State Violence, Black Immigrants, and the Issue of Black Racial Identity

• In Event: "I Can't Breathe": Police Killings of Black Men and the Quest for Justice of Black Boys in School

Abstract

I recently partook in an online panel of Somali educators. The majority of the panelists agreed that Somali boys are racialized and share the fate of other Black boys in school. There were few who voiced a hesitation on invoking a Black racialized identity as the reason. While I agreed with the views of the former, I also think that the views of those who disagreed deserve attention; after all, they highlight the complexity of Blackness and Black selfhood in the US and in other Western context (Dei, 2017). Yet, as Black male subjects, Somali men and boys are not exempted from state violence that has been created to police, subjugate, and even kill Black men.

In this essay, I explore how Somali immigrant communities navigate and orient themselves within the fields of white supremacy and whiteness; this is all while they make sense of the criminalization and killings of Black males including their own, in the US. To theorize, I put phenomenology of race scholarship (Ahmed, 2007; Alcoff, 2005; Gordon, 1995) in conversation with literature on state violence (Ali, 2016) to articulate how Somali-Americans are subjected to the same criminalization and violence African-American males have been subject to for four centuries.

Here I offer two different explanations on the different views (issue of ambivalence/ambiguity) around Black racial identity among Somali immigrants. The first episode is a conversation with a panel of Somali educators, as mentioned above. They are reflecting on the educational disenfranchisement of Somali boys in the US vis-à-vis that of African-American boys in schools. In my analysis, I use Charles Mills (2014) to understand the racial hierarchy and situatedness of Somalis and Ibrahim’s (2004) work to understand how Somalis experience becoming Black within the US racialized social structure. I argue that the criminalization of Somali males legitimizes yet another level of state violence because of their Muslim identity (Ali, 2016).

The second episode is about a group of young Somali activists protesting during the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis. These include family members of the many victims of police violence, and hence represent the voices of those marginalized. In my interpretations, I draw on anti-colonial framework (Dei, & Asgharzadeh, 2001) as well as phenomenology of race scholars like Alcoff (2005), Lewis Gordon (1995), and Sara Ahmed (2007) to show how experiences of racialization are pertinent in not only race conscious living but decolonial Black politics (Dei, & Asgharzadeh, 2001).

This paper ultimately argues that state violence as an important component of whiteness orientates Black African immigrants discursively, viscerally and materially (Author, 2020; Ahmed, 2007). In other words, these points taken together highlight how experiencing state racial violence and processes of criminalization can be instrumental in reorienting immigrant communities of color efforts of accessing citizenship into white supremacist settler nation into a socially just nation. I conclude that while the criminalization of Somali males is unjust and inhumane, the community has opportunity to use its pain to engage with the rich legacies of African-American civil rights movements.

Author

• Nimo Abdi, The Ohio State University - Columbus