Constructing and Contesting Racialized Identities Among Somali Youth: Visible Identities as Sites of Racialization

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Protracted Refugee Situations and Public Scholarship for Democratic Education

Abstract

Coming from East Africa, Somalis are black, and predominantly identify as Muslims. Hence, in U.S. context, Somalis are considered visible ethnics (Kusow, 2007). Research showed Somali youth are racialized, by school staff, and elders in theircommunity (Bigelow, 2010). This paper seeks to investigate how Somali youth experience and make sense of racialization, by focusing on the everyday nature of experiencing racialization. The paper draws from postmodern theories that link racialization and racialized identities (Alcoff, 2006) to students’ perceptions and interpretations of their schooling experiences. It also explores phenomenology of racialization by reviewing theories of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Gadamer, 2003).
In this paper, racialization is primarily understood as historically situated ideological process in which specific social practices, or groups are categorized or assigned to racial meanings (Omi and Winant, 1994). Hence, here I argue that this framework can be extended to religion as a racial project. This is pertinent particularly in post 9/11 contexts, where Muslim youth reported schools to be the place where they felt most discriminated against (Sirin & Fine, 2008).
This research draws from a larger phenomenological study that connects narrative accounts of lived experience to the racialized identity negotiations of Somali youth. Over ten weeks period, nine 11th and 12th grade Somali students, in a predominantly Somali K-12 charter school, were interviewed about their schooling experiences. Data sources ranged from classroom, to school social activities observations with interviews lasting 1-1.5 hours. Member checking (Merriam, 1988) was performed in follow-up interviews.
In order to analyze student narratives about experiences of racialization, I employed what van Manen (2001) called “highlighting approach”. This helped me to capture essential themes. Next, I utilized a hermeneutic approach that paid attention to meanings emerging from a circular reading whole-parts-whole (Greenwalt and Holohan, 2011).
In this paper, a primary emerging theme was Negotiation between visible identity markers (race and religion) and lived experiences. This was important in understanding the nexus between race, and religion, which provides the foundations of racialization (Bigelow, 2010). However, my findings suggest that besides race and religion, there were multiple elements such as gender, language, accent, and immigrant status that lead to Somali youth’s racialization. In students’ stories these elements became all visible at some point and invisible at other times.
These findings suggest the various ways in which identities of Somali youth were essentialized and racialized by not only school officials, but also Somali students themselves. Essentializing happened at various degrees in the storied lives of Somali youth, whether this meant the essentializing of all Muslims as violent people. Or being Somali meant that one can’t be a high achiever student, or one can’t sound like white, etc.
Finally, racialization of race, and religion not only lead to the marginalization of Somali youth in school, but it also influenced how they perceived themselves. This was particularly true for religion, where Somali youth often hid their Muslim identity due to fear of being marginalized. Also, findings suggest school climate to be instrumental in constructing racialized identities of Somali youth.

Author

• Nimo Abdi, University of Minnesota