Multicultural Community Building in an Urban Neighborhood A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY John Champe IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Karen Ho June 2015 © John Champe 2015 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Karen Ho, and the rest of my committee, David Valentine, Jean Langford, and Doug Hartmann. A special thanks also to the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota for some of my research on the neighborhood. For commenting on drafts of chapters, I want to thank Tim Gitzen, Nate Meyer, Amy Porter, Solvieg Brown, Marieke vanEijk, Susi Krehbiel Keefe, Karen kapusta-pofahl, Joe Esser, Sara Kaiser, Alex Bauman, and Dennis Moldestad. I’d also like to thank a few Champes – Sarah, Ava, Amelie, Richard and Sally. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the activists of the Whittier neighborhood. iii Abstract This is an anthropological ethnography of multicultural community-building among the almost all-white activists in Minneapolis’ largest neighborhood, Whittier. It shows the effects that the discourses, theories, and activities of these neighborhood activists have on the social structures that reproduce class, racial, and ethnic inequality. The first chapter analyzes the acrimonious battle over the opening of an apartment building for homeless. It shows the construction of the symbols at play, including Stability, Burden, Stakeholders, Gentrification, and Over-concentration of the poor. Chapter two explains how politics in Whittier became so polarized between competing factions of white, liberal, middle-class homeowners, who all share a love of their neighborhood’s diversity. The study also illuminates how the faction representing “homeowner interests” achieved dominance. Chapter three shows that while many paint Whittier as very dangerous, statistically it is not. The chapter explains the role that fear, exaggerated talk of crime, citizen crime patrols, media sensationalism, personal identity, and class conflict play in the creation of place and racial segregation. Chapter four explains how ethnic identities and class hierarchies are socially constructed through neighborhood campaigns, and also how the meaning of “diversity” itself gets produced. The chapter details how white and Somali ethnicities are manufactured by struggles over a Somali mall and the parking around it. Chapter five reveals the failures of democracy in Whittier politics, and argues that not only has elected, democratic governance failed, but that attempting it on the neighborhood scale is probably futile and destructive. Chapter six discovers that while the academic literature argues that Americans are largely ignorant of social structures that reproduce inequality, white Whittier activists of many viewpoints are actually cognizant of them, and of their own privilege. This study finds that the key to understanding the multiplicity of thought and policy on poverty and multiculturalism, is by investigating Whittier activists’ theories on neighborhood development. For example, activists opposing more subsidized housing in Whittier espouse that Whittier’s health requires more homeowners, fewer renters, and fewer residents requiring housing subsidies. This activism modified class hierarchy, re- imagining it along the lines of the type of housing one inhabits. iv Table of Contents List of Tables v List of Figures vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Building Diverse Communities by Stopping 19 a Housing Program for the Homeless Chapter 2: Case Study on How Politics in the Whittier 99 Neighborhood Become Polarized Chapter 3: “The Shooting Wasn’t Random” – Whittier is not Dangerous 167 Chapter 4: Fashioning Diversity and Ethnicity 241 Chapter 5: Attaining Democracy in Whittier through the Election 303 of Representatives is Neither Realistic nor Desirable Chapter 6: Knowledge of Inequality is Common 358 References Cited 404 Appendix 1: Study of the Studies of Whittier 416 Appendix 2: One Woman Explains her Activism 426 v List of Tables Table 1: Lydia Apartments Timeline 24 Table 2: 2006 Whittier Robberies 179 Table 3: Age of Robbery Victims in Whittier in 2006 180 Table 4: Race of 2006 Robbery Victims in Whittier 181 Table 5: Whittier and Minneapolis Population by Race 241 Table 6: Informant Positions on Subsidized Housing 379 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Examples of stock Neighborhood Watch Signs 217 Figure 2: Images of emptiness from the 50th & France website 271 Figure 3: Author with stacks of studies about Whittier 418 Figure 4: Various studies of Whittier 418 1 Introduction Everywhere one looks in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, white, middle-class activists are advertising multicultural programs. These schemes caught my attention because of my interest in the proliferation of the many and diverse forms of multiculturalism practiced today. In Whittier for example, the logo of the officially recognized neighborhood organization was “Where Diversity Becomes Community,” while their rival group was “Embracing Democracy and Diversity,” a neighborhood Baptist Church was “A Multicultured People,” and on and on. There are a wide range of programs in Whittier that talk about bringing together people of different types. All this activity begged the anthropological questions, what was happening that there was so much rhetoric and activity expended on “building diverse community” in one neighborhood? What did “valuing diversity” mean to disparate activists? What sorts of multiculturalisms were being practiced? What struggles were taking place between competing players? And what were the effects of all this. The Whittier neighborhood sits just south of downtown Minneapolis, between a poorer, mostly African-American area to the east across the freeway, a wealthier, 95% white area a few blocks to the West, and a growing Latino and Somali small business corridor to the south. The population is noticeably segregated by ethnicity, language, businesses frequented, and ownership status of home. In the late 1960s Whittier’s boundaries were established as Lake Street on the southern edge, Lyndale Avenue to the west, Franklin Avenue to the north, and Interstate 35W to the east.i Of its 13,000 to 15,000 residents, half are white, a fifth African-American, and another fifth Latino; there are also many refugees from the war in Somalia, some recent immigrant families from Southeast Asia, and many other ancestries. Whittier is the largest neighborhood in Minneapolis in area and population, and second in density only to its tiny neighborhood on its northern boundary. All of this diversity is treasured in different ways in Whittier, but in the academic literature there is a critique of multiculturalism that finds that some of its forms “merely” celebrate diversity through its cheery consumption, such as going to Scandinavian festivals and Vietnamese delis, rather than working to fundamentally change social 2 structures that reproduce racial/ethnic inequality (Fraser 1995). With the global rise of free-market neoliberalism (Harvey 2001), the enduring racial segregation in America, the ever-vigilant protection of white privileges (Lipsitz 1998), and the growing gap between rich and poor, I felt it was important to understand the significant and innovative roles that neighborhood activists were playing in these trends. While the whites in Whittier are mostly middle-class, the African-Americans, Somali refugees, and Latino immigrants spend little time in the places of the white social world that surrounds them. Even in the reputedly neutral space of the neighborhood meetings, where policies affecting all these groups is shaped, it is rare to find anyone that is not white, professional, or a homeowner. This dissertation investigates the relationship between neighborhood activism and (in)equality, through the process of multicultural community-building. It answers the question, what effects do the shifting discourses and contested programs of Whittier activists have on social structures that reproduce inequity? And what could be a more natural subject of research for cultural anthropology than multiculturalism and diversity? Writing over a century ago, Franz Boas was the most influential architect of anthropology in America, and given Boas’ liberal perspective on race and culture, contemporary anthropology would seem a natural for studying multiculturalism (Gelya 1997). Surprisingly though, it turns out that anthropology has had very little to say on the subject.ii A trend in contemporary academia is to be interdisciplinary, but my research study is interdisciplinary out of necessity, since the fields of Sociology, History, Cultural Studies, and American Studies have been the ones to tackle this thorny topic head on. Perhaps anthropologists do not find the need to discuss multiculturalism since they feel it is already embedded in their work? When it comes to the designing of multicultural programs in America, maybe this is why anthropologists have been disappointed that they have not been consulted by planners of such important things as school curriculums, government policy, economic development, international business relations, international peace plans, or corporate hiring. “Most of us have been sitting around like so many disconsolate intellectual wallflowers, waiting to be asked to impart our higher wisdom, and more than a little resentful that the invitations never come” (Turner 1993:411).iii 3 But while they may be eminently qualified in this