When Me'Lea Connelly founded a credit union to serve the black community, she realized she had to define what black meant.
Not refugees from Africa. Not immigrants. African-Americans who descended from slavery.
"We are very specific about the target beneficiary of our work," said Connelly, the vision and strategy lead at Village Financial Cooperative in north Minneapolis. Without making such a distinction, "there's a lot of erasure in our ability to advocate."
Waves of African immigrants and refugees over the past few decades have made the question of black identity far more complicated, prompting black leaders to question whether to specifically advocate for their own cultures, to embrace Pan-African solidarity or find a means to do both.
A national movement is working to highlight American descendants of slavery (ADOS) in a debate on reparations, while other activists are trying to draw attention to the needs of newer black arrivals. And the contours of blackness are prompting deeper reflection amid preparations for the 2020 census that will, for the first time, allow people checking "black or African-American" to answer in more detail about their country of origin.
These questions are particularly fraught in the Twin Cities, where a diverse black citizenry stretches from the African-American shops along W. Broadway to the high-rises with Somali families in Cedar-Riverside to the Liberian churches in the northwest suburbs. The state had 134,000 residents who were born in Africa as of 2017, out of 361,000 who identified as black.
Fartun Weli believes it makes no sense to group all black people under one label. As a Somali-American, she thinks that not being able to refer to people in a more particular way destroys their history and identity.
"It's important that African-American [ADOS] identity is honored," said Weli, executive director of Isuroon, a nonprofit that helps women of Somali heritage. She has spoken with the state demographer's office about preparing for the census. "When we're talking about infant mortality rates, we're talking about incarceration, we're talking about historical oppression and all that, you can't just put Africans and African-Americans together — that's not fair."