Black-Brown relations: are alliances possible?

• Date: 22 June 1997
• Author: Klor de Alva, J. Jorge,West, Cornel
• Published date: 22 June 1997
• Author: Klor de Alva, J. Jorge

Moderator (Ronald Wakabayashi): To begin, may I ask you both to share some of your thoughts on the issue of race in general and how your recent work touches on the matter of alliances?

West: Let me begin by briefly saying that I'm delighted to be here. And I'd like to thank brother Leonard Robinette [Chairman and Executive Director, WLCAC] and those at the Getty Center and Arco for having the vision and determination to bring us together, building on the rich legacy of Ted Watkins [Founder, WLCAC], who in so many ways was an exemplary organic intellectual, as both a progressive activist and institution builder. First, there is a real sense in which my own understanding of race builds very much on the kind of deep class concerns that brother Ted Watkins had, one that encompasses an understanding that it is very difficult to talk about race without talking about that larger economic, political, and cultural context, while always keeping one's eye on the internal dynamics of business elites, bank elites, cultural elites, and how they shape the very framework in which we not only confront one another, but perceive one another. And that's so crucial to me. The second point is that a Black-Brown alliance must always be understood within something bigger than itself. Jorge and I have had a longstanding relationship. We have been friends, taught at Princeton together, but we are not here just to chit chat and have a Black-Brown, touchy-feely kind of thing.

We are talking about ways in which larger ideals and principles, radically democratic ones, sit at the center of what ought to hold any desirable Black-Brown alliance together. I can imagine a whole host of Black-Brown alliances on which I would bring serious critique to bear, precisely because they would not be focusing on the various ways in which the working poor and very poor within our Black and Brown communities are actually being empowered. There are a number of Black and Brown alliances one can conceive of that are themselves in alliance with business and bank elites of a conservative sort, that are disempowering or setting up impediments to the empowerment of the masses, the vast majority of Brown and Black brothers and sisters. So in this regard Black-Brown dialogue is just an instance of what it means to take seriously a radically democratic project for the masses that keeps track of working people, the working poor, and the very poor, and at the same time tries to enrich the quality of our public life, which is a precondition for keeping that radical democratic tradition alive.

Klor de Alva: I have been working on questions of race and ethnicity for a long time in a wide variety of settings. However, the questions surrounding the relationships between Blacks and Browns had not been a central feature because most of my work had focused on interactions between indigenous peoples and Europeans and between Latinos and so-called Anglos. Over time, I became progressively more engaged with relationships between Blacks and Browns, Asians and Blacks, and Asians and Latinos. Yet in the course of my professional career there have been very few opportunities where those particular interests were nourished. After all, most people adhere to the dominant view that sees race and ethnicity as something essential. That is, they see race and ethnicity as something primordial, unchanging, fundamentally fixed and determinative. And that has been a very important assumption that has driven conversations about race and ethnicity in the United States and has made it very difficult to carry on a conversation like the one we are having now.

There are many conversations taking place between Browns and Blacks today. Most of them are based on mutual suspicion, fear, and stereotypes that we cannot repeat in public. There are many nasty ones I have been witness to, and accusatory and distrustful ones filled with anger and hate. My hope is that today we will be terribly frank and open so that we can use this opportunity as a springboard for many other, better conversations, among yourselves, among the people you all interact with, and in all the other settings where I hope Cornel and I will also have the chance to carry our discussions forward.

Although we will discuss later the question of whether alliances are possible, I would like to begin by summarizing the central problem with alliances between Blacks and Browns by quoting some graffiti written on a wall not far from here during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It read:

4/30/92 Crips Together Bloods Forever Mexicans Tonite Now, for the most part the alliances we have been familiar with have been alliances of the "together forever tonite" type, which are primarily the result of there being some external threat out there (such as the police in Los Angeles) that brings Blacks and Browns together seemingly "forever," but really only for a night. I would like to see a conversation begin and a framework put together that would permit us to break out of that mold and make it possible to begin a dialogue with a sense of togetherness that is focused more on "forever" than just for "tonite."

Moderator: The existing paradigm around race in this country is largely framed historically and in the present around Black-White relations. That is the nexus of how this country has come to understand and address the issue of race. Now, that paradigm assumes two populations that today are American-born. They are a cohort group in the sense that both are raised and live in the same national boundaries and share much in common. This framework, however, contrasts with the paradigm that must address a situation like that found in Los Angeles. The current diversity includes a population that is 40% foreign-born, that does not share that sort of life experience, has different historical roots and social histories, and arrives at this intersection often carrying different social paradigms and different institutions. Is that part of our challenge in dealing with these alliances, that there are issues concerning both the racial paradigm itself and the structures of the institutions?

West: I think so. We have to begin with the tremendous weight and gravity of the vicious, pernicious ideology and practice of white supremacy that is at the very core of the European settlement that understood itself as a precious, yet precarious experiment in democracy. When we look at Black-Brown relations, it is important to keep in mind the specific histories of the particular peoples. Because what would be distinctive about white supremacy is that it has to do with the weight and gravity of the particular roles that people play. White supremacy understood itself primarily over and against people of African descent, and it could have done that vis a vis Red brothers and sisters because it was ugly, atrocious, immoral, and so forth. The way in which American identity was constituted, then, was as positively charged whiteness, negatively charged blackness.

In the process of America's imperial expansion, with the Lone Star Republic and the Bear Flag Republic, you get dispossession of the land of Mexican brothers and sisters. That nation already understands itself as primarily a nation construed through this whiteness-blackness discourse. The question then becomes: How does one respond to, interact with, dominate, and engage in forms of conquest vis a vis these Mexicans whose land one is after, as well as what is on the land? It is the first wave of Brown brothers and sisters, interacting with a nation with basically a white supremacist identity. Then there is the second wave, after the Mexican Revolution, that pushed many Mexican brothers and sisters to make their way into what used to be their country and is now the United States. Then came the subsequent waves of new immigrants who have to contend with an America with a vicious legacy of white supremacy in which blackness has been privileged as the second term in the binary opposition of race talk. But that's historic; it is operative with all of the residues and effects and consequences in our day, given this larger historical development over time in terms of how we understand the USA.

Klor de Alva: I have a slightly different take. First, it is very difficult to engage in dialogue without making problematic some of the assumptions we hold. If we look at the history of the United States, and we could also look at the general history of Western European expansion, we would see a very complicated and mixed affair. Experiences of social interaction were different in different places. For example, the people you would expect to hate each other in a specific area did not necessarily do so, or the people who got along in one place did not do so elsewhere. There have been a number of occasions in the history of the United States when a kind of pluralism or, if you want, a kind of mestizaje, metissage, or creolism, was quite feasible. We see it in the very early history of Black-Indian relations. In many comers there was great affinity between both sides - and nowadays there are a good number of Native American communities composed of people that physically you would not be able to tell apart from a community of African Americans. Interaction had taken place, in the sense of folks getting by, getting along, trying to make a life together, reproducing, and working to make ends meet. In many places the same could be said for relations among white and Native American groups and even among whites and Blacks. For the latter, we have the case of the northern part of the South, where for a long time there was much close interaction between both sides. And we know that at the beginning of contact between the early Euro-Americans and Latinos/Mexicans in the Southwest, an incredibly high rate of intermarriage (not just rape) took place. Of course, some of these were marriages of convenience, folks marrying into Mexican families with...