(Illustration by Aurélia Durand)
In 2016, when I started researching the successes and failures of cross-sector partnerships like My Brother’s Keeper (MBK), I chose not to foreground race.
That was a mistake.
I quickly learned that race and what I call racial negotiation—the leveraging of the power of race to achieve a goal—are at the crux of collective-action efforts aiming to address deep societal inequities.
We must account for this dynamic in our change-making endeavors or risk failing to achieve the ultimate transformation needed to undo systemic inequities: the acknowledgment and eradication of racism.
Fortunately, my investigation into cross-sector initiatives also uncovered patterns that can help guide us toward this goal. The insight traces back to John Kania and Mark Kramer’s theory of collective impact, and Peter J. Robertson and Shui-Yan Tang’s conceptualization of how commitment can motivate individuals to cooperatively pursue shared ends. Inspired by their work, I theorized that the quality and success of a collective action is significantly interconnected with collective commitment, though neither always requires the other. And to really understand the concepts of action and commitment, I wanted to develop a deeply contextualized understanding of the relationships among a collaboration's partners and the circumstances in which they work.
I studied Padres y Jóvenes Unidos (PJU), PUSH Excel, Promise Neighborhoods, Project QUEST, and an MBK community in a large midwestern county (to be referred to in this article as “Highland County MBK”). They all are examples of collective efforts taking on large social problems involving communities of color, such as inequity in education.
In every case, stakeholders negotiated race and power to garner individual and organizational commitments, and these negotiations played a critical role in how participants and leaders engaged in change-making work and the outcomes they experienced. Two patterns emerged, the second of which provided tactics that promoted more success when trying to address systemic social inequities.
1. Emphasizing White Interest-Convergence
White interest-convergence describes a process of change in communities of color that aligns with the economic and sociopolitical interests of white elites. It can be used two ways: strategically to shape change-making efforts and analytically to evaluate those undertakings. Derrick Bell coined the term in a 1980 Harvard Law Review article, posing it as an analytical tool. Other scholars such as Enrique Alemán, Jr., and Sonya Alemán suggest that white interest-convergence can also be used strategically, and note that Civil Rights and Chicano/a activists documented deliberate attempts to bring about social change by allying with white elites long before Bell’s conceptualization of interest-convergence.
In all of the cases I studied, people attempted to bring about commitment, action, and social change by aligning the social-justice interests of communities of color with those of white people. This indicates that they saw white interest-convergence as an important means to achieve the goals of the collective group, a notion made even more compelling given that four of the five efforts were organized by people of color. It seems diverse leaders firmly believed white interest-convergence was essential for achieving their missions. But the tactic played out differently for some of the organizations. Here's a look at three of them that emphasized white-interest convergence:
- PUSH Excel initiative: Jesse Jackson founded Push Excel in 1975 to help black students achieve academic excellence while facing personal, family, and community challenges. White interest-convergence became apparent in his acceptance of large financial support from predominately white-power-holding organizations: the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which was abolished in 1979, and the National Institute for Education, which was abolished in 1985. The funding came with a compulsory program evaluation that didn't work well, eventually damaging the organization's mission.
- Promise Neighborhoods: The program, proposed by President Obama in 2007, had policies that excluded language about race, racism, and the systematic and institutional devices that have contributed to the continued marginalization of poor communities of color. The language instead focused on schools, poverty, and business-driven values, such as competition and rigorous evaluation. The scholar Alecia S. Person even suggested that the program wouldn’t have received committed federal funds had it not supported an education reform agenda that was tied to the economic self-interests of white political and capitalist elites.
- Highland County MBK (HCMBK): I was a participatory researcher and facilitator during HMBK's first two years. I observed the organization's predominately black leaders overlook the insight of local men of color and instead deferentially seek the thoughts, opinions, and validation of white legislators, institutional leaders, and power holders.
PUSH Excel and Promise Neighborhoods did not experience the long-term success and sustainability they anticipated, and the outcomes for HCMBK are not yet known. However, the other two efforts I studied—PJU and Project Quest—experienced more sustainability while also employing white interest-convergence. Why?
2. Emphasizing Racism, Race, and Communities of Color
The more successful organizations embraced conversations and actions that centered racism and race. Their strategies privileged the voice, needs, desires, and values of communities of color. They made it impossible to divorce structural and institutional inequities from the minds, goals, and commitment of their partners and participants.
This appeared to be critically important for building collective commitment, undertaking collective action, and ensuring the sustainability of their collective action. Here is how they did it:
- PJU: In the early 2000s, parents and students organized with education partners to make improvements to a deteriorating high school in Denver. It used political education, which authors Mark Warren and Karen Mapp define as “the mechanism by which [PJU] members and staff examined the impact structural inequities and power structure have on…day-to-day lives.” Political education explicitly allowed the Latinx-based group to discuss matters such as the root causes of racism, and connected knowledge of historic struggle to the everyday lives of youths and adults, aiming to inspire them to act.
- Project QUEST: In the early 1990s, two community-based organizations helped provide technical education to people in San Antonio, Texas, who were struggling to obtain employment in a dramatically changing job market. They used relational organizing, which is deliberate relationship-building for the purpose of finding commonality for political action. It allowed leaders rooted in their communities to conduct house meetings to reconnect and build relationships with neighbors. With these gatherings, communities of color could discuss “common difficulties,” including layoffs and low wages, and find the space to “process their private pain” and realize they weren't alone in going through it, Brett Campbell writes. Their experiences then rose in prominence and shaped the principles of the project's education-based job training program.
Allies Around the Globe, Listen Up
Considering race is a crucial approach to getting commitment to collective action and sustaining change-making efforts. It requires privileging marginalized voices in a consistent, respectful, and deliberate way.
For the allies of communities of color around the globe who want to fight the continued prevalence of racism in cross-sector collaboration, I recommend that they challenge white-interest agendas to ensure they’re truly aligned with the values and beliefs that support an equitable future. They must take on both conservative and liberal ideologies that normalize and disguise racism through, as the scholars Daniel Solórzano and Tara Yosso have written, “the rhetoric of shared ‘normative’ values and ‘neutral’ social scientific and educational principles.” They must figure out how communities of color understand and reconcile histories of oppression, and join in their aspirations for their future. Together, we can make a world that reflects the equity we all want to see.
Many thanks to Dr. Pamela Moss and Dr. Alaina Neal-Jackson for their thoughts and contributions to this article.
Read more stories by Tabitha Bentley.