Our group is proud to introduce Anika, one of the first African American women on the Coming of Age in Minnesota website. She is one of the younger participants of the project. All of our group members had the pleasure of attending Anika’s interview and experiencing her wonderful personality. Anika is an intelligent and articulate woman who has a great sense of humor.
Interviewing Anika about her coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s gave our group a perspective that we did not really have before. Although our group had learned about white privilege from reading various feminist texts, hearing Anika's personal experiences with racism and seeing her expressions and emotion affected us more than any written words could. Anika opened up our eyes to all the racial sameness here in Minnesota, along with how “Minnesota nice” isn’t always true.
It was not all a sobering experience though; it was also very fun and amusing. Anika has a great sense of humor and an interesting outlook on things and kept our group laughing. Unfortunately, the laughs ended there. Since the end of the interview, we seemed to have one technical difficulty after another. It seemed like the harder we worked, the more troubles we had. While the interview was fun, the project as a whole was very trying and involved a great amount of patience.
Meeting Anika and hearing her stories was a remarkable experience for our group, and we are so glad we had the opportunity to make her a part of our oral history project!
