Imagine growing up African-American in the pretty much white-bread culture of Minnesota in the 1970s and 1980s, as Kerwin Bell did, and maybe thinking this was all there was to being black in America, even though your parents told you different.
“In Minnesota back then there weren’t very many of us,” Bell recollects. “The North Side was our very small version of Atlanta. If you didn’t live there [and he didn’t,] you weren’t a part of it.”
Unless you lived right there, he says, there wasn’t that sense of black community, that realization that African-Americans come in “a wide variety of hues and tones,” live in various social classes and have a wide variety of talents, interests, aspirations and goals.
In fact, it wasn’t until he went off to college that he experienced that, and was the better for it, he says.
“Working and living together, with people who look like us, that’s a privilege I didn’t experience growing up in Minnesota,” he says carefully, though acknowledging the privilege of being the son of college-educated parents who had successful careers as educators in Minneapolis public schools.
Times have changed, Bell says, but as a public school teacher today he still sees that kind of community yearning among students of color.
That’s why I’m highlighting his story as I tell you about the 3rd Annual HBCU College Fair coming up Monday, Jan. 16, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The event runs from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at St. Peter’s AME Church at 401 E. 41st St. in Minneapolis.
You see, Bell is a 1993 graduate of Alabama A & M University, one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities that the fair is about, one of those 105 educational institutions in the southern and eastern United States that set out to educate Americans of African descent after the Civil War. There are none such in Minnesota.
Today Bell, 43, works as an equity teacher and learning specialist for the Anoka-Hennepin School District. He has a master’s degree and an administrative license in education.
And so he’s an educational symbol.
Better lives
Getting kids to college, especially black kids, is a big step forward toward bettering lives, but a struggle nonetheless, given the academic achievement gap here and around the United States.
Eighteen percent of blacks 25 or older in the United States have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to data just released by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Many black students are intrigued by the idea of going to a majority-black school. That’s part of the draw for the local Historically Black Colleges and Universities fair, sponsored by St. Peter’s AME Church in Minneapolis in partnership with AchieveMpls, Minneapolis Public Schools and other organizations. Students see a path taken by those just like them toward careers in corporations, education, medicine, research, government and other fields. Last year the fair attracted 600 kids.
“We need to provide as many opportunities and options as we can,” says Marika Pfefferkorn, director of community engagement at AchieveMpls in explaining the fair. She says more than 20 educational institutions will be represented this year with SKYPE access to other HBCU admissions officers and students around the country.
Even though Minnesota is much more diverse these days than when Bell first headed off to college, today’s young people are still interested in mostly black colleges and universities.
Born in Alabama, but raised in Minnesota, Bell was told stories of black community in the South by his parents and extended family that left him longing for a bigger helping.
His parents shepherded him through his childhood, sending him to a Lutheran school in the very early years, then moving to Plymouth when he was in fourth grade but enrolling him in public school in North Minneapolis through eighth grade. For high school it was Benilde-St. Margaret’s in St. Louis Park.
His parents shared stories of their “African-American experience” growing up in Selma, Ala., that had him considering what it meant to be black. Though their earlier lives were marked by Jim Crow laws and segregation, they were sculpted, too, by a rich and varied community of African-Americans including successful black professionals, he says.
Family members taught him to set his sights high, urging him to go to a black college as they had. That brought him, he says, both a fine education and more self confidence, as well as a better understanding of what it means to be African-American.
“Speaking for myself, I didn’t feel I was going to get it here,” Bell says.
I’ve always been a huge supporter of the UNCF but I’ve often wondered why sending your kids to an all-black college was encouraged and supported yet people who oppose forced public school integration or support school vouchers are considered racist.
I hate to ask this for fear of it sounding the way I don’t mean it, but why does there have to be an “African-American experience” for a person of African descent to feel a sense of community?
I have to admit to having little experience with needing a community of sames to feel like I fit in. I’ve always either had to find my way into the community or ignore the fact that I’m not like everyone else. It might be my personality, and the fact that I had no choice to be white in a white culture (if you can call it that), but I never needed to know anyone’s religion, race, or culture to feel a sense of community with the people I chose to be part of my community. That doesn’t mean I have a racially or religiously diverse community that surrounds me, but I would posit that that is simply a matter of statistics and not a need to build an experience based on a profile. I don’t place myself in a neighborhood or circle of friends because they’re Lutherans or of German descent or just generally white in order to have a certain experience.
But, perhaps it’s because I really don’t know and haven’t had personal stories about the “African-American experience,” I don’t long for it. As someone with no African ancestry, if I should be personally told of the beauty of the African-American experience, should I long for it?
I understand the need to be able to communicate your individual experiences with someone who understands them and has had similar experiences. I don’t know what it’s like to be racially profiled, but I do know what it’s like to be profiled by gender, so it’s not like my experiences are so far removed simply because they are not exactly alike. That doesn’t mean that I feel the need to surround myself with women so I can have the female experience.
I also know that commiseration can sometimes lead to unnecessary fear and anger when it’s undiluted by others’ experiences that are not similar. These feelings can nucleate distrust between groups with different experiences. It’s a natural reaction, but not a very logical one.
I know it’s only my opinion, but experience is what you make of it.
“Even though Minnesota is much more diverse these days than when Bell first headed off to college, today’s young people are still interested in mostly black colleges and universities.”
What data do you have to back up this claim?
Rachel:
I grew up in the 1950s in a predominantly black neighborhood in Saint Paul that people refer to today as the old Rondo neighborhood. It was a workingclass to middleclass neighborhood that was mostly populated by two-parent families with children. My father worked for the city. One of my neighbors worked as a porter on the railroad. Another owned a funeral home. There were black merchants, government workers, tradesmen, and professionals.
There was a Baptist church, an AME church and a Catholic church, all attended by predominantly black congregations. My preacher was black, my teachers at the neighborhood school were black, my scout leaders were black, my playmates at the community center were black. As a non-black person, I was in the minority, but it was such a friendly, nurturing, healthy experience growing up that I didn’t even think in those terms until years later in retrospect.
In that neighborhood, the “black experience” was no different than a workingclass or middleclass white experience.
When they built the I-94 interstate, they essentially bulldozed the neighborhood. Many of the black families moved to north Minneapolis. My family moved about a mile south into a predominantly white neighborhood.
A few years ago, I met a young black woman on a local forum like this one. She was raised by her mother and grandmother in north Minneapolis, where they had moved when the freeway construction destroyed Rondo.
She knew nothing about the old neighborhood and was in disbelief when I described it to her. Most of her black neighbors in Minneapolis were poor or working poor. Her mother sent her to a mostly-white private school in the suburbs and she later went on to college at an exclusive mostly-white college back East. She interned for an upscale ad agency in Minneapolis.
I used to tease her in our online discussions that I grew up with and probably knew more black people than she did.
In her “black experience,” only white people had good jobs and money and most black people were poor and lived on government assistance.
Had she gone on to Howard, Spelman, or Alabama A & M, instead of Williams for example, she would have met black people from a wide variety of backgrounds and upbringings and it would have changed her perceptions about the “black experience.” She even would have met some black republicans (see below).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBlMP5El9G4
I hope this answers your question.
@#4
Alas, it doesn’t:
“In that neighborhood, the “black experience” was no different than a workingclass or middleclass white experience.”
Does it change the experience when the color of the majority’s skin changes? The concept seems to have an overall feel, not an individual’s experience. That is, your friend’s “black experience” is not THE black experience. And it isn’t any different than the white experience in the same situation, as far as I can tell. And your “black experience” was no different than a similarly situated “white experience.”
Have I only experienced the “white experience” since I’ve moved up in the world, met a wider variety of white people? No. In fact, I’ve met a variety of successful (and less successful) people of all races and backgrounds. I would say that I’ve experienced several facets of the HUMAN experience, but I wouldn’t label it the “white experience,” except in stereotype. If THE experience is the opposite of the stereotype, then I experienced THE “white experience” when I was growing up poor and in a “broken” family.
I think that there must be something cultural that I’m missing. Perhaps something that I’m not expected to understand? If so, that’s a pity.
Rachel your comment reminds me of
the book my dissertation sponsor wrote called “Root Shock.” It told the seldom heard story of urban redevelopment and how it destroyed the black community. Redevelopment predates the civil rights struggles for integration so we focused on eating at the white owned establishment, which is a major struggle and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods went on silently. This more than anything prepared the way for the crack epidemic which was the nail in the coffin for the Blacks community.
Check out my blog Destroying the pipeline
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4490922182921921317#editor/target=post;postID=8327298214670566043