The We in Po(we)r | 3

Multiracial organizing doesn’t mean that we always get along.

Organizers and activists in Los Angeles know this. What it can mean is when intentions are right, multiracial coalitions can work together towards policies that benefit all. In this chapter, we hear from economist Manuel Pastor, environmental justice activist Denise Fairchild, and organizer Anthony Thigpenn.

Topic: Multiracial organizing
Title: “The We In Power”

Episode Outline:
Act 1 | Angela’s intro + Manuel Pastor minimum wage organizing
Act 2 | Denise’s environmental work
Act 3 | Anthony Thigpenn power analysis

AUDIO HERE

ACT I

My first job out of law school in 1977 was at a national public interest law firm based in San Francisco. We tackled a broad range of issues from employment discrimination to children’s issues to the rights of people with disabilities. Our cases got tons of media attention, and some stories featured me. Before long, I was getting calls from Black people looking for a Black attorney to address issues hurting our communities.

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When a Black delegation from a poor neighborhood in the Bay Area approached me about helping them stop the last grocery store from leaving their community, I was thrilled to be able to convince the firm to mount an effort throughout California to stop grocery stores from abandoning low-income neighborhoods for the suburbs. It was the fight against food deserts.

I talk a lot about democracy in service of human flourishing, and the issue of healthy food access is a great example of what I mean. Humans don’t flourish if they can’t buy healthy food.

My former law colleagues and our partners had some impact in California. But significant progress came 30 years later, after the election of President Barack Obama, when Michelle Obama made childhood obesity her signature issue.

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[Archival] Michelle Obama: Our goal is ambitious; it’s to eliminate food deserts in America completely in seven years. Tackling the issue of accessibility and affordability is key to achieving the overall goal of solving childhood obesity in this generation.
Finally, this issue was getting national attention. Her commitment to improve child health in low-income communities opened the doors of power to Black activists who’d been working for so long to get supermarkets in their neighborhoods.
So we marched through those doors – but not alone. We joined with an array of groups concerned about food deserts and their impact on health: Latine, Native American, Asian communities, low-income rural communities, farmers, anti-hunger activists, even local business leaders. These coalitions were built over decades. Together, we walked the halls of Congress and the White House. And together, we won billions of dollars in public and private investments in grocery stores, food co-ops, and farmers’ markets in neighborhoods that desperately needed them.
Not only did this victory improve access to fresh, nutritious food in many places. It also created thousands of jobs. And it showed that multiracial organizing isn’t some feel-good exercise. When diverse groups engage around a common agenda to address human needs, and use their power to get the government to make transformative investments in communities that have been kept behind, everyone benefits. And that’s multiracial democracy at work.
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I’m Angela Glover Blackwell and this is Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life. Chapter 3: The “We” in Power. Today we'll dive into understanding what makes multiracial organizing successful, what it takes for broad coalitions to build power and use it to make change that allows all of us to flourish, and we’ll uncover why relationships built on trust and shared values are essential.
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One of the reasons I’ve been so excited to take you on a journey in LA, is because organizers there understand the end goal of multiracial organizing and the work necessary to get there. They’re focused on governing power – where structural change happens.
There’s no one that embodies this more than Manuel Pastor.
Angela Glover Blackwell: Manuel, thank you so much for doing this.
Manuel Pastor: So glad to be with you.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I am really thrilled to have an opportunity to talk with you as we explore thriving multiracial democracy and what it's looking like in Los Angeles.
Manuel Pastor: Angela, it's always a blessing to be with you. I always learn so much and I'm always provoked to think so much. So, blessings for this partnership.
Manuel Pastor is first and foremost an economist, but he's also my longtime friend and colleague. We’ve worked together on more projects than I can count. More than twenty years ago, along with Stewart Kwoh, a trailblazer, and civil rights leader in LA, we co-wrote a book about the changing nature of race in the nation. We called it Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground. And though we didn’t describe it in these terms then, it laid out the basis for building a thriving multiracial democracy.
Manuel once said in a speech, that when we think about doing this movement work, it’s not simply about changing the world, but about changing ourselves at the same time. Movements, he says, are about visions deeply rooted in values. And for Manuel this perspective came from his own life experience.
Manuel Pastor: I was Cuban growing up in Chicano Los Angeles.
Although he was born in Brooklyn, Manuel was raised in a suburb near East LA.
Manuel Pastor: It was a really interesting place to grow up, because it was a place that was very working class. Had Latino folks, white folks, some Black folks. And it was a place of mixing, a place of hope, but fundamentally, a place of working-class dreams. And I think that's kind of what rooted me, is I'm fundamentally rooted in that working class, place-based experience of how it is that people come together.
Manuel is director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California and a professor there, but he’s no ivory-tower academic. His research has been instrumental in developing policies and driving grassroots campaigns that strengthen and empower low-income and working-class communities of color.
What I love about Manuel is he combines the rigor and resources of the academy with the heart and discipline of organizers and advocates.
Manuel Pastor: I came of age politically in Los Angeles because after graduate school I moved back to LA to work at Occidental College and I quite quickly got involved in local politics, in particular a multiracial movement to try to raise the minimum wage in the state of California.
In the late 1980s the federal minimum wage was $3.35 per hour. Advocates wanted to raise the minimum in California to $5.01 per hour. Opponents, including much of the business community, argued that the pay raise would lead to layoffs, slowdowns in hiring, and increased prices.
Manuel did tireless research to prove that raising the minimum wage wouldn’t suppress the economy, but instead boost growth. The advocates for raising the minimum wage argued that equity is the key to prosperity for all of us.
After negotiations, state leaders agreed to raise the minimum wage to $4.25 an hour. At the time, this was a huge win.
Manuel Pastor: What I realized from that was it was not my elegant argumentation about the economy that made a difference. It was the community organizing by people on the ground in South Los Angeles, in East Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, throughout California. That made the difference.
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The fight for raising the minimum wage in California back in the late 80s was formative for Manuel. It provided a clear framework for the power that can be built and the change that can be made when groups organize across racial lines for a common goal.
And that led Manuel to join forces with organizers from Black, Latine and Asian groups to form the New Majority Task force. Its goal? Harnessing collective power.
Manuel Pastor: We were trying to figure out the relationships between groups of color. And we were also trying to move from the idea of being a minority in which you react to what's being proposed, to being a new majority in which you make propositions about what the world should look like, what economic policy should look like, what civic institutions should look like. So I really feel like that moment of understanding, that we needed to bring together African American, Latino, and Asian Pacific Americans, and that we needed to move from a minority mindset to a majority mindset, completely formative to who I am and how I sort of dropped into the organizing and beauty of social movements in LA.
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These days the battle for fair wages continues. And it has united thousands of workers and activists across the country – people who reflect the full spectrum of the nation’s diversity. They’re pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $15, and they have won significant wage hikes in cities and states from coast to coast. In January 2024, California raised its minimum wage to $16 an hour – thanks to determined advocacy and organizing by a multiracial group of people.
Manuel Pastor: You've talked about the sort of generosity of people, maybe helping another group, reaching out to another community, trying to lift everyone up. But another kind of generosity that we need to practice in our movements nationwide is the generosity of calling people in, versus calling people out. The generosity of trying to reach to the not yet woke, rather than the strictness of saying, gosh, you're not there with me yet, on a thing that's very important. And I think that's the generosity we need, to be able to not move to the middle, but move the middle. To grab people's imaginations, to grab working class, ordinary people, and move them to a progressive, multiracial vision.
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ACT II
In Los Angeles and other cities, environmental injustices have proven to be effective issues for multiracial organizing and power building.
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The assaults are so obvious: Smokestacks belching pollutants into the air. Water that people rely on, fouled by toxic runoff. But there’s also something deeper at play. Although environmental degradation disproportionately harms communities of color, perhaps no other issue reminds all of us how profoundly interconnected we are. And how, ultimately, nobody will flourish unless we create the conditions in which all life can flourish.
Denise Fairchild: I don't care if you're Black, if you're brown, you're Native American, if you're from Ireland, if you're Jewish. Our origin story is understanding a world in which we are living in communal practice, right, where we are more in harmony with each other and that we're in harmony with nature.
Denise Fairchild is a long-time environmental and social justice leader in LA.
Denise: And when I talk about this and I see it from the African perspective, we use the word “Ubuntu”, right? It's a South African word that means “I am because you are. I am because we are.” And that is not only how we work and see the world as being interdependent, we're interdependent with each other, but also one with nature.
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I would be remiss to talk about organizing for human flourishing and not talk about our relationship with the Earth. Denise holds this connection in mind constantly. There was this one time when she was visiting Ghana in 2019 with a delegation from DC that included the Congressional Black Caucus.
Denise Fairchild: And there's a lot of villagers, Ghanaian villagers, fishermen that were just hanging out in their boats. They were not out fishing. So I went and I approached the brother and I says, ‘How come you're not fishing?’ And so he says to me, ‘cause it’s Tuesday’. And so I'm like, ‘so what does that mean?’ He says, ‘Tuesdays, no one fishes.’ So it allows for, you know, the fish and the oceans and all the, you know, marine animals to sort of like live without humans for a day. Right? Every week the humans are not here. Let's like, breathe and regenerate ourselves. And he says it's also the day that we talk with each other about community. That's our origin. Those are the cultures that we come from. No matter what culture you are from, you know, Black, white or Asian or whatever. These are the kinds of, sort of lessons and ancestral wisdoms that we need to really begin to put in the forefront of our efforts towards transformation. These are the efforts that's going to keep us flourishing and keep us working together and being in harmony with each other and being in harmony with Mother Earth.
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Denise was the inaugural president of an influential national network called Emerald Cities Collaborative. She’s now working to address what she sees as the root cause of climate change – exploitative and unsustainable economic growth.
In the ‘80s, she was appointed to be a commissioner to the Los Angeles Environmental Quality Board by then mayor, Tom Bradley. At the time, Los Angeles didn’t have much environmental consciousness. It didn’t even have recycling.
Denise Fairchild: We were getting ready to throw trash cans and plastic and everything that you can think of into an incinerator that would burn and emit all kinds of carcinogens into our communities.

Trash was buried in landfills located in hillside canyons, and now they had another solution. The city’s proposal was a 235 million dollar project to burn household trash and convert it into energy, using incinerators being placed right in the middle of South LA neighborhoods.

Denise Fairchild: As a commissioner, residents from South L.A., several black women came to me to ask about this particular project. It turned into about a two-and-a-half-year battle. I was essentially muzzled and was told not to have the public hearing with the Public Works department.
Denise’s story of being contacted by Black residents to solve a community problem reminds me of my own experience, as a Black attorney called on to address food deserts. The community had been starved for direct access to Black people who seemed to have power to drive change. This is why representation matters. Having people in power with roots in marginalized communities allows these communities to see the possibility of participation.
Denise Fairchild: And it took a citywide coalition of individuals on the westside of Los Angeles, the more well-endowed parts of of the city where UCLA and other individuals that brought legal, environmental science, engineering, technical expertise to the mobilization and organizing work of South Los Angeles and other environmental groups that showed up for the first time to South Los Angeles. It took a coalition to ultimately win and to defeat the municipal incinerator that was planned for South LA, but also ultimately for each of the major regions of Los Angeles. The rationale was if you defeat it in South Los Angeles we’ll defeat it in the other parts of the city where everybody else was going to realize the same kinds of consequences.
Our fates are intricately connected. And issues like the fight for healthy food access, fair wages, and clean, livable environments prove that when you solve an issue for those rendered most vulnerable, the effects ripple out to benefit everyone. The long-term work is in building the power for sustained structural change.

Denise Fairchild: You need power to change the system to be more life affirming. But the question becomes, you know, as a community developer, I said, look, there are two approaches that you can take to life. One is trying to change the system. The other is to build a new system. Well I was always fighting the system. I was partly fighting the system, but really we need to make more, allocate more time, investment and resources to building the new. It requires, uh, creative thinkers. It requires people to be naive enough to think they can do something radically different. How we can build an economy that is not about mass consumption and mass production and massive waste and massive accumulation of wealth. Is there a way that we can build carbon-neutral communities that we can live in harmony with nature? I mean, that is really radical thinking, radical work, radical re-engineering that has to take place.

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ACT III

I’m obviously a staunch advocate for the benefit of organizing across multiracial lines and the ways we all benefit from that work. But I don’t want to gloss over the challenges. This can be grueling.

Anthony Thigpenn: There are no magic bullets to that. I mean, it is about talking to people. Real talk with folks about your issue and my issue. Being able to disagree, but seeing the larger “we.”

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That’s Anthony Thigpenn. You might remember him from the last episode, as a lead organizer in the groundbreaking movement for community benefits agreements. Anthony is the founder and president of California Calls, an alliance of over 30 organizations that gets young people of color engaged with politics.

Anthony Thigpenn: I guess the main thing was intentionality. You know, we recognize that this is something that needs to happen. It was going to take time, but it doesn't happen automatically. You can't just bring a bunch of folks into the room and think they're going to get along and say ‘Okay, yeah, you're my neighbor, so we should work together’. It took intentionally having people understand each other building relationships to one another was key to that to create an ongoing multiracial organization.

The reality of organizing large, diverse coalitions to use their power for the good of all is complex. Even when groups recognize their common interests and goals, they don’t always agree on priorities, tactics and strategies.

Angela Glover Blackwell: What was it like organizing multiracially when you first started? I imagine it's changed over time and I'm wondering, in the beginning when this wasn't the way things were done necessarily, what was involved?

Anthony Thigpenn: You know, it was hard. Number one, because people were not used to organizing with people who didn't necessarily look like them or that came from different cultures. So it's obvious today, but then, having meetings that were multilingual. Spanish and English, right? Having cultural events that, that celebrated the Black culture, but also the Latino culture, and eventually the Asian culture. All those kinds of things were new to us and on everybody's side, having them be open to different cultural experiences were important.

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One thing that makes Anthony so effective is that he confronts differences head on. I’ve seen him navigate sharp disagreements. And even after people grudgingly compromised and forged consensus, he insisted on fully airing the points of contention. Another leader might have moved on, but Anthony never sweeps tensions or differences under the rug, because addressing them builds more vital, lasting relationships.

Anthony Thigpenn: So the idea of, ‘we all got to come together,’ wasn't really our strategy. It was really about as many of us as possible. Come. Let's see what we can agree on, let’s work through the disagreements, not paper over them. Because if you paper over them down the line, it's going to, it's going to fall apart, because you don't have the kind of agreement and trust necessary. So building that trust, being able to agree and disagree and then moving forward. And if everybody can’t move forward, not being arrogant about it. Not saying ‘you're wrong, we're right.’ Here's what we think is right. What you're doing is good. We respect that. We're going to try this and we're going to move forward with this with those who want to move forward with us. And we'll see you down the line. I can't tell you how many times we've done that. And the folks who were, who didn't come with us, eventually came around.
Anthony has a framework many organizers use to think strategically about building and using power across diverse groups of people, who may not always see their common interests. It’s a game plan for collective action. He calls it: power analysis. It helps people move to a more strategic, long-term position as they try to make change in their communities.
Anthony Thigpenn: It's very difficult to move to a proactive agenda because you’re just reacting, fighting against stuff. And so part of the idea behind power analysis – I got this from studying corporate, how do corporations think about this stuff? They look at conditions and try to look beyond the immediate fight to thinking three steps ahead.
Power analysis begins with mapping the current conditions of power: Where is it? Who controls it? And, how can it be accessed to achieve the immediate goals?
And he used it in the campaign for Prop 15 in 2020. Prop 15 was a state-wide ballot initiative that would have eliminated 40+ years of tax protections for commercial properties. If the proposition passed, it would have meant billions coming back into the state's coffers. Anthony and his group wanted to put that money where it was most needed.
Anthony Thigpenn: And people wanted, said you know, ‘Well, it's got to be housing. It's got to be schools. It's got to be healthcare.’ And so going through a power analysis and bringing in research and analysis to say, ‘Okay, well, given this particular policy, what's the best play?’ And so one of the best plays because of how Prop 13 was formulated was education – suffered most.
For listeners who may not know, I’d like to step back here and give some background on Prop 13. It was a statewide initiative that California passed in 1978. It put a freeze on property taxes for homeowners and businesses. Property taxes are a major source of revenue for schools and other essential services, so for more than a generation, this law has drained local communities of astronomical sums of money that should have gone to education, affordable housing and more. But over the years Proposition 13 has been really hard to overturn.
Anthony Thigpenn: There’s a whole base of working-class folks that supported it because it kept their property taxes down.
So to win support for Prop 15, Anthony and his coalition carefully crafted the initiative to overturn only the tax cap for commercial properties, and leave the residential property tax cap in place.
Anthony Thigpenn: And everybody didn't come right away. We had to build momentum. Some unions didn't come right away. It was building up momentum over time and sticking with it, that eventually brought the broad coalition together, that became Prop 15.
Prop 15 was narrowly defeated in 2020. But the campaign built a strong multiracial, statewide commitment to economic fairness for the future.
Anthony Thigpenn: A big test was, because we didn't win, would the coalition fall apart? And so we spent a lot of time doing one-on-ones with the key parties, etc., and it didn't fall apart. I mean, it continues to meet to these days. So we think we’ve built now a movement for economic equity that will take that on again, but also has the ability to take on other issues around economic justice for the state, for local communities. So people saw ‘Oh okay, well they didn't walk away from it. They're still here. We're still in coalition. We're still thinking three steps ahead toward the next battle.’
It’s a hard fact of democracy that we won’t always win. But, when we create systems for ongoing collective engagement, the power we build does not disappear after a loss, it can even expand.
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The work of meaningful collective engagement that lies at the heart of democracy is difficult. It’s even harder in the context of profound difference. It’s tough to pull people together to fight public battles, especially when their personal circumstances are challenging, often punishing. It’s hard to hold people’s faith and interest for the long periods of time it often takes to accomplish significant change. It’s hard to keep up momentum for the next battle. And the one after that.
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Manuel, Denise, and Anthony are showing what it takes to organize diverse coalitions to build the power needed to drive change. Yes, they’ve been working together for decades, but their work makes clear it’s not simply long-term relationships that determine success. What’s needed are shared values, generosity, a deep sense of how we’re all interconnected, and an intentional, disciplined approach to building power. And it’s not about building power for power’s sake. It’s about building power to transform systems and institutions so they serve human flourishing. It’s about building power that bends the nation toward equity, fairness and justice, and at last fulfilling the promise of democracy.
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In our next chapter, Labor of Love, we learn how shifting our approach to labor and our economy can lead us all to a good life.
Roxana Tynan: We really are at a critical turning point. This generation in their 20s is unwilling to accept the status quo on the job and is demanding to be treated with respect on the job.

Manuel Pastor: Radically inclusive, it's not just a kind of kumbaya, come together. It's to say that we are looking for the places where we are broken because we know that if we heal the places where we are broken, we will be strong as a whole.

Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life is a podcast created by PolicyLink in partnership with Pineapple Street Studios.
We are grateful for the PolicyLink funders whose support allows us to produce this show.
For a transcript of the episodes and for more resources visit PolicyLink.org.
The team at PolicyLink is Perfecta Oxholm, Fran Smith, Glenda Johnson, Josh Kirchenbaum, Ferchil Ramos, Vanice Dunn, Montana Rane, and Loren Madden. With additional support by Dr. David Kyuman Kim. Special thanks to PolicyLink CEO Michael McAfee.
This episode was produced by Yinka Rickford-Anguin with support from producers Alexis Moore and Natalie Peart. Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer. Our Editor is Darby Maloney. Fact checking by Will Tavlin. Our Senior Audio Engineer and Mixer is Pedro Alvira. Our Assistant Audio Engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks, who also provided scoring assistance. Theme song by Donwill. And our Music is from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Leila Day, Grace Cohen-Chen and Gabe Kawugule. Our Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija. Je-Anne Berry is our Executive Producer.
I'm your host, Angela Glover Blackwell.
Until next time. I urge everyone to make sure you’re registered and have a plan to vote. A thriving multiracial democracy depends on participation, and voting is extremely important.