This Time It’s All of Us
By Sahar Driver
History has shown again and again that when people come together and find common cause–despite differences in their racial and ethnic identities, religious beliefs, class backgrounds, citizenship, ability, and other histories and experiences–change is unstoppable. This is also the organizing principle of Color Congress for the documentary field and it is why we invited the National Multicultural Alliance to be the first members to speak with us at our June Member Meetup.
Despite the popularity of documentary film of late and the demand for nonfiction content in the commercial realm, public media is still the primary funder of documentary work in this country. And it is thanks to the work of the National Multicultural Alliance (NMCA) that public media is also a key way that filmmakers of color get their works made and seen.
The NMCA is made up of five distinct organizations who focus on bringing their communities’ diverse perspectives to public media: Black Public Media (BPM), the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB), Pacific Islanders in Communication (PIC), and Vision Maker Media. The earliest members of the Alliance emerged out of the Civil Rights Movement and Third World liberation struggles, with later members arising out of the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. All were responding to the fundamental truth that the stories that circulate in society about a community will shape how society treats that community. All understood the importance of being able to see honest representations of themselves on screen and to be able to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Over the last 45 years, these five organizations have supported tremendous storytelling coming out of their communities and shaping culture in important ways. Some of the works they named during the June Member Meetup as particularly important for their communities included the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987), which became an important touch-point for Asian American civil rights across Asian American identities; Unnatural Causes… Is Inequality Making Us Sick (2008) a four-hour series examining and popularizing the science showing that race and class can have a greater impact on health than genetics or behaviors; and America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa, which launched in 2012, an investigative news program focused on the growing number of Asian, Latinx, African American, mixed race, immigrant, and LGBT people, women, and youth who make up the new American mainstream and the first on show on PBS to be both executive produced and anchored by a Latina woman.
Public Media, unlike commercial platforms, has a mandate to represent and serve diverse communities. In other words, whereas commercial entities can and often do make funding and distribution decisions based on the market, public media is legally bound to support and distribute storytelling that reflects the diversity of our nation and ensure it is universally accessible to all of the public. So, despite challenges to uphold this mandate, this makes it a particularly valuable home for NMCA organizations to focus their efforts.
It was interesting to learn that the National Multicultural Alliance did not start as a coalition. Instead, over the years, their respective organizations increasingly recognized that they would be much stronger together–when navigating funding challenges or arguing for the support for their distinct communities–if they were collectively working to make the case for why all of their stories should be supported by and through public media. In this way, they’ve been able to collaborate and support one another over the years as they pursue their common goals.
In the conversation, they attributed their success to an attentiveness they have held to the different privileges and access their communities hold relative to one another (including the diversity within their own communities) and navigating those differences carefully.
As the strength and power of our diverse communities grow, we will continue to see pushback, the members of the NMCA reminded us. And despite these being especially challenging times for our communities, the power and potential that exists in this ecosystem of organizations who make up the Color Congress is a source of strength and inspiration for me. It was a gift to have the opportunity to learn from leaders who have been holding a collective vision of change for a long while. And it was especially affirming to hear that they too see in our membership a potent collective force for change.
