Democracy, Diversity and Voice Project

The Diversity, Democracy and Voice Project focuses on democracy, inclusion, and civic engagement among people of color. Our ultimate goal is to develop and implement a full research and practice agenda to describe the ways in which race, generation, and civil society connect.

The renewed scholarly and popular emphasis on the importance of and decline in civic engagement and community organization highlights a tension in the study of American civic and political participation. While there is extensive historical evidence that the politics of people of color (especially African Americans and Latinos) emerged from community-based civic and organizational activities and in effect the use of social capital to challenge exclusionary policies through direct citizen participation and accumulating trust, few studies have been concerned with what has been the role of these groups and processes in determining how social capital "makes democracy work."

Relatedly, there are surprisingly few voices of people of color figuring prominently in the debate over civil society and democracy’s future. There is a dearth of research or discussion of how civic action in the United States has often taken the form of protection of in-groups and how large segments of the population, excluded from mainstream civil society, were forced to build their own civil society, separate and often conflicting with mainstream politics, organizations, and associations.

Yet, as the nation is expected to become that oxymoron "majority-minority" near mid-way this century, knowledge about the civic life of people of color and their role in sustaining and strengthening democracy is increasingly important. It is especially critical to include both the experiences and voices of marginal populations in an analysis of how organizations in civil society are used by marginal populations to gain access to the political system. Civil society must be understood as both a site where relations of power are reproduced as well as where politics of contestation sometimes emerges.

The goals of this project are to:

• Discover fresh approaches to increase civic engagement among the masses of people of color, particularly among youth;
  
• Identify and help strengthen (and in some instances encourage or nourish the creation of) viable civic organizations in communities of color working to combat racism and improve race relations;
  
• Identify and contribute to eliminating remaining structural barriers to political and economic democracy;
  
• Bring to the same table people of different ethno-racial backgrounds so their distinct experiences and insights can be heard;
  
• Build a shared understanding across diverse communities of color in order to improve the potential for concerted action in problem-solving;
  
• Contribute to both improving ethno-racial relations and increasing the influence of people of color in society’s decision-making processes in order to build a stronger American community.; and in sum,
  
• Promote a more inclusive and just democratic system in societies characterized by deep diversity.

The first activity of the project was an Advisory Committee Meeting involving leading scholars and pracititioners. A full report is available here.

Click this link to download a document containing a list of the members of the newly-formed Advisory Committee. (Word .doc 39K)