In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 SIX “Black Like Who?” Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity Reuel Rogers Walking along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, one immediately notices that the Caribbean has come to New York. All along the avenue, signals of a vibrant Caribbean immigrant presence shout at even the most casual observer. Storefronts advertise Caribbean symbolism—the bright colors of a flag, a palm tree, a stack of island newspapers in the window. Small, garrulous groups of men and women congregate in front of Caribbean bakeries and restaurants to discuss the news from “back home.” Their animated conversations are thick with the distinctive inflections of Caribbean dialect. Jitney vans and dollar cabs perilously jockey for position as they compete for fares along the busy thoroughfare. And above the din, the sounds of calypso and reggae music ring out. This is black New York. Only a short train ride away is Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the city’s older African American neighborhoods. Mixed in with the brownstones are a few venerable African American churches, where a mostly older segment of the population faithfully worship. Young African American men stand on street corners or sit on stoops, playing spirited rounds of “the dozens.” They exchange clever barbs in an endlessly inventive form of American English vernacular. Cars speed by with the aggressive beats of rap and hip-hop music pouring out down-turned windows. This, too, is black New York. Together these two vignettes provide a snapshot of an increasingly diverse group of black New Yorkers. Within the past three decades the cleavages within the city’s black population have multiplied almost exponentially, a pattern reflected among blacks throughout the country. The divisions among blacks nationwide are many: economic, regional, generational, and so on. The most pronounced sign of diversification among black New Yorkers, however, is the division between the native- and the foreign-born. Native-born African Americans predominate, but their numbers are in relative decline. The number of black immigrants from the Caribbean, in contrast, has increased rapidly over the last few decades. Recent estimates put their numbers at roughly six hundred thousand, which constitutes almost one-third of New York’s black population.1 If the current immigration and demographic trends persist, first- and second-generation AfroCaribbean immigrants will soon outnumber African Americans in the population .2 To speak of the city’s black constituency, then, is to refer to a heavily foreign-born population. To make a more general point, black New Yorkers are a diverse population in flux. In light of this growing diversity, monolithic categorizations of the city’s black population have become increasingly untenable. In much of the influential scholarship on racial and ethnic politics in the United States, there has been a longstanding tendency to treat the black population as if it were a homogeneous lot. Many studies routinely ignore or elide intragroup differences , tensions, and conflicts within black politics. Such treatments simplistically assume or imply an undifferentiated black community bound by common experiences and wedded to some unitary vision of a political agenda. In short, these studies often leave us with lamentably superficial, one-dimensional analyses of black politics and the uncomplicated notion of an essential racial community. To posit an undifferentiated black collectivity , however, is to ignore how class, gender, and ethnic divisions within race may shape reality differently for members of the group. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994: 23) have noted, “Blacks in ethnic terms are as diverse as whites.” Sophisticated analyses of black politics, then, are obliged to take note of this diversity. In recent years, social scientists have begun to consider the political implications of these emerging patterns of differentiation within the black population.3 Their inquiries typically focus on three key analytical questions . First, do American blacks in the post–civil rights era share a common set of racial group interests? Second, is there a unified black political agenda? Finally, do blacks in general subscribe to a shared racial group identity that tends to inform their political attitudes and behavior? The growing differentiation among blacks has made these questions the subject of intense scholarly and public debate. To quote one observer, “the meaning of being Black, who is ‘allowed’ to be Black, and the content of a Black agenda(s), is now more fiercely contested . . . than before” (Dawson 1994a: 195). The deepening economic division between middle- and lower-class blacks has been the topic of much of this research and debate. In keeping with the...

Share