I Against I

On November 7 the first event organized by Unity members took shape. Everyone at Roosevelt stood side by side around the outermost edge of the school’s football field in a symbolic “circle of peace.” Despite the cold, the event lasted almost an hour as students read poems written especially for that day and talked about their concerns and hopes for the future.

This meeting is big enough now that our circle has turned into a lopsided oval. At one end, a large group of Somali girls are quietly talking. They are a striking group in their diaphanous, floor-length skirts and colorful long-sleeved shirts. In keeping with their Islamic faith, most of the girls wear scarves over their hair. Some wear a combination of Muslim and Western styles. About a dozen lanky Somali boys, dressed in the same droopy pants and boxy, oversized shirts as their American peers, are seated across the room flanked by small clusters of teens from other African and Asian countries, about a dozen African-American students, and a handful of white kids.

“We have to get started,” says a tall Somali girl as friends shush the crowd for her. One of the most active Unity members, she is the student who came up with the idea for the circle of peace. “There are too many fights happening in our school,” she explains, adjusting her purple scarf. She tells the group that according to the latest calculations, there have been 50 altercations between freshmen so far this school year. By contrast, she points out, seniors have been involved in only three. Members of the group need to volunteer to go to freshman homerooms to talk to them about some of the things that help keep fights between older kids to a minimum. “We’re on a mission,” she says, smiling. “This is a first step toward building peace in our school.”

It isn’t easy playing the role of cultural ambassadors in high school. Some kids give them a hard time in that “everyone hates a do-gooder” sort of way. But the Unity members believe their efforts to promote cultural tolerance are slowly paying off. To get an idea of how enormous an undertaking this is, consider that more than half of Roosevelt’s 1,500-plus students are immigrants who speak more than 26 languages.

As record numbers of African immigrants have relocated to the United States in the last 10 years, the need to reevaluate the notion that race defines a person seems more pressing than ever, says Mahmoud El-Kati, who teaches African-American history at Macalester College in St. Paul. Clashes between new immigrants and those who already live here are n
othing new. But in the case of black Americans and African immigrants, he says, conflicts are too often dismissed with comments such as, “Why can’t black people get along?” Because they can’t, says El-Kati with a laughing sigh. It’s clear he’s said this many times before. They can’t get along because most don’t know the first thing about each other. How could they? They’re from two different worlds. What’s more, race is a myth, El-Kati says. “It’s a false consciousness that we’ve been living under for years. The arrival of so many more black people in this country may finally make it obvious that race is not an indication of who people really are. What unites people is culture. But that’s much more complicated to learn about and understand.”

Roosevelt students are very aware of the ways culture unites them. Their understanding of how it divides them seems more tenuous. Fabian, an earnest and soft-spoken African-American sophomore, says he is struck by how difficult it is just to get people talking about cultural issues. “People don’t see each other as equals. Everyone thinks they’re better than everyone else. People are ignorant. Some want to educate themselves but others just don’t want to take the time to find out what other cultures are about.” But problems between African-American and Somali students are about more than just fear and misunderstanding, Fabian says. Some people are angry too. “I see Somalis as black people but some people don’t. They just see them as foreigners who came here and don’t understand our history. They don’t know the hardships of slavery. They don’t respect what we’ve been through, so they don’t get the respect of being black.”

Somali students bristle at those sentiments. Their families have also suffered. Yet they have moved on. Though they empathize, the way slavery still impacts their black American classmates is as lost on them as it is on most Americans. That happened a long time ago, they say. Why can’t they get over it?

“Kids here were watching Rugrats and Barney while we were running for our lives,” says Sadia, scooting her chair closer to the table. “We didn’t know if we would die tomorrow. [African-American kids] don’t know anything about that. We’ve been through a lot, our generation, you wouldn’t believe what we’ve seen.” Dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt, jeans, and platform shoes, she is both girlish and world-weary.