Some see Fargo confrontation as opportunity to discuss race

Both sides involved in a racially charged parking lot confrontation are expressing regret amid calls for a dialogue about race relations in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

It's not entirely clear what started the incident Tuesday afternoon outside a Walmart in Fargo. Police are still investigating. But Amber Hensley, a white woman from the nearby town of Mapleton, N.D., got into a heated exchange with three Somali women sitting in a car.

In part of the exchange recorded by one of the Somali women and posted on Facebook, Hensley is heard saying "We're gonna kill all of you!"

Hensley later apologized on Facebook: "It was not a Christian like thing to do AT ALL and wish I could take it back, but I lost my cool and I can't. I am terribly sorry."

Hensley said the Somali women were parked so close she could not get into her car, and they used an epithet to call her fat.

The three Somali women also want to apologize for their comments, according to Hukun Abdelai, who posted the video on Facebook.

Abdelai is executive director of the Afro American Development Association which helps immigrants and refugees with housing and job training. He's lived in Fargo for three years.

He said the three women contacted him for help after the parking lot incident.

Abdelai said he was very surprised when the video went viral. But he wasn't surprised by all the messages he received in response, mostly from African women in Fargo-Moorhead.

"You know, like it happened to me, somebody say 'get out of my country' and they never recorded or they never called the police," he said.

Abdelai said he's hoping to help arrange a meeting between Amber Hensley and the three Somali women. And he's willing to meet with anyone who doesn't like him because of his color or religion. "I feel like if they want to reach out to us, if they want to sit down with us we are a human being like them and the only thing that is different is the color so we can sit down, talk to each other, have a coffee and share ourselves, why we came here," he said.

Abdelai's organization is one of several hosting a rally next week in Fargo to draw attention to the issue of racial tensions in the region. The rally was scheduled before Tuesday's parking lot confrontation, partly in response to another incident earlier this month.

Early on a Sunday morning, Shuaib Ali, 35, was moving in to a new apartment in Fargo. Two relatives were helping carry belongings from a van into the apartment when Ali was attacked by two white men he says were shouting racial slurs.

"We never had any conversation at all, they are total strangers to me," Ali said. "They just like run in the street and came down to me and start punching."

The men were arrested and charged with assault. The Council on American Islamic Relations called for the men to be charged with a hate crime.

However, North Dakota doesn't have a hate crime statute.

"We need some hate crime legislation in the state," said Kjersten Nelson, chair of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition. "Prosecutors don't have that available to them in the state right now."

Nelson said the group has lobbied unsuccessfully for years to get a hate crime statute in North Dakota.

There has clearly been an increase in visible incidents of anti-immigrant rhetoric and action since last fall's election, she said.

"It raises the question of 'is there more going on, or are we just more attuned and paying more attention to things that have been going on all along?'" she said. "But it does certainly seem like something is different, something's happening. It doesn't seem to take a lot to kind of set it off."

The Human Rights Coalition recently started a project to collect stories from people who have experienced racist or xenophobic incidents, Nelson said.

She's hopeful the recent incident in Fargo will encourage more people to tell their stories as a way to start a community dialogue.