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Biracial Coalition Politics in Los Angeles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2022

Raphe Sonenshein
Raphe Sonenshein*
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
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Extract

In their 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough Browning, Marshall, and Tabb suggest that biracial coalitions are powerful vehicles for achieving minority incorporation in the political life of cities. They argue that black electoral mobilization and subsequent incorporation depend on both the relative size of the black community and white support. Similarly, Hispanic incorporation is a function not only of the percentage of Hispanics in the population but also joint membership with blacks in a liberal coalition (pp. 245–246).

Their optimistic view of biracial and multiracial coalitions contrasts strikingly with the more common pessimism about cross-racial politics. Racial polarization in such major cities as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia (as well as in a number of medium and smaller-sized cities) has fed the belief that the black protests and white backlash of the 1960s have doomed biracial politics.

Protest Is Not Enough focuses on ten small and medium-sized Northern California cities. The largest, San Francisco, is the 16th most populous city in the U.S. But biracial coalition politics has been most advanced in Berkeley, a city of only 103,328 in 1980. Thus the book's argument is vulnerable to the challenge that full-blown biracial politics worked only in a rather small, unusual city and otherwise had a significant impact in cities of only moderate size in the traditionally liberal Bay Area.

Type
Minority Power in City Politics
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Summer 1986 , pp. 582 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1986

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