Multicultural Community Building in an Urban Neighborhood

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 needing housing subsidies. This activism modified class hierarchy, by re-imagining it along the lines of the housing one inhabits.