Prologue to a Diasporan Journey

      Suddenly a woman, who seemed African American, stood up in the middle of a moderated session at a daylong conference called “Understanding African Refugees in Our Community.” Dressed in a West African factory-print head tie with bubba and wrapper, her emotionally charged plea suggests the debates about African diasporan identity occurring in Minnesota, which, according to the 2000 Census has the most diverse Black population in the nation: “If you want to build bridges, then look at me as African. When you look at me, you see the spirit of Africa. Look at me as an African; I am not here by choice. Politically, I’m African American; but in my soul and spirit, I’m African.”¹

      After her statement, there was an uncomfortable silence across the diverse audience comprised mostly of African immigrants, and White and Black Americans. Before her declaration, the three-hundred-person audience of community activists, foundation staff, and public servants was having a polite discussion. The session moderator was the director of a Washington, D.C. based African immigrant advocacy organization who was also a Zimbabwean immigrant. The theme of his speech was the need for various African immigrant groups to “build bridges” with African American civil rights groups, as both African immigrants and African Americans are affected by racial discrimination. After the stunned silence, a heated exchange ensued prompted by a question from an African American grant maker about how foundations should address factionalism in the Twin Cities’ African immigrant community. An Ethiopian immigrant and locally well-known community activist argued for recognizing the various factions and funding nonprofit organizations to support them: “You can’t expect people to suddenly come to America and forget!” The African American foundation grant maker argued that factions could not be accepted: “In America, we should require that you serve everyone—regardless of clan or tribe—we should apply the same standard.”

      The Twin Cities have recently become a crossroads in the global flow of people, ideas, symbols, and capital that increased immigration to the United States has produced. Attracted largely by the metropolitan region’s strong economy, the region has the largest Somali, Hmong, and urban Native American populations in the United States. It also has growing numbers of Chicano, Latino, and Russian immigrants as well as a sizable Tibetan community.² The region’s profound demographic changes have even caught the attention of the national media. Within the past few years, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have all had prominent front-page articles on these profound demographic changes.

      The Stockholm of America, this city of lutefisk and liberals has long boasted a tradition of generous social programs and enlightened views on American race relations. But for all the proudly progressive attitudes, only a tiny percentage of blacks actually lived in Minnesota, a place where a mixed marriage once meant the union of a Swede and a Norwegian.

      That monochromatic fabric has been changing swiftly. Migration of Blacks, especially those in poverty, has been stronger in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area than in any other urban center in the North. And other groups, especially Hmong, Somalis and Ethiopians, most of them refugees brought to Minnesota by religious groups, have become a growing part of the city’s ethnic mix.

      The demographic changes in the land of Lake Wobegone³ are a striking illustration of the ethnic and racial shift that is remaking the nation. And the new mix, particularly the growth among poor blacks from Chicago, is testing the mettle of Minnesota liberalism and changing the texture of the political debate, as civic leaders grapple with issues of race, class, and crime that most other big American cities were forced to confront long ago.⁴

      Leaving aside the article’s implied equation of increased racial diversity with crime and a more general sense of social chaos and danger, this excerpt provides a good overall sense of the issues of race, poverty, and diversity, which are very much at the forefront of Twin Cities public discourse and politics.⁵ Concurrent with the increasing settlement of African-born and African American peoples in the Twin Cities, there have been increasing racial disparities on a range of socioeconomic indicators. Despite the relative economic vitality of the region, until the post-September 11 economic downturn, the Twin Cities had been suffering from a critical shortage of skilled labor. Unemployment rates were below the national average—about 2 percent—but many newcomers did not have the skills necessary to fill the plentiful open positions that paid competitive livable wages. Although there was a low overall unemployment rate, the unemployment rate was much higher for people of color.⁶ According to recent census data, four out of every ten African Americans in urban Minnesota live in poverty. This is the highest rate among the nation’s twenty-five largest cities. As a result of these and other socioeconomic factors, including segregation, there is an increasing concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities that is especially affecting communities of color (powell 1999:1; Harrison and Weinberg 1992).⁷

      Local social service agencies and the business community, including the many multinational corporations that have Twin Cities headquarters (e.g., 3M and General Mills), have attempted to adjust to the profoundly increased cultural diversity of their customers and workers through the promotion of cultural sensitivity training, specialized employee recruitment efforts, and support of job training and other community development initiatives sponsored by their corporate philanthropy programs. This relatively well-off community is now grappling with perceived convergences of race, class, and poverty that other cities began to confront years ago. Counterbalancing this intensifying concentration of poverty is Minnesota’s vibrant nonprofit and philanthropic sector. The state is generally recognized as having one of the highest levels of philanthropy; innovative, nonprofit activism; and civic participation in the United States.⁸

      The Twin Cities, and by extension many of its most diverse neighborhoods, are fast becoming translocalities in Appadurai’s (1996:192) sense of the term. The region, while certainly not on the scale of a New York City or London, is emerging as a world city at the nexus of a global flow of people, ideas, and resources. Everyday social life is at once local and global.

      This study examines how a neighborhood-based nonprofit attempts to create a sense of locality in a place where residents may have community affiliations that crosscut the globe.⁹ In this book, my forum for exploring how Africans and Americans are addressing the cultural implications of these changing demographics is the Cultural Wellness Center (CWC). The CWC is a community-based, Minneapolis nonprofit that is deliberately attempting to create a shared sense of community across the diverse new and native-born ethnic groups that now inhabit the Twin Cities metropolitan region.

      Exploration of Minnesota’s active construction of new African identities is my most recent leg is an almost twenty-year journey as a practitioner-scholar in the nonprofit sector. During this time, mostly in Nigeria and several North American cities, I have had vexing encounters that blur the lines between what would be considered African and American, or European. In many ways this work is a meditation on the multiple intellectual and personal epiphanies I had along the way. It chronicles the experiences of Twin Cities residents who shared with me their transformative insights as they struggled to adjust to American society on their own cultural terms. It represents a new phase of my understanding of the impact of the global flow of culture through African peoples.¹⁰ It is next to impossible to understand contemporary Africa outside of this flow, and the influences manifest themselves in ways that anthropologists are just beginning to acknowledge and understand. Not only are African peoples mixing the constituent parts of cultures, such as American music, dance, and aesthetics and other influences, to create new practices and identities; this creativity also occurs at a metacultural level. The very theories and models of identity such as culture, race, and ethnicity employed by anthropologists and other social scientists are often also being studied and deliberately reconstructed by everyday African people in this culture-building enterprise.

      One of my first experiences of the impact of global cultural dynamics on Africa was as an undergraduate student in African studies at Georgetown University in the early 1980s. I did my first anthropological study from 1982 to 1983 as an exchange student at Ọbáfémi Awólọ́wọ́ University in Ilé Ifẹ̀, Nigeria.¹¹ The study concerned