Race and Community Building

A premise running throughout the stories presented here is that the topic of race is broad and deep. Race is tied inextricably to history and economics. Race manifests structurally, in the way institutions normalize the exclusion and subjugation of people on the basis of their race. Race manifests interpersonally in the ways that people do and do not feel comfortable with one another. It is also individual, in that every person has a racial identity, whether or not that is consciously acknowledged or explored.

Though there is no question that racial exclusion is a persistent and powerful force that continually shapes people’s lives, there are debates about how community-building practitioners should confront race in their work. How and when should race be engaged? Should race be named, and if so how? How should race be dealt with when working across race lines? The practitioners whose stories are presented here have a rich understanding of the relationship between race and democracy and what it means to struggle with race - in all of these ways. By seeking to confront how racism operates within societal structures, these community-building practitioners expose the flaws in these structures that lead to social exclusion. In this sense, race is a lens through which the problems of democracy are more clearly exposed.

In the following stories and commentary, we see that practitioner knowledge reveals how complex and subtle it is to navigate the dynamic between strong racial identity and the complexity of cross-racial coalition building. There are no foolproof recipes for acting concretely in the face of this dynamic. Instead, struggling with race plays a vital role in helping organizers reinvent the tools of democracy building.

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