Over the years, while writing at Refugee Resettlement Watch, an article would come my way that hinted at the problems within the African “community” between the new African immigrants and our own African-Americans.
(Resettlement contractors loved to place the new Africans in predominantly African-American neighborhoods with, I suppose, the naive notion that since they are all blacks they would love and embrace each other!)
If there were tensions, it was always just hinted (or immediately swept under the rug if a reporter dared mention it) and I suspect that is because it goes against the narrative—how is it possible for a black immigrant to be bigoted against another black person?
Everyone knows only white people can be racists and bigots, right?
Much to my surprise here is an opinion piece at MinnPostpublished a few days ago by second generation Ethiopian immigrant Eskender A. Yousuf.
It took me a few minutes of reading and rereading to understand that he is basically saying that the new immigrant Africans look upon African-Americans, who have been here for generations, as riff-raff, inferior to the real Africans newly arrived.
What is going on, two big admissions in the space of a week about problems in the Minnesota immigrant “community.”
Don’t miss my post at RRW about how Somali culture dictates that women can be treated with abuse.
A call to address anti-Blackness within African immigrant communities
“I was on a recent conference call helping an organization put a statement together and this Sudanese brother says, ‘I don’t understand this Black Lives Matter stuff, I have never felt racism in this country.’
You know, I’m just letting people have it now … we [African-Americans] can sniff out anti-Blackness right when we step in the room, wherever we are. … I have never felt welcomed or comfortable in any African immigrant establishment in Minnesota.”
These words come from a recent conversation I had with a close connection of mine.
Eskender A. Yousuf. I’m guessing the Leftists in MN are not too happy with Mr. Yousuf’s admission!
This was nothing short of our regular conversations and check-ins; however, this time it felt different. With the wake of the current racial uprisings, it provoked me to publicly call attention this issue.
As a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant who is ethnically Oromo, I was born and raised in the Twin Cities. I never imagined that the place I call home would become the epicenter of historic racial uprisings and protests that sparked a fire across the world.
Stood in solidarity
Amongst the sea of protesters that stood in solidarity in the streets of Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death were 1.5 and second-generation African immigrants (1.5 generation immigrants refer to those who came to America before they reached 12 years old; second-generation immigrants refer to those who were born in America).
Minneapolis, in fact, is home to a diverse population of racially Black individuals and a large fraction of them are African immigrants and refugees. We have the largest population of Somali immigrants, a vast number of Ethiopians, as well as immigrants from other African countries like Eritrea, Sudan, Liberia, and Nigeria. While African immigrant communities showed up in large numbers to protest police brutality and racial injustices, an oft-neglected nuance is the prevalence of anti-Blackness within these very communities.
The support for the Black Lives Matter movement from the African immigrant community demands that we address and correct the racist practices within our own community that are often left unquestioned.
For us to truly support the call for racial injustice, we must take the step eradicate anti-Blackness within our own communities.
Growing up in the Twin Cities, I have witnessed countless anti-Black sentiments, expressions, attitudes, and practices from close relatives and community members. Some examples include: looking down on marrying African-Americans, addressing and treating African-Americans and their communities by negative racialized stereotypes (i.e. lazy, not hardworking, criminals) and our perpetual disassociation with the African-American community in order to distinctly identify ourselves as African immigrants and not “Black/African-American.”
This identification process has been heavily documented and proved as a mechanism for us to distance ourselves from African-American communities for various reasons, including social stratification.
I didn’t want to post the whole thing, but there is more good stuff, so continue reading here.
Wouldn’t it be great if the politically incorrect Mr. Yousuf and the Sudanese “brother” he quotes made it to cable TV news. I can dream can’t I!
Of course its a lefty book aimed at vilifying the President and Stephen Miller, but there is some important advice in it (according to this excerpt at Politico) that the Republicans generally have failed to heed—you must fight like the Left fights!
And, that comes from none other than David Horowitz who was about as far left as you can get, but woke up one day (after a friend was murdered!).
In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
Former Senator Jeff Sessions and David Horowitz. There is nothing the Left hates more than one of their own, as Horowitz once was, exposing their strategies.
Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.
Sessions with aide Miller
Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate.
Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings.
Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.”
“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics. It is more comfortable with budgets and pie charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponents’ policies,” Horowitz wrote, adding that Democrats have the moral high ground.
“They are secular missionaries who want to ‘change society.’ Their goal is a new order of society—‘social justice.’” He argued that the only way to beat them is with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to voters’ base instincts.
It is perhaps the most compact crystallization of the relationship that propelled Miller, now a senior policy adviser and speechwriter in the Donald Trump administration, to the White House and of the importance that relationship has had in the administration.
This is long, but an important read. I’ve been arguing against spending a lot of time reading and thus feeling like something has been accomplished, but this article is extremely valuable because it helps reconfirm what I suspect you already know—Republicans have been fighting (if you can call it that!) all wrong for most of our lives.
There are, however, still a few months left to get it right!
Of course its a lefty book aimed at vilifying the President and Stephen Miller, but there is some important advice in it (according to this excerpt at Politico) that the Republicans generally have failed to heed—you must fight like the Left fights!
