The Possibilities of Indifference: (de)constructing Somali-Scottish identities and (re)positioning the ‘centre’

In the previous chapter, my critique of the race-making processes to which Somali people in Scotland are subjected opened with a series of commentaries from Somali women in Glasgow who found governmental provision for community development in Scotland wanting. Hawa, particularly, interpreted this environment through the lens of ethnicity and assumed that Glasgow-based Somali populations were being deliberately neglected by the government because of their Somali identity. It would perhaps be easy to dismiss Hawa’s earlier, ethnically-driven interpretation of the ‘aspirationally pluralist’ environment in Scotland as the result of personal experience.