Black people in America have long written about this condition of betwixt-and-betweenness that W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness: a disjointed identity, partially imposed by racism—the “two-ness” of living between Whiteness and Blackness, Africanness and Americanness—always seeing oneself through another’s vision, never feeling quite whole. With the global flow of people and ideas in the contemporary world, this feeling of disjuncture—of being betwixt and between—as Grandma would say—is increasingly common for many people. In many ways this book is the most current iteration of my longstanding personal effort to weave together the seemingly disconnected threads that have shaped the many cultural worlds in which I live: Black; White; nonprofit; corporate America; Nigeria; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and many others.
This book tells the story of the Cultural Wellness Center (CWC), a Minneapolis (Minnesota) nonprofit organization that attempts to create new approaches to build “African” community to reduce feelings of alienation for Black people and many others living through the most rapid demographic changes in this region’s history. The CWC teaches that many of the lifestyle-related illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension, that disproportionately affect persons of African descent are in fact a result of warring identities literally inside the bodies of people of color and others as they attempt to assimilate into mainstream society. The CWC offers a complex array of programs to help people create a more integrated identity and more healthful lifestyles to support it.
I was drawn to do this ethnographic case study for several reasons. The theoretical, applied, and methodological reasons are presented in great detail in this book’s main sections. But there are personal reasons as well. I began my training as an Africanist and anthropologist largely because I also felt this sense of betwixt-and-betweenness. I was living in some no-(wo)man’s-land between the tough Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up and Georgetown University, trying to define my place in the world and how I could contribute to it. I grew up in an urban community that was challenged by many social issues such as poverty and drug abuse, while it also had strong institutions, including churches, mosques, drill and step teams, block clubs—all created by Black people. There were also the people in the community that the youth would call the “old heads”—people who were thought to have wisdom about a particular aspect of life or Black history—particularly African Americans’ relationship to Africa. These people and institutions held together the sometimes tattered but still whole social fabric of our community.
I was amazed once I went off to study anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student that ethnographies featuring these people and institutions were rarely written. The picture of Black urban communities often presented in many 1970s and 1980s ethnographies did not represent the inner-city community that I or my family and friends knew. There was much written about our social problems. Studies of the functional aspects of our communities were somehow often presented as distorted versions of normative, that is White, social structures. Social problems were certainly one aspect of many ghettos with concentrated poverty. But the pimp and wino approach to much urban ethnography had the unpleasant side effect of pathologizing Black urban communities and blinding the field to the assets that also existed in them. I felt stuck betwixt and between the one-sided picture of Black life that was prominent in many academic—and media—accounts and my actual experience of it. I decided at that point that there were sufficient ethnographies about “what’s wrong with us.” I hoped to one day support and write about the longstanding, homegrown efforts, many in the nonprofit sector, to address these social issues—what I call the “glass is half full” approach to African diasporan ethnography in the United States. Much of what I present in this book will seem like common sense to people who have worked on such grassroots social efforts or who grew up in Black inner-city communities like those of Philadelphia. The CWC is not representative of all nonprofit sector work involving Black people and, in fact, this agency works with a multicultural constituency. But it does provide a glimpse into this largely unrecognized aspect of Black cultural life and will hopefully provoke the interest of a broader academic and popular audience into the historical importance of Black America’s self-help traditions that have existed since the colonial period.
As many Africanists and Americanists know, throughout America’s history, African American culture grew from the intermingling of the cultures and traditions of various African peoples and others who come to this country. I have personally been part of the contemporary flow of these exchanges between Africans and African Americans and my experiences have informed my interest in how people in the African diaspora—and diasporas in general—create identities and communities. In the early 1980s I lived in Nigeria as an exchange student, and I was constantly surprised by the impact of Black American culture—from the arts to standards of beauty—on contemporary life in Nigeria’s cities, towns, and villages. The ensuing cultural interchange has happened at the level of family and many other social institutions. Although this intermixing is recognized as an historical fact, fine-grained ethnographic studies of African immigrants to the United States and their relations with African Americans are few. Studies of the impact of Black American culture on West African culture are also few and far between. In addition to contributing to social science theory, particularly in anthropology, the process of researching and writing this book also has been an illuminating personal experience. I now better understand how trends in the global economy have influenced my own journey as a Black woman through Africa’s diaspora. I am most thankful to the CWC for enabling me to learn much more about myself and my family history than I had ever anticipated when I started this project.
During the fieldwork for this book I was having new personal struggles with betwixt-and-betweenness. After finishing all of my doctoral course requirements, for almost five years I served as a vice president of the Philadelphia Foundation. My job was to help build community in some of the most depressed inner-city neighborhoods in the region; to create coalitions among nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses to strengthen these areas; and to make grants to support the various projects that emerged from these efforts. For me it was a perfect job—a rare opportunity to practice community ethnography and to make a real difference in the city that had nurtured me as a youth. I kept current with new developments in the field because anthropological theories and models were important sources of innovation in my social sector work. But, like many scholars who work professionally, I felt lost between full practice and full scholarship. I was a closeted anthropologist; I was not able, at the time, to integrate the two sides of my persona as an anthropologist—practitioner and theoretician. Ethnography in an applied setting, as presented in this book, is a natural outgrowth of my work in the nonprofit sector. A personal lesson learned is that many of the cultural trends and issues that anthropologists study are indeed created in this intermediate space between government and private enterprise. Nonprofit sector ethnography provides a tool to practice anthropology while making new contributions to culture theory. In many ways this book is a coming out for me as a cultural anthropologist who is now comfortable with a dual identity as a practitioner and scholar.
In 1995 I moved to Minnesota to join my husband where he had taken a new job. Although I have lived in at least half the world, my stays in other countries and communities were generally temporary. The culture that supported me in Philadelphia was not apparent in Minnesota. Since my culture was no longer at my doorstep, I had to seek it out and develop a social network through which I could express it with other people.
During this period, to my absolute shock and surprise, Minnesota’s African immigrant community began to grow by leaps and bounds. By the late 1990s, the state had more Somalis than any other place in the country, as well as Ethiopians and other Africans from many countries—many of whom were refugees escaping the wars and civil unrest affecting their homelands. I certainly did not expect to find many African immigrants in one of the most frigid parts of the country, where winter often lasts from October to May. All of sudden, it seemed to me, African groceries started opening up. I could now easily buy a powdered pounded yam mix, plantains and other foods that had become a regular part of my diet after living in Nigeria. Slowly but surely, African restaurants, tailor shops, and social service agencies began to appear. At the same time, I kept running into African American professionals who had recently relocated to Minnesota, which has one of the highest concentrations of Fortune 500 companies in the United States and, at the time, one