Core Issues in Comprehensive Community-Building Initiatives ...

White people are really convinced that it’s all
over, or at least they try to be convinced that
things aren’t done as a matter of race. So you
have to be diplomatic in how you present a situation
so that you are not accused of making it
a matter of race. I find it challenging to always
try to turn race into economic or other social cost
terms so that people can get it. Then, if they begin
to see it as racist, you can discuss it.
Among the other micro-level challenges of handling
race issues on a day-to-day basis, one participant spoke about
political manipulation of race: “It’s a tool that people pull out
Site directors noted that a real challenge
of CCIs is trying to do this complex humanrelations
work in unrealistically short
time frames
when they want to maintain their power base.” Another
talked about American historical amnesia about race and
racism and how hard that makes any kind of discussion:
Things in this country that are racism never happened:
we didn’t take this country from the
Indians, and we didn’t steal southern California
from the Mexicans. We didn’t put the Japanese
away in camps. We didn’t bring Filipinos over
here and pass laws that they couldn’t get married
because we wanted them here just to work.
Yet another said that understanding issues of class are
as important as race to urban change: “It’s not just the
Caucasian community that sees the inner city as a place
they no longer want to be at. It’s people of color. You can
hear some of the same negative comments in terms of how
they talk about the people that remain.” These are issues
that pervade both insider-outsider and insider-insider relations,
and site directors must negotiate them all in putting
together and holding together fragile coalitions.
Lastly, site directors noted that a real challenge of
CCIs is trying to do this complex human-relations work
in unrealistically short time frames, time frames that are
often dictated to them by funding sources. The nature of
the communities in which they work makes “simple”
bridge-building extremely difficult. Said one:
We can’t take it for granted that just because people
are in the same area and even look like each
other that they are comfortable with each other.
I mean, I’ve been to meetings where people have
been asked to come and decide on some major
activities, like how money is used and decisions
are made, and these people have never met each
other, don’t know each other, and you’re expecting
them to sit down and have some real significant
dialogue without any trust or any sense of
who they are. But we’re outcome oriented.
You’ve got funding realities and timelines.
Sometimes the hardest decision is to try to free up
that time to work through the relationship issues,
as opposed to meeting that deadline of having a
decision on something that has nothing to do with
what’s going on in the community itself.
CCIs and the big picture
While site directors concentrated their remarks largely on
the very local and day-to-day context of their work, the
focus group participants noted a number of times that
CCIs and their potential had to be seen in a larger context,
and that part of their job was articulating this context
at the local level. One director suggested that “we’re not
even in the same game” with the power elites in the country.
“I think a lot of the work we do is recognition that
there are factors out there that we can’t control.”
The largest such factor discussed in the group had to
do with macroeconomic forces, and the consequences of
global market forces, exemplified by persistent inequities
Looking at Power and Race from the Director’s Chair 33