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Preface

On Life Betwixt and Between

My deceased grandmother, who was originally from South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia in her forties, was at least of partial Gullah heritage. An unschooled farmer who, as family legend has it, delivered her six babies on her own without the aid of doctor or midwife, she taught herself to read by memorizing the Bible. Grandma Aiken had a battery of sayings that could have filled a “good book” of her own. The family’s youngsters rarely knew exactly what Grandma was talking about. When I’d ask my mother to interpret what she was saying, she would just look down and, while shaking her head, say, “Chile, that’s just that old country Geechee English; don’t pay too much mind to it.” But I paid attention anyway and the meanings of many of her mysterious sayings have slowly revealed themselves to me over the years—I think once I had enough life experience to fully relate to what she was saying. Every time I saw her she would say to me with a hug and with earnest certainty, “How’s my lil’ school teacher?!” Eventually, Grandma’s nickname for me became School Teacher. I remember being initially a little perplexed about why she would call a six-year-old “School Teacher.” Over time I intuitively came to understand that for Grandma, who was largely denied opportunity because of Jim Crow, this was an act of aspiration and faith that my future might realize her deferred dreams.

I continue to be driven by the visions of this woman who survived and accomplished much in conditions that I can barely imagine. In part because of her, and even though I didn’t grow up in the most privileged of circumstances, I always believed I could write books that people might read and maybe find in some way interesting. I wrote this book in large part to honor my deceased grandmother’s hopes for my generation. For me she represents the Black women who have nurtured and inspired me and who created many “firsts”—big and small—that have made African Americans’ astounding survival as a people possible in America.¹ I stand in their shadow and spirit, trying to make myself worthy of their sacrifice. This book is as much their creation as it is mine and is dedicated to them.

Grandma Aiken left me with a particular saying that has been a running motif of my life and this book. Frequently, when I would ask her how she was doing, she would say that she was “betwixt and between.” As a young woman I came to understand that what Grandma meant was that she wasn’t feeling bad; she wasn’t feeling good; she was just existing some place between happiness and resignation—a general state of many people’s lives. Technically, the term, derived from Old English, means a midway position—neither one thing nor the other. But I think that Grandma was also making a kind of existential statement—an expression of a condition of feeling out of sync for some reason that she could not quite explain.

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 of the lowest unemployment rates. I later learned from the 2000 Census and other statistical studies that I cite in this book that in the 1990s, Minnesota also had a large influx of African Americans from other cities—poor and middle-class—who arrived here for opportunities in the region’s vibrant economy. In fact, as I later discovered, the recent census also showed that Minnesota has the most diverse Black population in the United States in terms of ethnic and national origin. My personal sense that America’s Black diaspora was converging in the Twin Cities was validated by the statistics, and I was living through these demographic changes. The process of writing this book helped me understand why these changes were occurring and what they meant for contemporary global cultural dynamics.

Like most ethnography, this piece of scholarship also contains shards of the ethnographer’s personal life. Throughout this book the reader will see that I recognize these influences and address them in my scholarly analysis. In other words, in current anthropological parlance, I attempt to be “reflexive”—to put myself as ethnographer in the story and attempt to self-consciously control for ways in which my personal biases might influence the research setting and my interpretation of it. This preface serves in part as an additional personal disclosure. However, it is also a commentary on the particular challenges that the field of anthropology sometimes presents for people of color, women, and others who do “native anthropology,” that is, ethnography in their own country or community of origin applying reflexive approaches. Until writing this book, I felt caught between two competing but often implicit claims of reflexive ethnography. On the one hand, the field maintains that such an approach is legitimate and even necessary for contemporary ethnography. On the other hand, scholars who use reflexive approaches, especially when doing native anthropology, can be seen as less objective. This book presents key fieldwork encounters and other personal perspectives that may have affected collection and interpretation of the ethnographic data. But this book is an ethnography, not a memoir or diary. I keep community voices dominant and my voice is evident to the extent it may have influenced the research context. I present diverse perspectives on the CWC’s work and include verbatim statements of people during CWC meetings and programs to give the reader an authentic sense of the dynamic culture-building processes taking place there. At the same time I try to protect the identities of the persons with whom I worked. This is particularly important because the leadership and participants were wary of being subjected to studies that had no clear benefit to their community. Thus, pseudonyms are used throughout and I avoid providing personal detail about participants’ lives that would easily identify them and their opinions here in the local community.

Some might find the CWC’s mission and programs controversial. For example, some Africanists might find its notions of Africa romanticized. Anthropologists might take issue with its notions of race and culture. Those with little experience in grassroots Black community efforts might deem their ideas Afrocentric. But cultural anthropologists specialize in documenting human cultural creativity. Thus, the CWC’s work is by definition worthy of study, even if its views may be disagreeable to some scholars. As an individual, I do not necessarily agree with all CWC doctrines and to write an unbiased case study does not require that I do so. However, as a cultural anthropologist I recognize one of the field’s basic tenets: people’s beliefs are culturally true for them, and we are charged to study them regardless of our own beliefs—personal or scholarly.

I have had numerous guides and supporters on this stage of my diasporan journey. Although the interpretation of these experiences is mine, survival through this sojourn would not have been possible without them. First, I must recognize the support and encouragement of Paul Stoller and Peter Agree, my two editors at the University of Pennsylvania Press. I appreciate their ability to see in this case study a story worthy of being told.

I must also acknowledge the excellent training and support that I have received from many people for many years from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sandra Barnes, in particular, has been an indefatigable advocate and mentor. Her openness to my exploration of unconventional topics in Africanist anthropology has been critical to my development. Her steadfast support through the sometimes unpredictable twists and turns of my diasporan journey has been above and beyond the call of duty.

Igor Kopytoff’s steady support and exemplary training in the history of anthropology as well as classical approaches in Africanist anthropology have also made important contributions to my development. His consistent reminder to study the classics and friendly debates about postmodern theory have influenced the eclectic blending of old and new theory in this study’s interpretation of transnational cultural processes in the Twin Cities African diaspora. I am also grateful for Peggy Sanday’s encouragement to publish the study and her public-interest anthropology perspective.

Classes by Arjun Appadurai, now at the New School for Social Research, and Kris Hardin provided invaluable explorations of issues in ethnohistory, ethnoaesthetics, and the anthropology of complexity which are evident throughout this study. Finally, Gwendolyn Mikell of Georgetown University and Elliot Skinner of Columbia University have provided appreciated encouragement and advice since my undergraduate days.

The Bush Foundation’s Leadership Fellowship Program (1997–1998) provided funding for this study. Its support enabled me to take a much-needed leave of absence from practicing anthropology to conduct the primary research for this study. I am especially thankful to John Archabal, Martha Lee, and Charlene Edwards of the foundation for their feedback and support. While on this leave of absence I was a fellow at the Roy Wilkins Center at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. The center’s current and former staff—Professor Samuel L. Myers, Jr., director; Judy Leahy; Mary Lou Garza; and Julia Blount—provided not only an academic home base in Minnesota but constant encouragement. I would especially like to thank Julia, who helped me solve the mysteries of word processing.

I must also recognize two agencies where I had professional experiences that helped to sensitize me to the potential of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector to inform contemporary issues in anthropology: the Philadelphia Foundation and the OMG Center. My sincere thanks to Carrolle Devonish, formerly president of the foundation, and Tom Burns and Gerri Spilka of the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, who provided me with practical forums to cultivate some of the approaches to nonprofit sector ethnography used in this study.

I cannot express enough appreciation to the staff, participants, and volunteers of the Cultural Wellness Center, where I based the ethnographic research for this study. Their bold and unconventional approach to issues of health and wellness and their capacity to build concrete consensus around a wide range of potentially volatile community issues are inspiring. I am thankful for their collaboration and hopeful that the concepts presented in this study are in some way useful to their work.

Finally, I must recognize my extended network of family and friends who have been a bedrock of support through what has been one of the most challenging undertakings of my life. A special thanks to my husband, Emmett D. Carson, and my thirteen-year-old daughter, Yetunde, for tolerating my often arcane dinner conversation digressions about “deterritorialization” and “transnational scapes of global cultural flow.” Emmett, thank you for staying the course in this journey and believing in me. The unflinching belief of my sister and brother, Parthenia and Aaron, in my aspirations was a constant source of strength and inspiration. Also, special thanks to my mother, Willette Copeland, whose sacrifices, high expectations, and constant faith always inspired me to dream, even when I’ve lived nightmares.

Although I have had the good fortune of unwavering support and advice throughout this process, the study ultimately represents my interpretations of the issues. It does not necessarily reflect the perspectives of the numerous people and institutions who have in some way supported this project. Nor does its analysis in any way constitute an evaluation of the effectiveness of the CWC, which is its subject. The findings and conclusions are primarily designed to inform issues in anthropology and not the decisions of current or prospective CWC funders.

I have emerged from this process affirmed in my identity as an anthropologist practitioner-scholar—a bridge between two sides of social life upon which our field is ultimately based. This space between theory and application, called public anthropology by some, is fertile ground for those of us who want to inform our discipline’s theory building while building community. I am most indebted to the Cultural Wellness Center for showing me a path out of the betwixt-and-betweenness of the practice-versus-theory divide.