that African Americans are still disproportionately being asked to learn about and support the struggles of immigrants.
In order to address this imbalance, African American organizations could take more initiative to reach out to immigrant organizations and educate them on “their” issues, in addition to participating in dialogues with immigrant organizations that approach them. At the same time, rather than asking how they can get African American communities or organizations to support their causes, more immigrant rights groups could spend time understanding their potential partners’ issues, analyses, and self-interest. Affinity-group work may be one effective way to do this, and more materials should be developed with this specific work in mind. Then, together, immigrant and African American organizations might begin to identify areas of mutual interest.
CASA de Maryland, a primarily immigrant worker center that was a partner in the 2007 creation of the Crossing Borders curriculum, has spent the last several years reaching out to African American state and community leaders. Gustavo Torres, CASA’s Executive Director, reflected on his lessons learned:
As immigrants we see everything through the lens of comprehensive immigration reform, and we’re trying to attract African American community join us in this fight. For the African American community, immigration reform is not a priority. The Black community in our area wants to fight discrimination, police brutality, and related abuses. We must have solidarity on justice issues that affect both of our communities. The goal is for the two communities to come together and identify the challenges faced in each community. We can’t “use them” for just immigration issues. The African American community knows what injustice is. The mistake is placing group interests above common points of struggle when building coalitions.
Immigrants’ Relationships to Whiteness, Blackness, and Racial Hierarchies
Reluctance to engage immigrants in self-reflexive examination of their own positioning vis-à-vis racialized power and privilege represents a second major shortcoming in the practice of relationship building between immigrants and African Americans. Despite extensive scholarly work on where immigrants fit into the U.S. “color line” and their complicated relationships to the constructs of Whiteness and Blackness, we found that, with the few exceptions that we discuss below, intergroup relations initiatives avoid asking immigrants to interrogate these issues. While many programs dissect structural racism in the United States with the goal of helping immigrants and African Americans to identify common points of oppression, the failure to build popular analyses of the workings of “Whiteness” and “Blackness” means that immigrant participants rarely confront their own racial privilege. Footnote 22 With this in mind, we discuss the limitations and promise of several intergroup relations initiatives we studied that dealt with race.
We earlier mentioned the innovative work of the African Diaspora Dialogues, one of the few initiatives we encountered that has been bringing Afro-descendant communities together to discuss race. “What we thought we would do—rather simplistically,” recalled Nunu Kidane of Priority Africa Network and the Black Alliance for a Just Immigration, who co-organized the dialogues, “was call our friends from both ethnic groups (African American and African immigrant) to hold fantastic conversations on race, culture, history, geography, etc. Footnote 23 We greatly underestimated what would happen. We thought people would just resolve their issues and kumbaya.… We found it was far more political, racial, and layered than we thought.” She described tense, emotional, and deeply personal conversations on Blackness as an identity category. Whereas African American participants assumed that African immigrants would identify first and foremost as Black, several African immigrants expressed discomfort with this category, identifying instead in terms of ethnicity and nationality. African American participants perceived this as a denial of Blackness and shared identity, while some of their African counterparts expressed disappointment and even anger at these accusations, interpreting the imposition of Blackness as a reenactment of the trauma of slavery that ripped away particular identities in exchange for an allegiance based on skin tone alone.
Facilitators say that the dialogues have produced new shared understandings about the value and limitations of a continental identity, the complexities of the African diaspora, and the problems that come with romanticizing the mother continent: “The dialogues are wonderful for bringing forth the idea that Black doesn’t always mean slave ancestry. There’s this whole world of Black immigrants and Black experience beyond slave history,” shared Kidane. Yet, while these are important lessons, so, too, is the recognition that U.S. racial hierarchies distinguish between different “types” of Blackness, relegating African Americans to the very bottom and privileging, even to a matter of degrees, “ethnic” Blackness originating in other places. It is unclear from the various facilitators’ recollections whether the African participants were encouraged to confront the privilege they enact by reinforcing their cultural and ethnic difference from African Americans. We are not suggesting that immigrants should downplay ethnic or national identities; rather, we assert that what we know about immigrants’ relationships to the U.S. “color line” suggests that this conversation is necessary for challenging racialized privilege in this country.
We assert that, in addition to exploring the structural underpinnings of racism in the United States and their positioning within this system, immigrants must also be pushed to look at the assumptions about race that they bring with them from their home countries. Our inquiries, however, produced limited evidence of initiatives with this focus. We learned of one such effort from Janvieve Williams Comrie, formerly of the US Human Rights Network, who helped plan dialogues for her organization’s Immigrant Rights Caucus that emphasized racial diversity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Footnote 24 Their goal was to push the immigrant rights movement to recognize the heterogeneity encompassed by the term “Latino” and be more inclusive, particularly of Afro-Latinx and indigenous communities, recognizing that “Latinos” experience race, racism, and gender differently. While neoliberalism has taught us that recognizing cultural, racial, and other forms of difference does not necessarily require reflexivity regarding privilege, she reports that the organization still received pushback. While the effort was enthusiastically received by Afro-Latinxs and supported by African Americans, the larger Latinx community resisted: “It’s just opening a can of worms and creating divisions.”
Also notable is the work of Jorge Zeballos of the Institute for Dismantling Racism. Footnote 25 He has created a “bank” of Powerpoint slides about histories of colonialism, race, and inequality in Latin America that he draws from when making presentations and facilitating dialogues about racism and White supremacy in Latin America. At the time of our research, he was in conversation with the Highlander Research and Education Center to translate this content into a more popular education-style approach to the subject, but a dearth of human and financial resources has prevented these ideas from becoming reality. Alexis Mazón’s intergroup work with the UC Berkeley Labor Center met a similar fate. She developed a pilot workshop for Latin American immigrants that encouraged participants to question how White supremacy affects issues of race, identity, and relationships in their families and communities. She and her colleagues saw promise in the conversation that resulted and hoped to scale it up, but funding limitations remained a primary obstacle.
While these initiatives are innovative and needed, they are not widespread. Much more work is required to help immigrant and African American communities build a historically grounded analysis of the workings of White supremacy in the United States as well as immigrants’ home countries and critically situate themselves within these structures.
CONCLUSION
We believe that engaged scholars and other committed intellectuals have much to contribute to these efforts. In this article we have identified areas in which research is needed to further test and validate analyses emerging from practice. We have noted topics about which academics have been quite prolific but their ideas have not yet reached the realm of intergroup relations praxis. Scholars can help ensure they inform and serve the efforts of organizers and popular educators by writing for diverse audiences, translating jargon into plain language, and coming up with alternative, even non-written, ways to share ideas. We might consider collaboratively developing curricula, dialogue guides, or other programs that speak to the needs of our research participants and partners. We could help organizers of different stripes figure out how to incorporate this type of work into their campaigns, breaking down the artificial barriers that exist between dialogue, education, action, and reflection. Footnote 26 Or we might help foundations and other potential funders grasp why they should support these crucial efforts.
The most important product of our collaborative research was the 2013 launch of IntergroupResources.com, which makes findings available to organizers, educators, and advocates so they may more effectively advance intergroup relations in an increasingly multicultural America. This on- and offline resource center houses curricular and dialogue materials, highlights pedagogical innovations, reflects on lessons learned, and offers analytical frames and other tools for approaching intergroup dialogue and political education. It is supported and staffed by Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs), directed by a founding member of the project’s advisory committee. Footnote 27 SPACEs is working closely with community organizations seeking to adapt the materials and lessons from IntergroupResources.com for use in their own communities.
Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the insights and experiences shared by our research participants is the pressing need to elaborate and nurture a new framework to guide relationship-building between immigrants and African Americans. This framework would draw on dialogic and political education materials infused with an analysis that engages issues of power, oppression, and resistance through an awareness of structural inequalities of race, class, and other identity markers. Affirming the standpoint of Steinberg’s (Reference Steinberg2005) “black figure,” such a perspective would encourage people to consider how they are implicated in constructions of race and in racism and how this impacts their opportunities and politics. It would grapple with the logics, mechanics, and consequences of White supremacy, unmediated capitalism, and globalization, both in the United States and in immigrants’ countries of origin.
This vision of a broader framework for intergroup relations resonates with Manuel Pastor and colleagues’ (Reference Pastor, De Lara and Scoggins2011) “everyday social justice,” which encourages the development of shared interests between African American and immigrant communities to build bridges toward a better future for all. “Everyday social justice” recognizes that African Americans’ efforts in the Civil Rights Movement yielded a national pledge to principles of equality, and as long as African Americans continue that fight today, immigrants’ interests in good jobs, schools, and communities remain tightly interwoven with those concerns. Uniting under a shared struggle for social justice and equal opportunity and drawing upon the power of civil rights discourse, this appeal for “everyday social justice” calls for intentional framing that elucidates and uplifts common issues.
Ultimately, the promise of this new framework would not be its capacity to disrupt the zero-sum, us-versus-them social psychology fed by the African American-immigrant conflict narrative, but rather its potential to collapse the very distinction between “us” and “them” as applied to African Americans and immigrants in the context of political struggle. This is a matter of identity re-formation, about changing the political identities of immigrants and African Americans in such a way as to allow members of all communities to redefine their interests (and strategies) inclusively and to their mutual advantage (Guinier and Torres, Reference Guinier and Torres2002; Kinder and Sears, Reference Kinder and Sears1981; Sonenshein Reference Sonenshein and Jones-Correa2005). The programs we encountered have begun this delicate work. It requires a long-term, sustained effort that consciously recognizes each group’s culture, history, and relationship to structural racism while underscoring those inequalities and common experiences that, together, can serve as a catalyst for personal and social transformation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research that informs this article was funded by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. It received additional support from the Department Anthropology and Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida. The authors would like to recognize the project’s advisory committee, whose thoughtful and committed participation ensured the relevance and success of our collective work: Jennifer Gordon, Dushaw Hockett, Gerald Lenoir, Carmen Morgan, José Oliva, Steven Pitts, Laura Rivas, Saket Soni, Eric Tang, Gustavo Torres, and Leah Wise, thank you. Alexis Mazón and John Ocampo also contributed to the building of a shared analysis during a spring 2011 convening. We gratefully acknowledge each of our project participants for sharing their generous insights; a full list of these individuals may be found at www.IntergroupResources.com. Finally, the research assistance of graduate students Kerra Carson, Ashley Meredith, and Owen Gaither was vital to our effort.
