kusow 2006 somali immigrants racial formation

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Migration and Racial FormationsAmong Somali Immigrantsin North America

Abdi M. Kusow

Early writers on migrants in North America such as Bryce-Laporte (1972) lamented the

lack of research on black immigrants, referring to them as invisible immigrants. Since

then, both the volume of research on foreign-born blacks as well as their share of the

overall black population in North America have risen dramatically. This increase signals

that the black population in North America is a diverse group increasingly identifying

themselves more by culture and/or nationality than by skin colour. Using qualitative

research methods, this project focuses on the disjuncture between how one set of black

immigrants*/Somalis*/understand blackness in their homelands and how it is defined

in North America. The findings reveal the problematics of racial categories and confirmthe situational nature of racial identities. The results of this study are not substantially

confined to African immigrants alone, but carry both theoretical and conceptual

significance for the development, maintenance and consequences of racial formations in

North America.

Keywords: Migration; Racial Formations; Blackness; Somali Immigrants; Identity

Introduction

The demographic context within which contemporary immigration to North

America takes place is substantially and theoretically different from earlier eras.

Due to changes in the immigration laws in 1965, which shifted the main source

region of immigrants from primarily Europe to Latin America, Asia and Africa, along

with high fertility rates among ethnic and racial groups and increased interracial

marriages, North America is presently in the midst of a significant racial

demographic transformation. It is moving from a largely white and a small black

Abdi M. Kusow is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oakland University, Rochester. Correspondence to Prof.

A.M. Kusow, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Vol. 32, No. 3, April 2006, pp. 533 /551


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population to a society with a large number of foreign-born ethnic and racial

communities (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Pollard and OHare 1999; Tienda 2002;

Waters 2000; for a similar discussion about Canada see Dyck 2001).

The changing racial and ethnic profile of the North American population,

particularly the increase in the number of non-white foreign-born immigrants,introduces a new sociological moment in which non-white immigrants not only

bring their homeland racial and cultural identities, but also redefine the meaning of

racial categories from the historically and contemporaneously normative black/white

dichotomy to a situation of multiple and hybrid identity categories (Bhabha 1994;

Gilroy 1993). Moreover, the shift in the demographic transition of the North

American people has increased the level of heterogeneity within each ethnic and

racial group with the implication that pan-ethnic identities such as Hispanic

American, Asian American, or African American no longer capture realities on the

ground. One understudied, but critical area is the increasing diversity within theblack population in North America and its potential to transform the meaning of

blackness from skin-colour categories to a culturally and nationality-based ones.

Using data from Somali immigrants in both Canada and the United States, this

paper describes an empirical instance in which the North American-based meaning

of blackness or colour-based racial categories are contested and redefined with a

different social classification system that does not acknowledge blackness as a

meaningful category for social stratification. I am specifically interested in describing

the disjuncture between how contemporary black immigrants, particularly Somalis,

understand blackness in their own homeland and how it is defined in North America.

The main question raised here is: How do immigrants who migrate from societies

that do not historically and culturally employ colour-based racial categories negotiate

identities in situations where colour-based systems of classification are the primary

source of social stratification? I pursue answers to this question on the premise that

blackness, or any other social category, cannot be understood without considering the

historical, cultural and political contexts within which categories of social under-

standing are constituted.

Conceptualising Racial Categories

The sociological debate concerning meaning of racial categories has been dominated

by whether or not race is biologically or socially constructed. The biological

perspective operates from the assumption that racial groups are imbued with

physical, mental and moral abilities as a result of actual genetic differences. The social

constructionist perspective, on the other hand, contends that racial categories are

culturally and socially produced, and that they vary over historical eras and across

cultural and historical contexts (Espiritu 1992; Lieberman and Reynolds 1996; Nagel

1994). Lieberman and Reynolds, for example, trace the history and construction of

the concept of race and point out that it did not exist prior to the seventeenth

century. They identify three phases through which it has been debated historically.

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The first phase centred on whether human beings descended from one or several

origins. The second phase was consumed by whether human beings were equal

intellectually, while the third phase was dominated by the deconstruction of the first

two phases. Thus, starting with the Chicago Schools ethnic and immigrant studies

(Park 1928; Park and Burgess 1924; Thomas and Znaniecki 1927), the idea of race as asocial phenomenon has become a sociological truism. Today, almost all social

scientists treat race as a socially constructed phenomenon.

The problem with the social constructionist perspective is that it de-emphasises the

reality that race has been by far the central issue dividing American society. In order

to account for this shortcoming, Omi and Winant (1986) introduce what they call a

theory of racial formations. The racial formations concept is based on the

assumption that race is the most important organising category of social under-

standing in the United States, and is maintained simultaneously through the

competitive interactions between state agencies and minority groups agitating forsocial change. Since Omi and Winants Racial Formations, calls by sociologists and

anthropologists for employing race as a central analytical category for understanding

society have gained momentum. Thus Harrison (1998: 616) writes, Within the past

several years, a racially cognizant anthropology has clearly been revitalized as

evidenced in a proliferation of scholarship that directly and explicitly addresses issues

of race and racism. And Ong (1996) pointed out that, because of the nature of

European imperialism, which in essence categorised human societies on the basis

of biological features into certain hierarchies, race became the basis of various forms

of discrimination. According to Ong (1996: 751), the dynamics of racial othering

emerges in a range of mechanisms that variously subject non-white immigrants towhitening and blackening processes that indicate the degree of their closeness to or

distance from the ideal white standards. Ongs articulations that immigrants in North

America are organised along the dominant racial dichotomies tacitly assume that

those who are categorised along such lines readily accept this process.

This way of conceptualising race is possible only if the meaning of blackness and

whiteness is derived from an American system of social classification. To the extent

that blackness and whiteness are defined in terms of the American classification

system, then the idea of blackening and whitening, or skin-colour-based racial

stratification in general, can be made comprehensible. However, if the meanings ofthese categories are examined from mutually incomprehensible systems of classifica-

tions, then the issue of Who is black? (Davis 1991) becomes conceptually

problematic.

Reflecting that problematic, a small but growing number of researchers have

alluded to the existence of a conceptual gap between how blackness is defined in the

United States and in other parts of the world (Charles 1992, Essed 1991; Foner 1987;

Kusow 1998; Laquire 1998; Maines and Kusow 2001; Stafford 1987). Charles (1992:

101) asserts that the multiple identity categories displayed by Haitian immigrants in

the United States represent an expression of the different meanings of blackness that

inform the consciousness and identity of the Haitian immigrants. Foner (1987),

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 535


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writing about Jamaican immigrants in New York city, points out that these

immigrants reject blackness by appealing to ethnic-based identity categories that

emphasise Jamaicanness or West Indianness as a way of distinguishing themselves

from African Americans. Others (e.g. Stafford 1987) have likewise pointed out that

whiteness and blackness have different symbolic meanings for Haitian and Americansocieties, particularly in terms of how to determine who is and who is not black.

Moreover, Haitians tend to claim that they do not understand skin-colour-based

derogatory terms, they ignore any discriminatory acts against them, and tend to

regard the United States system of racial classification as illegitimate.

One of the earliest elaborations of the existence of black ethnics is found in

Woldemikael (1989), and more recently in Mary Waters (1999) book, Black

Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realties. Using the

experiences of Caribbean immigrants along with a sample of native blacks and

whites, Waters reveals how these immigrants view racial identity placements andannouncements in ways that are different from those employed in America. This is

because the nature of racial formations in the West Indies is substantially different

from America. This difference in the racial worldview allows West Indian immigrants

to the United States to transcend the black/white binary opposition categories and

embrace cultural and/or nationality-based identities. Mary Waters as well as Tekle

Woldemikaels research on black identities clearly shows how the process of

conceptualising race along skin-colour lines undermines the experiences of black

ethnics*/there is an increasing number of black immigrants who identify themselves

more in terms of culture and/or nationality than by skin colour.

One shortcoming of the research on Caribbean and South American blackimmigrants is that racial classification in these regions cannot be considered as

radically different from that of the Unites States. This is not to deny the fact that

racial classification in the Caribbean is more complex than the hegemonic black/

white categories found in the United States; social stratification in many parts of the

West Indies is derived from the intersection between a continuous gradation of skin

colour and class. However, it is also true that Haitians and other black immigrants

from the Caribbean historically tend to accept the ranking of whiteness as superior to

blackness, and privileged segments of these societies have traditionally been fair-

skinned (Charles 1992; Woldemikael 1989).The above studies, particularly Woldemikael (1989) and Waters (1999), provide a

solid starting point for the further elaboration of the culturally mediated nature of

blackness in the experience of contemporaryAfricanimmigrants. African-born black

immigrants embody a radically different classification system and identity categories

to those available in North America. That is, while blackness is a meaningful

identification category for American society, it does not necessarily carry a similar

meaning for contemporary African immigrants. Thus, once we understand that

contemporary African immigrants, as Odim-Johnson (2000: 59) puts it, have created

much of the old country in the new and in ways not available to those who preceded

them through the Atlantic slave trade, a whole new approach to understanding the

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mediated nature of blackness becomes possible. It is that very possibility that I have

sought in my research on Somali immigrants.

Methods and Data

The central question that guides this paper is as follows. How do African-born black

immigrants from societies where skin colour does not represent an important

category of social understanding negotiate identities in situations where skin colour is

the primary category of social differentiation? I collected the original data for the

present study through a combination of purposive and snowball or chain-referral

sampling (Babbie 1992) from 30 Somali immigrants in Toronto in 1996. The data

from the United States is based on two focus groups: one in south-east Michigan and

another consisting of nine participants who lived both in the United States and

Canada for an extended period. The purpose of setting up a focus group consisting of

members who lived in both the United States and Canada was to test whether the

degree and nature of racialisation in Canada are different from the United States. The

data for the United States also include extended participant observation in Lansing,

Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio from 2002 to 2004. These data were augmented with

a substantial degree of analytical auto-ethnographic information derived from the

authors own experience of race in North America.

The primary interview schedule comprised 39 open-ended questions and a fact-

sheet containing socio-demographic questions. The average length of the interviews

ranged from one and a half to two hours and resulted in roughly 20 to 39 double-

spaced type-written transcript pages. I interviewed the Canadian immigrant samplein their home or in agreed-upon locations. The two focus groups were carried out in

2003 and 2004. I carried out the first focus group in a coffee shop in a suburb of

Detroit and it lasted for about one hour and a half. The second focus group took

place in London, Ontario, at an annual social gathering of a group of Somalis who

had lived in both the United States and Canada, and lasted more than two hours.

Unlike the initial data from Toronto in 1996, participants of both focus groups were

men aged 40 /60 years. Also, the participants of the focus groups were relatively more

educated and had lived in North America longer than the participants of the initial

sample from Toronto. The average age of the respondents in all samples ranged from19 to 60. The final sample consisted of 15 females and 26 males. All respondents were

born in an urban area, and nearly 83 per cent graduated from high school before

migrating; 43 per cent graduated from college before migrating and roughly 7 per

cent had a masters degree before leaving Somalia. The high educational achievement

among the migrant sample is not unique to Somalis but is rather a common

characteristic among African-born immigrants in North America. As a whole,

African-born immigrants are among the highest-educated immigrant groups in

North America. When we look at the income level of the respondents, however, we

see a different picture. Almost 57 per cent earn less than $10,000 Canadian dollars per

year and only one person makes $70,000. About 43 per cent of the respondents are



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married. The income distribution of the focus-group participants is very similar to

that of the original sample. The length of time immigrants resided in Canada ranged

from 3 to 23 years.

Some of the main questions I asked include: Have you ever thought about colour-

based identity differentiations in Somalia?, What ethnic or racial group do youconsider yourself in Somalia?, How about Canada or the United States?, Have you

ever experienced colour-based discrimination in Canada or the United States?. The

questions were organised into three heuristic analytical categories: pre-migration

identity contexts, post-migration identity contexts, and reactions to colour-based

identity categories. In all three categories, the narratives used in this paper represent

the responses of the majority of the sample. I transcribed interviews verbatim and

stored them on computer files, assigning an identification number to each case. The

initial coding consisted of a detailed reading of each interview (open coding)

followed by axial and selective coding (Charmaz 1990; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Inthe open-coding phase, I organised the data into discrete units and examined them

for similarities and differences. In other words, I used open coding to fracture data so

as to identify important categories, their properties and dimensions. Once I identified

those, I further examined the data for connections between categories and sub-

categories. This process resulted in the development of the final master categories,

which I used to set the parameters of the overall analysis. Finally, by employing

selective coding, I compared all the categories for similarities and differences until I

found a central theme/category. This resulted in the identification of the following

categories: pre-migration awareness of colour-based racial categories, encountering

colour-based racial categories, and reactions to colour-based racial categories.

Colour-Based Categories in North America

Skin colour, particularly blackness, is one of the principal categories of social

stratification in North America. It is delegated to any person with any visible African

characteristics and determined through what Davis (1991) referred to as the one-

drop rule, meaning that a single drop of black blood makes a person black. This way

of defining blackness has been derived from the dominant American classification

system where skin colour is an important category of social stratification and enjoys,for the most part, a collectively shared understanding by both blacks and whites in

the United States. According to Davis (1991), the one-drop rule has long been taken

for granted throughout the United States by both blacks and whites alike, and the

courts have taken a judicial note of it as being a matter of common knowledge.

It is important to note, however, that, due to changes in the political climate and

the increasing diversity in the racial demographic composition of the American

population over the past few decades, the meaning of the one-drop rule has also

changed in a number of ways. First, the social, political and economic changes

ushered in by the civil rights movement in the 1960s have introduced significant

diversity in the American population, both in physical demography and in social and

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political thinking. Equally important, the economic policy changes that resulted from

the civil rights movement created an increasing number of middle-class African

Americans. These middle-class African Americans have slowly moved out of central

urban areas and very much identity themselves in terms of class categories, to

differentiate themselves from inner-city poor blacks (Anderson 1990). Second,changes in the 1965 immigration laws, which dramatically increased the number

of non-white, non-black immigrants in the United States, have fundamentally

transformed the meaning of colour-based racial categories from simply black and

white to multiple classification systems. Despite these transformations, however, the

United States remains a colour-conscious and racialised society (Waters 1999).

The historical, demographic and ideological frameworks through which the notion

of colour-based racial categories and, more generally, race are conceptualised in

Canada are somewhat different from the United States. Canada is different from the

United States in that it did not experience slavery on its own soil, so it does not havethe same degree of historically-based racial tension and animosity between blacks and

whites. Second, the majority of the black population in Canada resulted from recent

immigration from the Caribbean and more recently Africa. Third, and most

importantly, Canadas cultural and racial ideology is guided, at least officially, by

multiculturalism, as opposed to the assimilationist ideologies commonly associated

with the United States. However, the problem with multiculturalism is that it has

historically been interpreted and implemented in a manner which stripped culture

from its political aspect and implied consensus within the rhetoric of a just society

(Ghosh 2001); it focuses on cultural pluralism instead of social, political and

economic equity. The concentration on cultural pluralism instead of equity translatesinto the unequal treatment of non-white Canadians in all aspects of life. A large body

of research shows that non-white Canadians are disadvantaged in the labour market,

in education, and in their quest to find proper housing (Boyd 1992; Li 2003; Porter

1965; Rajagopal 1990; Reitz and Breton 1994). In fact, Li (2003: 3) argues that,

despite the legal framework of liberal democracy, race is articulated in Canada in

the normative construction of racial differences, in the public discourse of

diversity, and in unequal chances associated with racial origins. According to

Li, such articulation reifies race, reinforces its social import, and hampers the social

inclusion of racialised minorities in Canadian society.More importantly, the fact that racial categories are part of the Canadian social

context is shown in how the 2001 Canadian Census defined visible minority, a

definition not much different from how it is defined in the United States. The

Canadian Census defines visible minority (another way of saying non-white) as the

following:

Visible Minority: The 2001 Census provides information on the characteristics ofpeople in Canada who are members of a visible minority, as defined by theEmployment Equity Act. The Act defines visible minorities as persons, other thanAboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour. Underthis definition, regulations specify the following groups as visible minorities:



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Chinese, South Asians, Blacks, Arabs, West Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians,Latin Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and other visible minority groups such as

Pacific Islanders.

It is true, as Baxter (2003) rightly pointed out, that the definition of visible

minority as used by the Canadian Census is a derived variable in that respondents

are not asked how they define themselves, but Statistics Canada defines people as

being part of the visible minority if they are anything but white or aboriginal.

Regardless of how the data are derived, the effect is the same. The Canadian

definition is not much different from how the United States Census categorises the

ethnic and racial composition of the population. In other words, Canadas cultural

and social ideals, including race relations, are very similar to those of the United

States. As Boatswain and Lalonde (2000: 217) put it: It would be nave to assume that

that the politics of black identity in Canada are not influenced by events and trends

taking place in the United States. For example, similar to the white/non-white

dichotomy in the United States, Canada employs white versus visible minorities. The

two categories, despite differences in appearance, perform the same processes of

exclusion and inclusion. Moreover, in Canada, the notion of blackness is mainly

articulated through Jamaicanness. According to Levin (1988), despite the existence of

white Jamaicans and blacks who are not Jamaicans, in Canada, Jamaicanness has

become a euphemism for black (quoted in Jackson 1998: 28).

Somali Immigrants: Pre-Migration Awareness

The Somali Republic came into being as a sovereign state on 1 July 1960 as a result of

a merger of the former Somaliland Protectorate under British rule, which became

independent from the UK on 26 June 1960, and Italian Somaliland, which became

independent from the Italian-administered UN trusteeship on 1 July 1960. A military

coup led by General Mohamed Siyad Barre toppled the third democratically elected

government on 21 October 1969 and formed a Military Junta. This regime ruled the

country until an all-out civil war forced Siyad Barre to leave the country in 1991.

Within the first two years, the war caused the death, through armed conflict as well as

imposed starvation, of several hundred thousand people, mainly women andchildren. The war also forced another several hundred thousand people to flee the

country and seek refugee in neighbouring African countries as well as the Middle

East, Europe, Canada and the United States. After fifteen years, the country remains

without a legitimate government and Somalis are still arriving in large numbers in the

United States as refugee claimants.

Both in the United States and in Canada, Somalis constitute one of the largest

African-born black Muslim immigrants. Available estimates show that Somalis

comprise one of the top ten sources of refugees in Canada in the 1990s. Roughly

70,000 Somali immigrants reside in Canada, with approximately 23,000 residing in

the Toronto Metropolitan Area. The second largest Somali immigrant community,

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roughly 13,000, is found in Ottawa (Young et al. 1999), while the rest are spread

mainly in others parts of Ontario and in Vancouver.

Estimates of how many Somali immigrants live in the United States range from as

low as 30,000 to as high as 150,000, depending on whether one uses information from

Somali community leaders, local officials, or data from the 2000 census. According tothe US Department of State, nearly 40,000 Somalis have been settled in the United

States since the 1980s (US Department of State 2003), with the majority arriving after

the collapse of the Somali regime in the early 1990s. The discrepancy in the estimates

of the Somali population in the United States may result from the fact that the Somali

immigration is a very recent phenomenon, and that many Somalis may not have

filled out the 2000 census questionnaire. Despite this discrepancy, though, there is a

consensus that Columbus (Ohio) and Minneapolis (Minnesota) have the largest

concentrations of Somali immigrants in the United States.

Unlike North America, however, social stratification as well as cultural identities inSomalia are primarily determined through clanism. Clanism is a system of social

differentiation where membership is determined through shared mythical ancestors

(Kusow 2004a). These narratives serve as the central organising principles for

establishing the social (and symbolic) boundary of who belongs to which ancestor,

when, and how, and ultimately determines the social boundary ofSomaliness. This

system divides the society into so-called nobles and non-nobles. Nobles are those who

claim direct descent from an alleged noble ancestor; non-nobles are those whose

ancestor is accused of having engaged in a non-noble occupation or practiced non-

noble social values. Based on these ideas, certain segments of the society are explicitly

removed from the social boundary of the nation, while others are excluded or

included depending on the prevailing political and power arrangements. However,

clan differentiation, albeit a meaningful category of social understanding and social

differentiation, it is not strictly based on skin colour. This does not mean, however,

that Somalis do not grasp or understand that skin colour is one of the most

important categories of social, political and economic differentiation in the world

today; nor that it does not provide a meaningful category of social understanding in

their own environment.1

The following interview exchange is typical of how Somalis understand and

appropriate social identities in terms of clan categories (tribes in the account) asopposed to colour-based categories:

Author: In Somalia did you ever think about issues related to race, or skincolour?

Enow: No, it never occurred to me, I never even heard about the problemsbetween blacks and whites. Even when I was in India, I never heard

about issues of black and white, or that blacks are the minoritypeople.

Author: What do you think is the reason?Enow: Because we didnt have anybody who was white. All of us were 100 per cent

of the same religion and colour. We never had anybody who was superior



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or inferior in terms of colour. But if you think about ethnicity in terms of

tribes, we had that problem, but not colour.

The above account supports my earlier assertion that clan differentiation, despite

being a meaningful category of social understanding, does not derive its meaningfrom colour-based categories, and that Somalis do not perceive each other in terms of

black and white. This disjuncture exists because, in order for a society to perceive skin

colour as a meaningful category of social understanding, variations in skin tone must

be available in the demographic distribution of the society. In other words, one of the

reasons why skin colour is normatively appropriated in North America is due to the

presence of population segments with different skin tones along with a corresponding

social exclusion and inclusion. In Somalia, however, such a demographic distribution

is not available because almost every member of the society carries a dark skin tone,

and therefore skin tone cannot become part of the social distribution of meaningful

categories (Rawls 1996). Another respondent says:

I used to hear about the racial problems in South Africa and Rhodesia

[now Zimbabwe], but I didnt know anything about the nature of racism in

North America, and I never heard the word racism at all. I heard that your

colour makes some differences in some parts of the world or that some

singers singing about racial issues in America, but I never appreciated what it

meant.

In fact, one of the most important problems that I faced during my fieldwork had to

do with the difficulty of explaining or translating the social meaning of race orethnicity to my respondents. A sizeable number could not readily conceive what I

meant by race or ethnicity in the interview questions. The following interaction with

a 32-year-old female shows what I mean:

Author: How about issues of race?

Huburrow: Back home?

Author: Yeah.

Huburrow: [Hesitated]

Author: Remember, in Canada, we think in terms of black and white.

Huburrow: Right, right, here yes, but there no, no, I never, never, never heard ofthat word before I came to this country, never, race, I have never

heard of that word before. . .

The apparent incomprehensibility of the idea of skin colour as a meaningful category

of social understanding is reflected in the hesitation of the respondent. What is shown

is a passionate and simultaneously honest and innocent voice */one that speaks to

the potential reality discontinuity that individuals face when they are confronted with

decoding social categories that are not available in their cultural narrative resource

(Holstein and Gubrium 1995).

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Encountering Colour-Based Categories

Given the lack of comprehensibility between how North Americans and Somali

immigrants conceive colour-based categories of social understanding, the question

then becomes: How do people who migrate from societies that do not employ

racialised identity categories for social understanding deal with situations where race

is the most important category of understanding social reality? In other words, what

happens to the identities of Somalis when they come to the United States or Canada?

In order to understand this dilemma, we need to conceptualise migration as a social

process where identities as well as physical bodies can migrate together, instead of

mere physical movement of bodies from one location to another (Maines 1978). To

the extent that we accept the possibility of simultaneous body/identity migration, we

can suggest that Somalis are not only crossing borders, but are moving from one

set of social classification systems to another. According to Vila (1997), Mexican

immigrants crossing the border to the United States face a different set of identities aswell as attitudes and behavioural expectations. In Mexico City, for example,

Chilangos are considered a smart and successful ethnic group in the Mexican social

context; however, once they cross the border, they confront the ethnic classification

system of the United States. Because Chilango identity is not available in the local

cultural resources of the United States, the immigrant from south of the border

simply becomes Mexican, Mexican-American, or Hispanic-American depending on

geographic location within the United States. In other words, once in the United

States, a Chilango is no longer seen as smart, but rather as a person without ambition

and perhaps stigmatised as welfare-dependent.Similarly, Somali immigrants in Canada and the United States must confront and

respond to new classification systems. Moreover, these new classification systems are

never positive, but loaded with hegemonic meanings that locate immigrants in a

subordinate identity. Somalis are, of course, aware of the ways in which they are

labelled. Some of them perceive how they are categorised along racial lines, as one

respondent pointed out: I dont think they see us any different from the rest of the

black people. When I asked the respondent how he understood the implication of

this kind of identity placement, he proceeded to say:

Well, I am not a white person, but when I watch TV like the Jenny Jones show andthe like [laugh] they see blacks as dirty that do not want to work. Even if you lookat the dictionary and examine the word black, it says dirty, ignorant, all the negativestuff, at the same time, if you look at white in the same dictionary, you will seeclean, honest, you know. Even the way they describe in the dictionary, you know,instead of them using dirty why not just say black, or colour. Well, you know, somedirt is white too, if you want to see it that way.

The above account indicates, directly or indirectly, that Somali immigrants become

aware of the paramount reality of colour-based categories, as well as the potentially

negative stigma associated with dark skin in North America. Unlike other black

immigrants, however, Somali immigrants constitute one of the first black immigrant



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groups who are not Christian or English-speaking, and who generally operate from a

social value system which is radically different from the dominant Judeo-Christian

value systems in North America. One respondent sums up the complexity and

multiplicity of the nature of identity announcements and placements that Somali

immigrants encounter in North America as follows:

Well, I dont know about the majority, but what I have experienced and seen is, andI dont want to generalise because there are a lot of good people. But what I haveexperienced is a lot of intolerance, a lot of intolerance, and a lot of rejections like

you are not welcome. I am beginning to realise that it has something to do with theidentity and label of colour, having a different heritage, being from a different race,being black and all the above.

Each label has its connection. Remember I gave you some labels and fortunately orunfortunately, I dont know which one of these labels is behind the view. But what

makes things more difficult is that the Somalis are the first blacks in Canada whodo not speak English as opposed to the Caribbeans who used to come to Canadabefore. They [Somalis] are the first blacks who are not Christians. So it is anAfrican, non-Christian, it is an African and Somali. It is an African with a differentreligion and they are black.

We are all Mohammeds and nobody can deal with these Mohammeds. When youwalk into a job interview, before you could say my name is . . .that perceptionis already there. On top of that you say my name is Mohammed and you havethis heavy accent and you say Somali, and then the perception of warlords isthere too. So I dont really know, but all these labels each and every one has its

own inferiority attached to it, its own inheritance and it is so complex to a pointwhere the perception of the Somali society was not so warm. They are labelled aspeople who are in fraud, people who are preying on the system, people who are nothere to settle, and that perception has been portrayed in the media and thegovernment.

The preceding account shows that Somali immigrant identities are more complex

than the one-drop rule in that they are simultaneously black and ethnic. In fact,

their cultural and religious identities mark them as others more so than their skin

colour. Interestingly, native blacks who interact with Somali immigrants notice that

skin colour alone is not a basis for group solidarity. One African Americaninterviewed by a local newspaper in Columbus explained the different worldviews

that Somalis and African Americans maintain as the following: You can look just

alike and appear to be on the same team, but were as different as night and

day.. . .Just because we are all black or originate from Africa doesnt mean anything.

He went on: We have a separate language, culture, and religion. It is a big thing. This

is not an issue of colour. This last statement speaks to the core argument of my

research in that it shows some of the contradiction inherent in the assumption that

skin colour unifies all those who can trace their ancestors to Sub-Saharan Africa.

More importantly, the sudden appearance of Somali immigrants in communities

with no experience of significant non-white, particularly black Muslim, immigrants

544 A. M. Kusow


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led to cultural clashes and, in some cases, hostile reactions form local residents.

For example, their un-anticipated relocation from Atlanta to Lewiston, Maine, led

the Mayor of Lewiston to write an open letter to the Somali community asking

them to stay away. The publication of the mayors letter by the Lewiston Sun

Journalgenerated an international media response beyond the imagination of localofficials. News organisations like Fox, CNN, CNN International, NBC, MSNBC, BBC,

CBC, and the Voice of America picked up the story, and the international media

descended on Lewiston to cover it. A group of white separatists organised a rally on

11 January 2003, which led to a counter-rally of 4,000 Americans in support of the

Somalis.

Aside from this one extreme case, however, the Somali community has attracted a

wide range of reactions. Scores of Somali women wearing a full-cover Hijab (the

Muslim traditional veil), ethnic stores selling halal food, and Somalis lack of

understanding of the racial classification systems in the United States aroused thecuriosity of the media as well as of ordinary people. The Mayor of Owatonna, a small

town in Minnesota, said in an interview in the local Star Tribune, when people of

color come here, boom, just like that */who dont speak our language, who dont

worship in our churches, who dont dress as we do */we say hmmm, whats all this?

(Williams 2000: 2). In Columbus, Ohio, one newspaper article read, Most Americans

associate Columbus, Ohio, with state politics and Big Ten football. But few would

guess that this Midwestern capital has become a magnet for Somali immigrants to the

United States (Herman 2002).

These responses and accounts can be understood in terms of the immigrationreception afforded to Muslim immigrants in North America. Muslim communities

have existed in the United States. The formation of the Muslim community in the

United States began with the arrival of Muslim African slaves in the seventeenth and

mid-eighteenth centuries (Diouf 1998). The second wave of Muslim immigrants,

mainly from Syria and Lebanon, came in the mid- to late-eighteenth centuries.

Like the majority of the non-white immigrants in the United States, however, the

largest number of Muslim immigrants came after 1965. There are currently an

estimated 3 /6 million Muslim immigrants in the United States. Roughly 25 /30 per

cent of the Muslim population is African American, while the immigrant Muslim

population constitutes the remaining 70 /75 per cent. The immigrant Muslim

population is also a diverse group with roughly one-third from the Middle East and

Africa, and the remaining two-thirds from South Asia (Khan 2003). Unlike other

non-white immigrants, however, Muslim immigrants face an unfavourable reception

in the United States. This is particularly true since the September 11 attacks

perpetrated by individuals who used Islam as an instrument to advance their own

political motives. Beyond this particular case, though, general prejudice against Islam

in the American mainstream society, and Muslims desire to affirm their Islamic

identities, present a substantial barrier to Muslims assimilation into primarily Judeo-

Christian America.



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Reactions to Colour-Based Categories

Due to the fact that colour-based categories of social understanding are not available

in the cultural narrative resource of Somalis, the majority of respondents identify

themselves according to cultural and religious identities. For Somalis, the notion of

race becomes synonymous with Somaliness, as the following respondent points out:

I considered myself a Somali. Well, a Somali, like there is Chinese, Indian, or eventhe whites have different types, they dont all look alike, and maybe we think thatthey look alike, but they dont. So, I consider myself a Somali, I did not considermyself as black, white, Chinese, or Indian, I considered myself as Somali and onlySomali, that was my race.

This response supports the growing literature which indicates that black immigrants

tend to identify more by culture and/or nationality than by skin colour (Landale and

Oropesa 2002; Waters 1999). The above response further indicates that race is acontext-based variable and clearly shows how the way in which race is understood in

Somalia is radically different from how it is viewed in North America. More

importantly, the above account shows that, in order to fully grasp the development,

maintenance and consequences of racial formations among the largely non-white and

post-1965 immigrants in North America, we need to see race as a set of definitions

that exist within a particular social structure. In other words, in order to understand

the meaning of race one has to understand the conditions and historic processes that

give racial categories their meaning.

Other respondents insist that their culture is far superior to the North Americanculture. Consider the following:

Well, I see myself as better than them, who have a better religion, better color, andbetter culture who came from a good country and are quality people. For examplefrom what I have seen from the Gaalo [Christians] so far, they dont even havefamily values, so I see them as very inferior to me. Everybody is going on their ownway. The father is walking in one direction, and the son in the other direction.Everybody is only working towards their individual interests, so they dont evenhave families or any values. Therefore, we are different from them and are veryhappy that we are not Gaalo.

What is clear from the above remark is that Somalis use a moral discourse in order to

draw a symbolic boundary transplanted from Somalia between themselves and

mainstream Judeo-Christian North America. The maintenance of social boundaries

transported from the Somali context allows Somali immigrants to construct cultural-

based identity attributes that not only provide them with social boundaries with

which to shield themselves from discrimination, but also give them a necessary

cultural framework from which to reverse-stigmatise members of their host society

(Kusow 2004b). In essence, what Somali immigrants are doing is to shift the

construction of potentially stigmatising attributes from one unit of analysis (skin

colour) to another (that of symbolic and cultural categories).

546 A. M. Kusow


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Yet other respondents react to colour-based racialisation by attempting to ignore

its existence. The following response is typical:

It doesnt affect me. I ignore it. So far I try to succeed that it doesnt affect me, I

dont internalise it but it continues.

However, the same respondent then acknowledges that, if such discrimination

continues, they, or second-generation Somali immigrants, may not be able to shield

themselves from the resulting social and psychological damage. She says:

And if it keeps going on, people are not all safe. There are people whom it will affecttheir self-esteem. There are younger people who will internalise this. I dont know,

ten, twenty years down the road, whether I could be that patient.

The implication of this last statement will have to await future comparative research

that compares the experiences of first- and second-generation Somali immigrants in

North America. What is clear now, however, is that these immigrants view racial

identity placements and announcements in ways that are different from those

employed in America. The difference in racial worldview between Somalia and North

American society allows Somali immigrants to transcend the black/white binary

categories and embrace cultural and/or nationality-based identities. My research

clearly shows how the process of conceptualising race along skin colour lines

undermines the real experiences ofblack ethnics*/the increasing number of black

immigrants who identify themselves more in terms of culture and/or nationality than

of skin colour.

Conclusion

The cultural dynamics of contemporary African immigrants, particularly Somalis, is

radically different from those found in North America. Blackness in North America

is embedded in the dominant classification system where social stratification is

primarily based on colour categories that divide society into black and white.

Blackness is delegated to any person with any known black African descent, and

trades on the principle that a single drop of black blood makes a person black (Davis1991: 41). This way of defining blackness, for the most part, rests in a collectively

shared understanding by both blacks and whites in the United States and is assumed

to be a universal phenomenon shared by the rest of the world. That assumption,

however, is misleading. Recent research shows that the understanding of blackness as

a meaningful category of social stratification is mainly shaped by the categories

through which the black population has been excluded from the mainstream society.

For instance, according to Butler (2000), blackness as a racial category became a

rallying category through which Afro-Brazilians in the Sao Paulo area asserted their

identity simply because blackness was the category used to exclude them from society.

However, among Afro-Brazilians around the Salvatore, Bahia area, where most of the



16/21

population maintained significant elements of African culture, both exclusion and

identity assertions took the form of cultural categories. This situation creates a reality

discontinuity between the adherents of the taken-for-granted universal blackness and

how it is defined in the rest of the world (Butler 2000; Gordon and Anderson 1999).

Writing about her Brazilian field experience, Butler (2000: 132), had this to say aboutthe difference between her (North American) racial worldview and that of South

American blacks: What I realized was that my construction of blackness based on my

United States perspective was not necessarily shared around the Afro-Atlantic

Diaspora. And Gordon, referring to his fieldwork experiences among Nicaraguan

blacks, writes:

A young black, politically active, male intellectual, a product of the vexed racialpolitics of the United States. . .carried with him a political common sense . . .agood sense. . .of a centered blackness.. . . This was also a globalized notion of

blackness */the African Diaspora as a community and identity. Thus armed, hearrived on Nicaraguas coast expecting to find in its black Creole community acentered African Diasporic identity and race-based politics. What he found wasvery much more complex.

The apparent disjuncture between the meaning of blackness as an identity category

in North America and in other parts of the world is brought into sharp contrast by

the experiences of the contemporary African diaspora, particularly Somalis in North

America. In other words, for the Somali immigrants in Canada or the United States,

blackness does not provide a meaningful category for social understanding. Given

this, the taken-for-granted understanding of blackness in North America is at oncechallenged by the non-racial-based classification systems employed by the con-

temporary African diaspora. For the contemporary African diaspora, and particularly

the Somali immigrants, identity is anything but racial. This proposition raises a

fundamental dilemma for the idea of race in the United States in that it challenges the

black/white binary opposition that is the constituent unit of the racial worldview

in North America. This is so because social stratification as well as identity categories

in Somalia are inherently tied to clan-based, non-racialised classification systems. In

other words, for the Somali immigrants in Canada or the United States, blackness

does not provide a meaningful category for social understanding, as one respondent

confirmed by saying, I consider myself as Somali, and I dont consider myself as

black, white, Chinese, or Indian. I consider myself as Somali and only Somali */that

is my race.

Note

[1] One group that is racially distinguished in Somalia is the so-called Bantu or Jareer. They are

characterised as Adoon, meaning slave, or Jarer, meaning kinky hair. In other situations,

they are referred to asGusha(people of the jungle) or Shabelle(people of the Shabelle river).

Despite the variations in naming, all such references are derogatory and stigmatising in

nature. They are also stigmatised according to narratives that suggest that they originated

548 A. M. Kusow


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from the importation of slaves from East Africa during the nineteenth century. None of these

categories, however, is similar to the purely colour-based stratification system found in

North America.

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