Berkeley graduate student and Hildebrand Fellowship recipient Jae Yeon Kim recently published a paper in Studies in American Political Development, the flagship journal in its field. The paper, "Racism is Not Enough: Minority Coalition Building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver", was based on research supported by his Hildebrand Fellowship and compares the formation of ethnic housing coalitions in three West Coast Chinatowns during the 1960s and '70s.
According to Kim's research, while all three cities had a legacy of anti-Asian racism, each produced a distinct movements shaped by local history and development pressure. Arguing that these factors were more important to determining inter-group cohesion than the simple shared experience of racism, Kim proposes that coalitions were strategically constructed and expanded. He contrasts each coalition's formation and the ethnic groups they included or excluded: in contrast to the largely Asian groups in the United States, the housing coalition that developed in Vancouver included European immigrant groups. Kim examines the reasons behind these divergences, and their implications on the understanding of the formation of minority coalitions.
Read the full study here.