More than 600 people packed a hotel in St. Paul last week to listen to a former star of MTV's Real World rap about diversity.

The rapping honored a handful of people who have made extraordinary efforts to fight racism in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota. The Saint Paul Foundation, the state's largest community foundation and sponsor of the Facing Race Ambassador Awards, flew in Mohammed Bilal as the award ceremony's keynote speaker at the Crowne Plaza Riverfront on May 3.

"Yo people watch this world, watch it like TV, and think of all the ways you could change the energy, change the electricity trajectory, change your own insecurity," Bilal said, rhythmically.

Bilal is a diversity consultant who is also a poet and musician (he's collaborated with Santana and Ben Harper), and he's the father of a six-year-old and an eight-week-old baby. He's recognizable from a widely-watched season of Real World in San Francisco, in which one of his roommates was booted from the house and another lived with AIDS.

"In reality we constitute light and space, and when they want to nail us down they call us gender, sexuality, ability, race," he said.

A Conversation Starter

The Saint Paul Foundation decided to launch the Facing Race Ambassador Awards seven years ago, when its research found that all racial groups report some level of discomfort around people of other races.

In her acceptance speech, winner Velma Korbel, Minneapolis' Civil Rights Director, noted that the Twin Cities' nonwhite-to-white unemployment rate is three to one. Forty-seven percent of African American children live in poverty, she said. And 29 percent of black families own their own homes, as opposed to 79 percent of white families.

"There is still a lot of work for all of us to do," she said.

Korbel was nominated by the YWCA for helping organize giant discussions on diversity at the Minneapolis Convention Center, where 1,200 people participate in table dialogues and commit to continue the conversation in their own networks. She's currently working to improve the city's poor record of hiring women- and minority-owned contractors.

Korbel grew up in East Texas. She remembers sitting apart from whites in the movie theater, and she remembers sitting by the side of the road at age six while police searched her family's car on the way home from a family vacation. "I have children; I don't want them to ever have to face the kind of segregation that I faced growing up," she said.

Rooting Out Injustices

The Facing Race co-honoree, Nathaniel Abdul Khaliq, watched his grandparents' predominately African American neighborhood in St. Paul become uprooted by the construction of I-94 in the 1960s. Khaliq's grandparents were one of the last to be evicted from their home. He saw businesses shut down and never relocate, and he saw other evicted neighbors go on to never own a home again.

"It had a profound impact on me," he said. "It made me angry, because we as a community didn't organize and fight harder against it. I was angry that the system would come up with a plan like that."

In a 17-year run as president of St. Paul's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Khaliq went on to fight other systems he found to be racially biased.

In collaboration with the University of St. Thomas, he reported that nearly 70 percent of "obstructing legal process" charges were levied against African Americans. The findings prompted the city attorney to retrain prosecutors, which doubled the dismissal rate of cases being prosecuted.

Khaliq also advocated for changes to police databases that contain thousands of young people--most of them members of minority groups--who are presumed to be gang members. A couple of red flags--being in a photo with known gang members or wearing gang colors, for example--could be enough to land a youth on the databases, Khaliq said, and inclusion could be used as the basis for a search warrant. He said that as a result of his work, the parents of very young teens entered on one database must be notified. He was also able to get a reduction in the number of years young people are kept in the databases.

"I've really been pleased and disappointed with this struggle," he said. "The only thing we've ever asked is not special treatment as a people, but equal treatment. The struggle continues."

Skewed Perceptions

Three other nominees received honorable mentions for their work. They include Rev. Paul Slack of New Creation Church in Brooklyn Park, who convinced the Minnesota Department of Transportation to dedicate part of its federal funding to women and minority job training; and A. Lori Saroya, who has worked to resolve hundreds of legal complaints as part of the Council on American-Islamic Relations/Minnesota (MNCAIR), the state's only Muslim civil rights organization and a branch of national CAIR.

Another honorable mention went to Dr. Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. He's working to preserve the Ojibwe language, which is down to about 1,000 speakers in the U.S., many of them elderly. Treuer is developing the first grammar manual of the Ojibwe language. His $1,000 in prize money will help pay for more than 100 businesses in the Bemidji area to convert their signs to both Ojibwe and English. He said the signs help Native Americans feel more comfortable in stores where they normally feel eyes suspiciously following them around.

Treuer said the Ojibwe face all kinds of attacks on their culture, from the movement toward English-language laws to the reservations' lack of employment opportunities. He said the general public's perceptions of Native Americans range wildly, from people getting rich on casinos to people living in squalor.

"No one knows what is really going on," Treuer said. "I think Native Americans are often imagined, but not often well understood."

Working the Awareness Muscle

To overcome misconceptions about other cultures, Bilal challenged attendees at the Facing Race event to break their usual habits. He suggested listening to music they don't normally hear, or attending community events outside their neighborhoods.

"Every day, we have to continue working the muscle that exists around this subject, around facing race, around racial equity," he said.

As part of his trip to Minnesota, Bilal met with students at Central High School in St. Paul. He taught them about the real-world value of networking in diverse groups, and showed them how to convert their life stories into poetry.
Students from Central performed a poem at the Facing Race awards, and the school's artist-in-residence, Brittany Delaney, used Bilal's techniques to write a poem as well.

"We don't need to be colorblind, but we don't need to be color-blinded," said Delaney.

This year's awards featured more young people in the audience than ever before. A grant from the Shepard Family Fund helped bus them to the event.

"Each year we do this, the crowd gets bigger and bigger," said Joan Grzywinski, board chair of the Saint Paul Foundation.

A Challenge

The Foundation left the audience with a challenge. The board is looking for idea submissions on how to create new conversations on diversity. The submission deadline is June 3, and the best ideas will receive $2,500 for implementation. Saint Paul Foundation President Carleen Rhodes said that one example might be youth group members hiring a bus to shuttle them to nursing homes to tell their stories. Or a church primarily composed of a single race or ethnic group could reach out to a church of another ethnicity to hold joint learning sessions.

 Korbel said she is hopeful that all of the dialogue about race is starting to work. "The first time I had this conversation about eight years ago � there was just a lot of pain in the conversation," she said. "But what I find now is that there is a lot of hope in the conversation."

Michelle Bruch profiled entrepreneur Don Smithmier in our February 23 issue.


Photos, top to bottom:

Mohammed Bilal

Bilal stokes up the crowd in the Crowne Plaza.

Texas-born Minneapolis civil rights chief Velma Korbel with her award

Veteran activist Nathaniel Abdul Khaliq

A drum circle opened and closed the ceremony.

All photos by Bill Kelley