Beyond Integration: Moving Toward Multi-Racial Coalition Building
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
Photo courtesy of Cha-Cha Jiminez, via South Side Weekly.
As our country mourns with Asian and Pacific Islander American communities across the country, as we grieve with the families of slain Black and brown children, women, and men, and as we attempt to enact policies that attack the racism underlying this violence, we must also take time to define what a different society could look like for those most affected by this brutality. At the center of this work is an urgent need to reimagine the concepts of integration and coalition building.
There is a brokenness pervading the very structure of American culture — a brokenness rooted in the divisive core of white supremacy and racism. In order for racism and white supremacy to perpetuate themselves, whiteness must be a distinct racial category, one implicitly understood as superior and sacrosanct — because if being white were indistinguishable from being Black or Korean or Filipino, our society could not reasonably justify the injustices our society perpetuates on the basis of race alone.
How could we explain the repeated and extrajudicial killing of people doing nothing, but going about their daily lives, if we did not understand them as both Black and Dangerous? How would we place the brutal beating and killing of the elderly and vulnerable if we did not situate them as both Asian and Foreign?
White supremacy must necessarily break the body of humanity and personhood in order to facilitate harm and, ultimately, augment its own power. And while the justification for this racial stratification was always artificial, its legacy is real and its wounds are deep. It stands to reason, then, that the thoughtful mending of those fissures is the only societal antidote to this ongoing systemic harm. Intentional, accountable community building is the bone-deep remedy and coalitions are the sutures that help us mend from the searing lacerations caused by centuries of orchestrated racism.
While the myriad cultures, languages, and people who comprise the Asian and Pacific Islander American community are not new to white supremacy’s sorrow, the rise in violence over the last year has made that sorrow even more acute. In the past year, Asian American communities have watched in horror as their elders were harassed and brutalized, and the most vulnerable murdered. Anti-Asian violence comes from the very same source as the anti-Blackness that drives the hundreds of deaths of Black people each year at the hands of vigilantes and police alike. The xenophobia that facilitates the imprisonment of migrant children in cages at the border, even as a pandemic ravages our country, is rooted in the same pernicious force that drives anti-Asian violence.
The erasure, invisibility, and exoticism that many Asian and Pacific Islander American activists and scholars have articulated throughout history, but most recently in the wake of the Atlanta shootings of six Asian women and the Indianapolis murders of four Sikh FedEx workers, is a function of a system devised to divide and conquer. This system is committed to entrenching power, humanity, and agency in one singular identity: whiteness. The work of dismantling and rebuilding a society without white supremacy at its center is the defining work of our generation and every generation to come.
During the Civil Rights Movement, desegregation was the overwhelming focus of organization and mobilization. In the decades following, as desegregation gutted the resources within Black communities, and integration was touted as the primary means to eradicate racial harm. However, integration has historically been a deeply fraught concept.
For many, integration symbolizes the apex of racial healing, for others, it indicates assimilation and erasure. If many mainstream readings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words and career are to be believed, integration was his primary objective, not the dismantling of a racist, classist society. Our vision of integration in this country is often attached to his most famous speech; the term conjures images of classrooms where the Black and white children sit next to each other, judged not by their skin, but the content of their character. However, this view of integration — filtered through the lens of whiteness — has proven limited in its effectiveness over the many decades Americans have sought to see it realized. It is time we reexamine and redefine what integration could truly mean.
While this glittering imagining of integration may be captivating, coalition-building and liberation — not integration — were the central thrust of Dr. King’s work, along with the many activists and organizers who led the 1960s Movement of Civil Rights. If we — those in our country most concerned with dismantling systems of power — were more practiced, more thoughtful and intentional about that coalition building, it would mean that we would have responses when anti-anyone violence rears its head. Because while in this moment it is important to stop anti-Asian violence or to end the state-sanctioned violence that steals the lives of Black people, it is equally important to to name and thwart the systemic racism that undergirds these evils.
Successful multi-racial coalition building — and thus a more expansive definition of integration — hinges on the solidarity around anti-anyone violence, anti-anyone oppression. Racism is the driving force that allows a Minnesota police force — in the midst of a trial for the police officer who murdered George Floyd — to kill yet another Black man in the streets and then impose a curfew on the citizens and community members protesting state-sanctioned violence. Racism is the same underwriter of a police-driven narrative that says the murder of eight people in Atlanta was just an average white man having a bad day.
Integration has historically been concerned with teaching white people how to live with people of color or has been preoccupied with exposing children of color to dominant white culture in order to improve their lives. This is not integration, it is forced assimilation. Thus, it is inherently flawed as an idea. By contrast, coalition building, such as the rainbow coalition assembled by Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, is about honoring each other's humanity and differences in service of a collective good. Coalitions like the Highlander Center and the Fair Food Program are not just about unity in the face of common enemies, but about liberation rooted in shared humanity. We have examples of how to do this throughout history, but the efforts made by governments or other vested interests to dismantle them have led us to erroneously believe that coalitions are situational at worst and ephemeral at best.
But such coalitions allow us to access the truth that white supremacy and racism have stripped away: that we are all deserving of dignity, freedom, and the ability to thrive. In such coalitions, we do not ask anyone to subvert their identity, tradition, or language, but to honor how those unique aspects of being intersect. In successful coalitions, we recognize how systems that demand we prioritize arbitrary divisions or ask us to see differences as adversarial are in service of whiteness and destruction, not care and abundance.
Coalition building is solidarity work. It requires radical imagination to both reimagine community and integration, but this moment requires it of us.