Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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

Migration and Racial Formations

Among Somali Immigrants
in 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 confirm
the 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: kusow@oakland.edu
ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/06/030533-19 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13691830600555079

534 A. M. Kusow

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 the
black 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 understanding 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.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

535

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 a
social 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 understanding in the United States, and is maintained simultaneously through the
competitive interactions between state agencies and minority groups agitating for
social 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 to
whitening 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 of
these categories are examined from mutually incomprehensible systems of classifications, 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),

536 A. M. Kusow

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 American
societies, 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 and
announcements 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 black
immigrants 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 fairskinned (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 contemporary African immigrants. 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
/

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

537

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 factsheet 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 doublespaced type-written transcript pages. I interviewed the Canadian immigrant sample
in 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 from
19 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
/

538 A. M. Kusow

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 colourbased identity differentiations in Somalia?, What ethnic or racial group do you
consider 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). In
the 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 subcategories. 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 onedrop 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

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

539

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 have
the 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 translates
into 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 of
people in Canada who are members of a visible minority, as defined by the
Employment Equity Act. The Act defines visible minorities as persons, other than
Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour. Under
this definition, regulations specify the following groups as visible minorities:

540 A. M. Kusow

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 and
children. 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,

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

541

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 to
the 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 in
Somalia 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 of Somaliness. 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 nonnoble 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) as
opposed to colour-based categories:
Author : In Somalia did you ever think about issues related to race, or skin
colour?
Enow : No, it never occurred to me, I never even heard about the problems
between blacks and whites. Even when I was in India, I never heard
about issues of black and white, or that blacks are the minority
people.
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

542 A. M. Kusow

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 meaning
from 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 or
ethnicity 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 of
that 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).
/

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

543

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 as
well 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 and
the like [laugh] they see blacks as dirty that do not want to work. Even if you look
at the dictionary and examine the word black, it says dirty, ignorant, all the negative
stuff, at the same time, if you look at white in the same dictionary, you will see
clean, 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, some
dirt 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

544 A. M. Kusow

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, and
I dont want to generalise because there are a lot of good people. But what I have
experienced 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 the
identity 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 or
unfortunately, 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 who
do not speak English as opposed to the Caribbeans who used to come to Canada
before. They [Somalis] are the first blacks who are not Christians. So it is an
African, non-Christian, it is an African and Somali. It is an African with a different
religion and they are black.
We are all Mohammeds and nobody can deal with these Mohammeds. When you
walk into a job interview, before you could say my name is . . . that perception
is already there. On top of that you say my name is Mohammed and you have
this heavy accent and you say Somali, and then the perception of warlords is
there 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 point
where the perception of the Somali society was not so warm. They are labelled as
people who are in fraud, people who are preying on the system, people who are not
here to settle, and that perception has been portrayed in the media and the
government.

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 American
interviewed 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

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

545

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
Journal generated an international media response beyond the imagination of local
officials. 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 the
curiosity 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 immigration
reception 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 JudeoChristian America.
/

546 A. M. Kusow

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 even
the whites have different types, they dont all look alike, and maybe we think that
they look alike, but they dont. So, I consider myself a Somali, I did not consider
myself as black, white, Chinese, or Indian, I considered myself as Somali and only
Somali, 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 a
context-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 American
culture. Consider the following:
Well, I see myself as better than them, who have a better religion, better color, and
better culture who came from a good country and are quality people. For example
from what I have seen from the Gaalo [Christians] so far, they dont even have
family values, so I see them as very inferior to me. Everybody is going on their own
way. 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 even
have families or any values. Therefore, we are different from them and are very
happy 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 culturalbased 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).

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

547

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 affect
their 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 of black 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 (Davis
1991: 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

548 A. M. Kusow

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 about
the 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 racial
politics of the United States . . . carried with him a political common sense . . . a
good sense . . . of a centered blackness. . . . This was also a globalized notion of
blackness */ the African Diaspora as a community and identity. Thus armed, he
arrived on Nicaraguas coast expecting to find in its black Creole community a
centered African Diasporic identity and race-based politics. What he found was
very 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 once
challenged by the non-racial-based classification systems employed by the contemporary 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 as Gusha (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

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

549

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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