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Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside youth work to strip bad reputation

September 8, 2015

By Shreya Thakkar,
editor-in-chief

Musa Ali (left) and Abdullahi Abdullahi (right) walk home after playing basketball at the local park.“Once people learn about our community, they’ll know that we’re not that different,” Abdullahi said. (photos courtesy of Courtney Walston)

Minneapolis, MN — Cedar Riverside Community Middle School student Teysir Yussuf was restless. Any minute the Fox News article about qualifying for track and field nationals would be posted and he would get the recognition he earned.
But the 288 word article quickly became meaningless to Yussuf when he saw the three-line reader-comment at the bottom on the article.
“Their own culture is so dysfunctional they had to go to a safe Christian country to have success,” the commenter wrote, and then implied there was a link between Yussuf and terrorist group al-Shabab.
“Yussuf comes to me and he was just distraught,” said Jennifer Weber, behavioral specialist and Cedar Riverside Community School athletic director. “He said, ‘I don’t even want to run anymore. They don’t know who I am. They don’t know what I’m about. Why would they do that to me?’”
Cedar-Riverside is a neighborhood of Minneapolis, otherwise known as “Little Somalia” for its 4,000 to 6,000 Somali people and 96 languages spoken in the four-block radius. For youth living in the 8,094 person town, negative attention from both the media and the city is common.
Most of it is based on the 27 Somali-Americans who left Cedar-Riverside to fight in the Somali Civil War between 2006 and 2011, according to National Public Radio. Within the past two years, 12 members of the community traveled to Syria to join ISIS and 12 more who allegedly had been preparing to go have been intercepted.
Recruitment is a very real problem that horrifies most community members. However, Abdirizak Bihi, the director of Somali education at a local advocacy group, believes perception of the community is skewed, and he will not tolerate it.
“Instead of supporting the good job we’re doing here and aspirations of these young people, they become another al-Shabaab by further calling names to the community,” Bihi said. “The person who is trying to destroy their life by talking to them and trying to make them terrorists … and those people that smear and peel the aspirations of our young people are equally the same to me and what I do, and we condemn them.”
Al-Shabab recruited Bihi’s nephew Burhan Hassan, then 17, in 2008 to fight in Somalia, where he was later killed. Since then, Bihi has risen as a leader in his community to fight against terrorist organizations and recruitment. Along the way, he has spoken to countless national news organizations.
Like Bihi, Abdullahi Abdullahi, the eighth grade class speaker at Cedar Riverside Community School, believes the public’s perception of the Cedar-Riverside community does not match up
with the reality.

Director of Somali Education in Cedar-Riverside Abdirizak Bihi explains how media attention concentrating on terrorist recruitment incidents in Cedar-Riverside, Minnesota hinders the advancement of the community. Ever since Bihi’s nephew joined terrorist organization al-Shabab in 2008, Bihi has been working to prevent recruitment of youth in Cedar-Riverside.

“When people are crossing the streets, they’ll run because of the reputation of Cedar-Riverside,” Abdullahi said.
In fact, when student-teachers from Minneapolis’ Augsburg College taught evening classes at Cedar Riverside Community School, they were asked to fill out pre-program and post-program surveys.
According to Weber, the pre-surveys showed some teachers were told they shouldn’t come across the road into Cedar-Riverside or use the light rail in the neighborhood. The post-surveys showed a shift in attitude that described the community as a “quiet, clean place.”
Next year, Abdullahi will attend Saint Louis Park High School, located outside of Little Somalia. There he plans to expose himself to greater diversity and acceptance.
“I want friends who aren’t my culture or my skin color,” Abdullahi said. “I don’t want them to be all Somali. I want friend that are white. I want friends that are black. I want friends that are Mexican. I want all kinds of friends, and I won’t judge them.”
Abdullahi hopes others will soon see Cedar-Riverside as he does.
“Once people learn about our community, they’ll know that we’re not that different,” Abdullahi said. “We only speak a different language, have some different customs, celebrate other religions and all that. But it’s not that different because we’re humans and they’re humans so they [shouldn’t] be scared anymore.”

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