Our Separate Struggles Are Really One: Building Political Race Coalitions for Educational Justice

• In Event: Research and the Politics of Re/building Coalitions for Racial Justice Leadership and Advocacy in Education

Abstract

Reflecting on the African American and Chicano movements for civil rights and economic justice and more than a decade of respective research documenting the lived experiences and leadership perspectives of Mexican American superintendents on school finance policy distribution (Author 2, 2007, 2009) and Black superintendents on school desegregation (Author 1, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b), in this article, we consider the prospects of Black and Brown coalition building for educational justice in the post-Civil Rights Era. Inspired by the Black and Brown alliances of the 1960s and 1970s and informed by Guinier and Torres (2002) conceptualization of political race as “the lived experience of being raced in America” and its relationship to power, we draw from the experiential knowledge of African American and Mexican American superintendents to better understand how they interpreted and navigated the politics of race as district leaders and what lessons might be gleaned from their perspectives and leadership. We close with a discussion of how the racialization of power requires more theorizing in education leadership and offer examples of how the field can deepen future analyses using critical race theory as critical policy analysis.
We define “Black and Brown” here as inclusive of individuals and communities in the United States. who self-identify and associate themselves within the broad group of people claiming or representing African, Latin, and indigenous ancestry. Through the use of capitalization, we attempt to distinguish self-ascribed ethnic, cultural, and political descriptors (e.g., African American, Black, Chicano, Latinx, Afro-Latina, Afro-Caribbean, Puerto Rican) from racial categories constructed by outsiders to describe individuals, groups, and communities relative to whiteness (e.g., black boys, black and brown schools). When describing racial or ethnic groups in their historical context, we use the terms from that time period, and when quoting racial or ethnic identifiers as used by other writers and scholars, we use the same terms and capitalization they used. This approach results in some variations and in some cases, contradictions in usage, reflecting the messiness, tensions, and unspoken assumptions associated with how race functions in schools and society and the need for further theory development on race in education research, particularly its political dimension and relationship to power.
We do not approach this work naïvely, unaware of the significant barriers to Black and Brown coalition-building whether through lack of trust, affinity, or the competing economic and politicalinterests existing within a white power structure (Guinier & Torres, 2002; Hunter, 1953; Mantler, 2013; Mills, 1956; Ortiz, 2018; Vaca, 2004). As Vaca (2004) warned, the risk of assuming unity or a “presumed alliance” between Black and Latino communities without recognition of their distinct histories or competing interests can be costly and thwart any efforts for collective organizing and advocacy before it starts. As history reveals, it was important for Black and Brown coalition leaders to understand not only the respective struggles, needs, and interests of the diverse groups their coalitions represented, but also what it meant to be “raced” or racialized within the white power structure and its institutions.

Authors

• Sonya Douglass, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Enrique Aleman, Trinity University

• Phillip A Smith, Teachers College, Columbia University