America is changing: we have a black president, increasing diversity in the ranks of the nation’s CEOs, and a new generation seemingly at ease with racial and other differences. And a lot more change is in the works: by 2042, the county will be majority-minority, by 2023 the majority of those under the age of 18 will be youth of color, and this year or next will the first (but not the last) in which the majority of births in the U.S. will be to black, Latino and Asian parents.

It’s enough to make pundits wax about a new “post-racial” era in which race and ethnicity are less salient as social and political categories. But despite what is surely a startling shift in attitudes (Tea Party undertones notwithstanding), the income gap between African Americans and Latinos on the one hand and whites on the other has remained stable since the mid-1970s, even as the recent wave of foreclosures has shattered the wealth of those homeowners, disproportionately of color, who came late to the housing boom.

So why, then, the “post-racial” appeal? Part of it, of course, stems from the hope that some of America’s thorniest problems — the residues of slavery, Jim Crow, and racially restrictive immigration laws — will just go away. Part of it is that race is difficult to talk about: whites with the best intentions worry that they will say the wrong thing while people of color resent it when they are seen through the sole prism of their skin and not their full identities.

Stepping in where only the brave (and perhaps the foolish) dare to tread, Angela Glover Blackwell, Stewart Kwoh, and I have just completed Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future. It’s actually an update — and a substantial one since the world has changed — from an earlier volume commissioned in 2001 by the American Assembly, a leadership forum originally founded by Dwight Eisenhower.

The title is intentional: we argue that too often, leaders seek the lowest common denominator, either in the politics of racial division or in securing agreement on only the broadest and vaguest statements about our common national interest. Instead, we suggest that we should seek the highest common ground — the place where principled disagreements and uncomfortable conversations lead to real breakthroughs on policy and politics.

That’s territory familiar to those who have sought to lead in America’s metropolitan areas. After all, the demographic change the nation will soon experience has already washed over many of our larger metros. And building bridges to create a shared regional identity between diverse communities — white and non-whites, cities and suburbs, business and labor — is just part of the job description for those forging new metropolitan coalitions.

The challenge we pose in this book, however, involves keeping race in that mix — not to create grievance and separation but rather to “get race up front to get it behind.” While the traditional argument has been that lifting up racial and ethnic differences could alienate white voters, the changing demographics mean that people of color also need to be “seen” in the conversations we have and the political signals we send. The risk of alienation, in short, needs to be balanced against the risk of “undermobilization”.

Moreover, race still matters. In a striking experiment just as the Iraq War was staring in 2003, researchers responded to Internet ads for apartments in Los Angeles County using names that sounded white, black or Arabic. Ninety percent of the white names were invited to visit and apply in person while only two-thirds of Arabic names received an invitation. The kicker: black names were even less favored.

But it’s not just the continuing possibility of direct discrimination. Race matters precisely because continuing racial and spatial disparities are key — although often unidentified and unexamined — elements in nearly every challenge our metro areas face.

Poor educational systems chasing away businesses? Addressing this requires that we specifically target African American and Latino outcomes to strengthen the quality of the future labor force. Neighborhood safety a concern? Part of the solution lies in reducing the criminalization of minority youth that traps them in the judicial system and promoting successful community-based reentry programs for those leaving prison. Immigrants triggering concerns by long-term residents? Calming local nerves requires an emphasis on how immigrants also revitalize distressed areas and the development of policies to promote faster immigrant integration. Climate change got you thinking about Smart Growth? Let’s be honest: to make it work, we need to address the underlying racial and class tensions that have promoted and maintained sprawl.

It is also from America’s metros that we are seeing some of the most innovative approaches to dealing with the civil rights issues of the 21st Century. Just think of how New York’s Harlem Children’s Zone is improving childhood education, of how Oakland’s Green for All is pioneering an equitable approach to a green economy, of how Chicago’s Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) is linking city and suburban residents to support immigrant integration.

It’s no surprise that these organizations and their metros are leading: for many of them, 2042 is already here. Our hope is that Uncommon Common Ground can build upon this regional wisdom and offer a solid foundation for advancing racial equity. The book includes a wealth of the latest data on racial attitudes, racial progress, and racial challenges as well as model solutions. Above all we hope that we offer a new model of conversation and clear-headed analysis that can help heal the wounds of the past and set a firmer agenda for a more inclusive America.

Manuel Pastor is a co-author of Uncommon Common Ground. For more information on the book, go to: http://college.usc.edu/pere/publications/uncommon_common_ground.cfm.

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It’s always great to complete a new book. And my new co-authored volume — This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America — is surely no exception.

But this book feels particularly satisfying because — oddly enough — it’s not the book we meant to write.

I’d set out out three years ago to catalog “best practices” in the field of regional equity — the various attempts by non-profits, government agencies, and some business leaders to insure that all communities get to share in successful regional economies. Joining in the research adventure were two long-time colleagues — Chris Benner, previously the research director at Working Partnerships, a labor-affiliated think tank in the Silicon Valley, and Martha Matsuoka, now a professor but once an environmental justice organizer for Urban Habitat in the San Francisco Bay Area.

All three of us had been early proponents of regional equity. Chris helped to push for living wage laws in San Jose. Martha worked for regional tax-sharing in the Bay Area. And I collaborated with L.A.-based groups to place inner city youth in jobs in the entertainment industry. Along with such groups as PolicyLink in Oakland, we had been boosters of mutually supportive regional connections. And we were all starting to feel a bit guilty.

What, after all, had people done with all our advice to “go regional”? We knew that it was harder than it looked: making regionalism real to struggling communities was a challenge, and collaborating at the regional level required a new set of skills. Plus, low-income advocates were always afraid that their voice would be diluted in regional discussions.

It’s hard out there for a regionalist, we thought, and so we sheepishly set up to survey the progress — or perhaps the damage we and others had inadvertently caused in response to our suggestion of a whole new approach to community development.

What we did find was as surprising to us as it may be to others. There was no shortage of best practices in terms of real estate development, job training, and regional planning. But — that wasn’t what practitioners were focused on or wanted to talk about.

Leaders of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, architects of the nation’s first Community Benefits Agreement, might be expected to dwell on the arcane but critical details of zoning and entitlements they’d mastered — even becoming as expert in as the lawyers negotiating on the other side. But they had a broader interest now — how “community benefits” reframes the nature and purpose of development, and leads to quite new coalitions.

When we talked with the organizers of MOSES, an interfaith group in Detroit, and out came an erudite exposition of why one needs to reform voting power in the regional transit authority, along with an emphasis on”fix it first” priorities in infrastructure spending (you’d think you were talking to Brookings experts!). But stick around long enough and the talk turns to how the group’s broader goal is to repair the divide between rich and poor, black and white, city and suburb.

What we’d stumbled on was not simply a field of new practices to gain fairer treatment. It was a social movement in the making.

What struck us most were the social movement regionalists who focused on organizing communities, building power, and changing the narrative of disconnection that has allowed poverty to flourish in so many different locations in our metropolitan landscapes. They are not seeking a new housing project, a new jobs program, or a new way of taxing: they are actively trying to reshape America.

And they are winning. When others were decrying a rightward turn in the country, they were demonstrating a different path with the passage of living wages and community benefits agreements. When others were pessimistic that Washington would ever address climate change, they were forging agreements to curtail sprawl and support public transit. When others were dismayed by the growing polarization in the country, they were working effectively with business leaders to forge new job training programs to rescue both workers and regions.

We realize this is a bold view. When we first presented it to one crowd in early 2007, we faced a sharp push back. We quickly asked the group to name the most exciting politician in America. The answer came back: Barack Obama, with the explanation that he could connect us to each other and to our higher selves. We pushed back ourselves: why do you think he can connect like that? To which we were reminded that he was a community organizer with the Gamaliel network in Chicago, just as they were starting to experiment with regional equity as a strategy to connect suburbanites and rural residents with city dwellers.

This is not the book we meant to write — it’s the one we discovered in the writing. And it suggests a future — of inclusive and sensible politics and policies — a future we hope will continue to bubble up from our regions to our nation in the years ahead.

Manuel Pastor’s e-mail address is mpastor@college.usc.edu. He is Professor of Geography and American Studies and Ethnicity and Director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California. The Cornell University Press is publisher of his Pastor’s coauthored book — This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America.

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It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. We have elected the first president in decades from urban America–and he seems to get the regionalist mantra. Running a campaign that tied together voters from cities and suburbs, he promoted a metropolitan prosperity agenda in place of the usual anti-poverty bromides. He coupled that with a commitment to social justice born from his early experience working for an interfaith group that was part of the Gamaliel Foundation, a network that has “regional equity” at the heart of its community organizing.

Yet, the incoming president also faces a tough economy and a propensity for some to say that smart planning for social inclusion is a luxury we can ill afford in a time of economic crisis. This is exactly wrong: we are only as strong as our weakest link. And there’s little doubt that the distributional excesses of the last decade are at least partly to blame for the mess we are in.

It is tempting to put inclusion to one side. Traditional economic theory has often posed a seemingly intractable trade-off between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting what’s good for one may be bad for another. In hard times like these, business and politicians argue, the constraint is especially tight: we need to celebrate the creation of any job.

But a spate of research on America’s metropolitan regions suggests we can and should aim higher–that those metros that make more progress on reducing poverty, segregation, and inequality actually grow faster.

In one sense, this is no surprise: it’s exactly the desperation, separation, and isolation of some communities that has caused these places to underinvest and fall behind. And the national parallel seems clear: our financial crisis was preceded by widening disparities that drove people to borrow to stay afloat, our foreclosure crisis was triggered in part because segregation and sprawl drove new homeowners to the hinterlands, and our current economic crisis reflects our inability to compete, partly because we have neglected basic infrastructure and education.

But we can also learn from the new regional efforts of the last decade to find a positive national path.

First, we need to recognize the importance of just plain talking. Many regional efforts of recent years have seemed to be just so much speechifying–a good friend labels them an “endless series of conferences.” But new regional dialogues–face-to-face, race-to-race, and place-to-place–have also created fertile terrain for finding common ground. And strikingly, this is exactly the sort of message of shared fate and cross-constituency organizing that Obama found resonated in his campaign.

Second, business needs to embrace the possibilities of a “bottoms up” approach. Regional examples of this abound: business organizations like Chicago Metropolis 2020 have pushed hard for affordable housing; business-philanthropic initiatives like the Fund for Our Economic Future in Northeast Ohio have stressed the need to support and grow minority business. We need to translate to the nation this regionalist understanding that firms do well when they partner with disadvantaged constituencies, invest in workforce development and accept the sort of employment and community standards that can lift everyone up together.

Third, community and labor groups need to evolve their own perspectives, moving beyond economic justice to just economics. It’s all well and good to secure community benefits when benefits are to be made. But a serious approach to growth requires understanding sector clusters, supporting selective investments in infrastructure, and working hard to connect low-skill residents with economic development opportunities. Here, too, the regions offer reason for hope–such groups as the labor-affiliated Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy have coalesced environmental and community allies to support the growth of a trade industry vital to the future of Southern California businesses.

Can we bubble up these regional efforts to a new national consensus on the importance of conversation, competitiveness, and cohesion?

Three years ago, I set off with two other researchers to interview on-the-ground leaders who were blending regional growth and social equity. We initially hoped to offer a sort of “best practices” handbook. But we soon found that the best of these advocates were not really in it for a transit stop or a housing project or an urban boundary. They were instead hoping to refashion our understanding of public life, the connections between communities, and the ways in which our fates are intertwined.

Arguing that these new efforts could jump from the region to the nation, becoming an antidote to the corrosive politics affecting Washington, we called the book (forthcoming early next year) This Could Be the Start of Something Big. It was an overambitious title, to be sure, and, anxious for a convincing close, we ended our first draft (back in January 2007) by highlighting an obscure Illinois Senator and how he had found his own language of cohesion while still a community organizer focused on issues of inclusion and economic recovery.

Today’s exciting possibility: that vision of a fairer and more sustainable society, built from our communities and regions up, may guide a whole nation.

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