Multiracial coalitions may be necessary to combat racism

There’s a tendency to make issues of discrimination into specific problems affecting only one minority group. It’s black Americans who experience staggering racial disparities in the criminal justice system. It’s Muslim Americans who are targeted in physical and verbal attacks by bigots who broadly apply the acts of a few religious radicals to the entire Muslim population. It’s Hispanic Americans who are wrongly denigrated by racists as job-stealing, undocumented immigrants.

But history and research suggests that solving these issues of discrimination requires a greater understanding achieved through cooperation across racial and ethnic lines.

Jennifer Richeson and Shana Bernstein recently broke down this topic in the the American Prospect, noting historical examples of different minority groups coming together to combat racial and ethnic discrimination:

Much like the founding of the NAACP, however, the 20th century is full of examples of cross-group coalition building to enact change. For instance, the fight for voting rights in Selma forged by both the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was supported by Latinos and Jews.

Before that, lawyers involved in Brown v. the Board of Education, including Thurgood Marshall — who would go on to be the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice — practiced their arguments in a 1946 school-segregation case brought by a group of Mexican American families in California in the case of Mendez v. Westminster.

Japanese, black, and Jewish Americans filed friend-of-the-court briefs in both Brown and Mendez. Jewish Americans helped enable the creation and early sustenance of the Community Service Organization (CSO), one of the most significant mid-century civil rights groups for Latinos. In the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos joined forces in the Poor People’s Campaign.

Richeson and Bernstein cited a series of studies published in 2012 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found Hispanic and Asian Americans were more likely to express closeness and common fate with another minority group if they were exposed to or experienced discrimination against their own group. Researchers primed Asian and Hispanic participants with examples of discrimination their groups faced. Participants exposed to discrimination reported having more in common and more positive attitudes toward black Americans than those who weren’t.

Once participants could relate to the feelings of discrimination, it was easier for them to see why people of other minority groups were so troubled by it.

This doesn’t mean that each minority group faces the same modes or levels of discrimination. But the studies and history suggest that multiracial coalitions can foster a broader sense of understanding to greater effect than standing alone.

Some of that unity may be occurring organically. Among some activists and media, the February 10 police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Hispanic man in Pasco, Washington, has drawn comparisons to the August 9 police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, which led to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Further reading: Police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Washington state could be the next Ferguson.