The election and coalitions

I'll be taking over for Claire this time.

As you all know, this past Tuesday was the general election. And as you all know, Barack Obama was elected.

Now there's been lots of talk about what this means, for us to have elected the first African American president. It's a big question, and I'm going to leave that discussion for more participatory channels. But it does open up a window for discussion of issues of race in the United States - specifically, how issues of race can bubble to the surface during such a contentious time as the election.

This year, as in several previous elections, UAAO worked with the Asian Pacific Law Students Association (APALSA) and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) on an election protection project. To give you a little background, AALDEF did this in 11 states this election, focusing on jurisdictions in which there's a substantial number of Asian Americans, especially those in which there's a high rate of limited english proficiency (LEP). In Michigan, these communities are Ann Arbor, Canton, Detroit, Novi, and Troy. In addition, AALDEF worked with the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) to bring this project to Dearborn and Hamtramck, communities with significant Arab American populations.

The election protection project consists primarily of exit polling - surveying Asian and Arab American voters as the leave the polls. This is necessary because we tend to be underrepresented in polls, and often excluded entirely when poll results are divided by racial groups - they tend to focus chiefly on white and black, sometimes including Latinos.

The protection part becomes necessary due to a combination of LEP and discrimination. Because many Asian American voters are less proficient at reading English, ballots can often prove difficult to use. Under the Voting Rights Act, voters are allowed to bring someone in to help them with the ballot; however, poll workers, sometimes unaware of this, try to prevent this. There's also the issue of racism and discrimination - for example, an elderly Chinese American voter may be rushed by the poll workers more than a white voter, or poll workers may make racist comments and intimidate Asian American voters. This is where AALDEF comes in.

So what we did was look out for these things, using our eyes and ears as well as our interactions with voters. If a voter reported a problem or if we noticed it, we got as much detail as possible and called it in to AALDEF - ultimately, they work to fix as many problems, case by case, as possible, as well as to fix systemic problems using our observations. And something we noticed was that simply by being visible observers, we helped influence poll workers' behavior for the better. To be sure, it would be ideal to end discrimination at the polls without having to be present physically, but in the United States, if you lose your vote, there's no getting it back. And this goes back to the central issue of how race becomes a factor in elections. Disenfranchisement occurs among Asian American communities due to relativekt higher incidents of problems with language access and racism.

I've been talking mostly about Asian Americans here, but there's lots to say about how this relates to Arab Americans. This is tied to my own experience with election protection this year - I worked at a pollsite in Dearborn, MI, the city with the highest proportion of Arab Americans in its population compared to any other city in the United States. How does this relate to Asian Americans?

Arab Americans' place in relation to Asian Americans has shifted; at times, they've been included under the label "Asian American", but conventionally, they're considered separate. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing or unjust - Arab Americans have different voting trends, face different issues, and have their own diversity and heterogeneity within the sweeping label "Arab American", as one of the voters I surveyed wryly pointed out to me. Despite these differences, however, there's at least one simple reason that led the Arab American community in Michigan to be a part of this effort - and this reason can be identified simply by looking at the organizations involved. Whatever the differences between Arab Americans and Asian Americans, AALDEF and ACCESS did partner up, because it was recognized by both organizations that their respective communities faced common problems on election day. This is, to put it simply, coalition-building.

Coalitions are a big thing with in A/PIA history as well as UAAO. The pan-ethnic Asian American identity has, at its heart, coalition politics - taking on this identity is at least in part a deliberate choice, a political act. And this election reminded me of that. It reminded me that although Asian Americans and Arab Americans may have vast differences - just as the different ethnicities under the Asian American label may have with each other - they banded together in an effort to combat injustice. It reminded me that coalitions are not a phenomenon of the 60s and 70s, but rather a way to empower ourselves and those around us - a tool for use in the struggles our communities faced decades ago and continue to face today, however those struggles may appear to us at this moment. And it doesn't have to be a fundamental identity shift, but can be as simple as working together.

- arthur