Creating Africa in America. Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
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The CWC was formed in 1997 as a spin-off of a foundation-funded demonstration project called here the Cultural Health Initiative (CHI).6 The healthcare foundation supported the CHI for two years (from 1995 to 1996) as an experiment to see if a grassroots approach to health care could reverse the high incidences of infant deaths, hypertension, diabetes, homicide, and other lifestyle-related ailments that plague this community. CHI convened several community-based committees called “Citizen Health Action Teams,” or CHATs, which met during this formative stage to design a community-based health center. CHATs focused on both culturally specific issues—for example, defining an African philosophy for health and wellness—and general concerns such as defining a healthy person and community. CHATs represented the diversity of the CWC’s Powderhorn constituency. The goal of these CHAT meetings was to design a health center in which all Powderhorn people felt some sense of ownership. Although staff and volunteers elaborated and refined programs during this research, these formative CHAT proceedings defined all of the cultural wellness approaches described and analyzed in this study, including the CWC’s mission, its program design, spatial philosophy and layout, and what it called “the people theory,” a grassroots model of health and wellness, as well as related program principles and strategies.
In addition to describing the official program and mission of the CWC, this study also uses ethnographic methods to explicate the underlying folk theories of health, wellness, and identity that inform the CWC’s public discourse. While the CWC was a grassroots organization, its mission and programs, of course, evolved within a broader set of power relations. This study describes how the wider sociopolitical climate and CWC African diversity dynamics mutually inform each other.
As a comparatively new and relatively small-budget nonprofit organization, the CWC had a full-time, all female staff of only six people and ten to fifteen part-time instructors (mostly women with about five men) who taught specialty classes (for example, African dance and other classes featured in this study) on either a pro bono or contractual basis. Staff positions included an executive director, a medical director (who was also a physician), an office manager, two cultural healers (who were also licensed social workers), and an administrative assistant (who was also a cultural healer).7 As is typical of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, the CWC had a volunteer board which set program policy. The CWC also housed self-help groups from various communities, for example, a Laotian women’s support group, which had sources of funding independent of the CWC but, in exchange for helping to pay rent and other expenses, may have utilized office equipment, participated in other CWC programs, and/or received general CWC administrative services such as accounting and fiscal agency for foundation grants.8 Augmenting the capacity of its full-time staff, board, and part-time instructors was a large network of special-project volunteers from the community, for example, members of CHATs, medical doctors, and other professionals who were members of advisory committees, such as an evaluation committee and a health and wellness policy committee. These committees also shaped CWC program direction. The staff, board, and volunteers reflected the ethnocultural diversity of the Powderhorn community where the CWC was based. Although the majority of board and special-project volunteers were women, there were significant numbers of men working in these capacities.9 Thus, the CWC, through its volunteer network, had an effective reach and capacity that extended far beyond its small staff.10
Anthropologists have been criticized for focusing their studies on disenfranchised populations and exhorted to “study up,” that is, include those who hold power in their research for a more complete understanding of the formation and operation of sociopolitical and cultural systems (Weatherford 1985; Herzfeld 1987). It became evident early in the research that although the CWC focused on the Powderhorn planning district, which included several of the poorest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities region, it worked across a diverse social network that brought together, in sometimes very direct ways, some of the metropolitan area’s poorest residents with the region’s most powerful people, who included foundation funders, wealthy donors, politicians, and public servants. As I better understood the socioeconomic background of the CWC’s African participants, it became clear that although they were working with low-income constituents, the leadership which organized and implemented CWC programs and related efforts would probably be classified by most people as middle class.
One of the many challenges of this study was that I initially set out to understand the broader dynamics of identity and community formation among people of African descent, inclusive of diverse class backgrounds. However, including a broad sample of class backgrounds, particularly among African immigrants, proved difficult. The most active CWC participants tended to be well-educated people who were fluent in both their native language (often in addition to at least one other African and/or European language) and English. They tended to be more established immigrants who had some post-secondary education, professional careers, and had lived in the United States for at least five years. However, there seemed to be more class variation among African American participants than their African counterparts. For example, several African American participants in the CWC’s network held very prominent leadership positions in either the public, corporate, or nonprofit sectors. I did not meet any African participants who held such positions. This was probably a function of their status as relative newcomers. The average age of African and African American participants was about thirty-six, with a range from the early twenties to late sixties. A conscientious effort was made to include intergenerational diversity in the research.
As will become evident in the presentation of the ethnographic data, the CWC’s leadership often acted as intermediaries or agents—cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic—for people of African descent (immigrant and United States-born) of lesser financial means, education, international exposure, or experience negotiating American institutions. For example, several of the CWC African immigrant leaders who shared their migration stories and opinions about African identity formation acted as volunteer interpreters and providers of various social services to people from their community. They helped people with fewer resources and less knowledge of American society navigate the various bureaucracies they needed to understand for survival: for example, by helping with a job interview, working with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrange for emigration of relatives; accompanying them on doctors appointments; or working as a liaison with attorneys, social workers, schools, and so forth. Indeed, in many instances African immigrants saw this kind of support as their personal responsibility. This same role of cultural or bureaucratic intermediary was also prevalent among African American CWC leaders with both African immigrants and lower-income African Americans.
Most CWC leaders of African descent, at the staff, board, and special-project levels, were women. While I cannot offer any conclusive statements about why this was the case, it did seem that part of the CWC’s ideology was that identity and community building—defined by the CWC as working to strengthen connections to heritage—was “women’s work,” the actual term often used by the CWC leadership. Therefore, partly by design, across all constituent groups, the CWC leadership and most active participants tended to be mostly, though not exclusively, female. Several active African and European male participants took special note of the many occasions where they were among only a few men in CWC workshops, classes, or other activities.
The CWC was not part of any national initiative. Although the CWC was one of about six local nonprofits working to explicitly promote some version of pan-African identity, such groups were not part of a broader, organized movement. In the context of the Twin Cities’ vibrant and relatively large nonprofit sector, the GWC, as a new organization, had a relatively low profile. Groups like the CWC represent a highly creative, local response to global cultural dynamics in the Twin Cities.11
Given the unique work and particular sociodemographic background of the CWC’s African and African American network, it was not possible to make conclusive generalizations about an identity or community formation process that applied to the Twin Cities metropolitan region’s entire African diasporan population. Nonetheless, the CWC provided an important lens on the region’s broader identity dynamics. With the limitations and contours of the “sample population” in mind, the CWC’s diverse African and African American network, its strong support from the philanthropic and public sectors, and its location in one of the most ethnically diverse and immigrant-populated