African-American, Latino Perceptions

by Dr. Hollyce (Sherry) Giles

Jun. 11, 2008

[This study, "Perceptions of Piedmont Area African-Americans and Latinos of Each Other and of the Beloved Community Center’s Proposed Black-Brown Alliance: A Participatory Action Research Project* Summary of Project Findings and Community Responses" was released at a community meeting on April 29th at Guilford College. You can view pictures of the event here. This study is part of an ongoing effort to build Black-Brown Coalitions. For more information please contact Wesley Morris. ]

"How do we defy the logic that we [African-Americans and Latinos] are each other’s enemies? Until globalization itself goes, this is how it’s going to be. We can annihilate and cannibalize each other. Yet, there is no danger that doesn’t have a flip side—we can learn to understand each other’s language."

- Rev. Nelson Johnson, at the April 29th community meeting on the project’s findings

These sobering, yet hopeful reflections by Beloved Community Center (BCC) Executive Director, Rev. Nelson Johnson, highlight the dangers and opportunities faced by African-American and Latino communities in their relations with each other. Social, political, and economic forces continually pit the two groups against each other, with sometimes devastating consequences for both communities, including race- and ethnicity-based gang involvement of their youth. To counter these divisive forces, BCC has begun working toward the creation of a Black-Brown alliance in North Carolina. BCC envisions this Black-Brown alliance eventually expanding into a multi-racial alliance including Whites and other racial/ethnic groups, working together for economic justice for all communities.

To support BCC’s efforts to build the Black-Brown alliance, this past Spring, students in my research methods course at Guilford College and I collaborated with BCC on this participatory action research project to learn how Piedmont area Latinos and African-Americans perceive each other’s communities and how they feel about the idea of building an alliance with each other for their mutual betterment. On April 29th, we shared the findings from the project at a gathering at Guilford College of over forty Latino, African-American, and White community members, and facilitated a discussion about the meaning of the findings for each group and for a potential Black-Brown alliance. While participants found some of the findings hard to hear, ‘bruising’ even, the general feeling at the end of the meeting was, as Joyce Johnson, Director of BCC’s Jubilee Institute, shared in her written reflections, “a fierce urgency to build this alliance.”

The summary of the research project can be read by clicking on each section highlighted below.

• overview of the study, explaining who the researchers and participants were, the specifics of how we did the project, and providing some background information from the research literature about Black-Brown relations;
• power point handout of the study’s findings (in adobe reader format);
• summary of the discussion of the findings by Latino, African-American, and White affinity groups at the April 29th gathering.
• annotated bibliography with references for further reading about Black-Brown relations and other initiatives to create Black-Brown alliances.

My students and I are deeply grateful to BCC for entrusting us with this project, and for giving us the opportunity to learn so much and to be a part of their efforts to build a Black-Brown alliance. Guilford College student researchers include: Martha Boyd, Amber Curl, Valerie J. Dargan, Sarah Demerest, Jacqueline Foster, Tammy Fowler, Tory Frink, John Greene, Ora Grooms, Regina Johnson, Lisa Kelleher, Morgan Kelley, Jamys Leak, Angela Parker, and Wendy Poteat-Turner

* In Participatory Action Research, researchers collaborate with members of a community to explore systematically an issue or problem identified by the community.

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