Taking on racism in South Sacramento, Calif.

Bringing diverse communities together

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December 9, 2008 | | South Sacramento, California

Photo: Phillip Fortune

Bonnie Ratner of Committee Addressing Racial Equity in South Sacramento, Calif., takes part in a discussion during Everyday Democracy's Communities Creating Racial Equity learning exchange in April 2008.

Everyday Democracy’s Barbara Yasui interviews Bonnie Ratner of South Sacramento, Calif., on her organization’s efforts to bring the diverse community together in dialogues to find ways to build racial equity. As part of Everyday Democracy’s Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative.

Sacramento's Committee Addressing Racial Equity (CARE) first engaged residents in affinity dialogues to give people of similar racial or ethnic backgrounds the opportunity to talk about issues that are important to them before joining a community dialogue-to-change program on racism. CARE has since wrapped up the affinity dialogues and is now hosting dialogues around the community. An action forum is planned for February 2009.

I am Barbara Yasui, a senior associate with Everyday Democracy and I’m talking to Bonnie Ratner of the South Sacramento County California CARE Committee.

 Bonnie, can you tell me about South Sacramento County’s current dialogue to change efforts?

 Sure. We’re in November 2008. We now have 8 conversation circles formed with about 65 people participating in the circles. These are mixed group circles. We had November 1^st kick off and all of the groups worked on session one in the race guide: facing racism in a diverse nation.

 We have a database of about 160 people who expressed interest in the process so we’re still doing some recruiting from that list, hopefully to add a couple more people for session 2.

 We’ll hold one session a month through February, which will take us to March 7^th, our action forum.

 So, one of the things that made the South Sacramento County’s circles different from other communities is that you started with affinity groups. Can you explain first what an affinity group is and why the CARE committee decided to take this approach.

 Well our affinity groups represent the different racial, ethnic groups in Suth. Sacramento. So the Sacramento County Department of Neighborhood services opted to invest in community engagement in South Sacramento, which is one of the most diverse areas in a very diverse county and city. South Sacramento has no racial or ethnic majority, but it did become clear almost immediately doing the work that communication between groups was not all it could be. And so we’d been working in 2004, before we became involved in community change and racial equity. That work included three multicultural forums that started by addressing cross cultural community issues and a move to discuss harder issues such as how the media portrayed communities of color.  Through this work we began to build relationships with community leaders representing the different ethnic groups. Our first step was to organize our local committee, which we call CARE, the Committee Addressing Racial Equity and to view this committee as a major organizing tool. So their relationships would form the basis of the organizing plan. So therefore it made sense to form affinity groups first, to train these community leaders as facilitators and to give them the responsibility to  organize and create comfort within these groups and then to bring them to the table for cross group dialogue and action.

 So can you tell me which groups were represented in affinity groups?

 We ended up with seven affinity groups: African American, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Mixed Race, Middle Eastern, and Caucasian.

 So I’m understanding that now the affinity groups discussions have finished and you’re moving to the mixed race groups. How did the affinity groups go?

 First of all the fact that the facilitators were all jazzed for the group and they said that people seemed hungry for the conversation and grateful for it. The issue of identity came up in many different ways. Many of the groups talked about the diversity within their own groups and that the affinity groups were not homogenous, but at the same time many of the groups expressed a desire to keep meeting. At least two of the groups met three times rather than two.

 In the same notion of identity groups expressed that words like black or white are polarizing. So at the kickoff one of the affinity group members who was asked to sort of  give some inspiring transition words, led us in an exercise where we put our hands next to the person next to us and described what shade of brown we saw. So we all talked about being different shades of brown. People felt good about that exercise. It was a nice way to transition into the group.

 Several groups thought that we should discuss class as well and that we couldn’t effectively discuss race without discussing class. I would say in terms of lessons learned so far and I’m sure this is true everywhere is that relationship building takes time and trust takes even longer. Having the local government support is a real plus and the fact that it’s not government driven but government support is very important.

 I think that’s great Bonnie. Thanks.

Learn more: Racial Equity