Somali-American Community Worries HBO Show Will Promote Misrepresentation

The pilot of a new HBO family drama about the Somali-American community in the Midwest wrapped filming in Minneapolis last week. But Somali-Americans in the city have protested the show out of fear it will depict their community poorly.

The show, titled “Mogadishu, Minnesota,” was written by Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan Warsame, and it will focus on a Somali family living in the city. But after speculation that the focus would be on the community’s vulnerability to jihadi recruitment, protests broke out in the city. 

Some expressed concern over the pilot’s title, “The Recruiters.” Haji Yusuf, the community director of the #UniteCloud campaign, which seeks to fight stereotyping in the St. Cloud area, told The Huffington Post in mid-October that he worries the show could portray his community in an unfair light.

“The people that are against it, they feel it’s going to portray Muslims, Somalis, in a certain way. You know media’s very powerful,” he said. He added that his community has already been poorly represented in films like “Captain Phillips,” where the main character is attacked by a team of Somali pirates. 

Minneapolis currently has one of the largest Somali populations in the country. Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked terror group based in Somalia, has targeted the city’s Somali community for recruitment.

“We have a problem with the issue of terrorism in our community, and we have to admit it,” Yusuf said. “Then we need to come together, working with law enforcement, working with everybody in our communities to deal with that problem and find a solution.”

But, he added, “We don’t want it to be told only through a movie or a TV series. It’s bigger than that.”

Warsame, who spent his early 20s in Minneapolis, has addressed the opposition and said he hopes the show will actually combat misconceptions. He told CBC News how opponents of the show have told him they “don’t want Muslims being stereotyped.”

“I say, ‘Me, too. That’s why I’m writing this,” he said.

Yusuf emphasized how positive stories about Somali-Americans are often overlooked. “It doesn’t have to be terror, terror, terror all the time” he said. “Or pirate, pirate, pirate. We have positive stories. It’s just people have to look and find them.”