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CONCLUSION Invisible No More? West Indian Americans in the Social Scientific Imagination Philip Kasinitz In his 1972 landmark essay on West Indian Americans, Roy Bryce-Laporte described the group as the “invisible” immigrants. It’s a telling image. The essays collected in this volume and the larger body of research on which they draw show clearly that West Indian Americans have become a good deal more visible in the last quarter century—both in the social scientific literature and in the popular imagination. Yet the confluence of race and ethnicity that may have rendered West Indians invisible at earlier times is still very much with us, as the essays by Waters, Vickerman, Rogers, and Bashi Bobb and Clarke all show. Today West Indians are the largest immigrant group in the nation’s largest city.1 They constitute about 8 percent of New York’s population —more if their U.S.-born children are included. They are a major contributor to the huge wave of international migration that has altered the nature of several of America’s largest cities since the mid 1960s, yet they are still most often written about in terms of what their experience does (or does not) imply about African Americans. They are almost always seen relative to other blacks—and only rarely relative to other immigrants. Given the central place the question of race plays in U.S. history, it could hardly be otherwise. Indeed, many of us who have written about West Indian migration were initially drawn to the topic precisely for this reason. Yet this focus, if no longer rendering West Indians as invisible as they were twenty-five years ago, still ignores parts of their experience. Drawing on Ralph Ellison, Bryce-Laporte’s notion of invisibility was both apt and ironic. On one level West Indian Americans, at that time overwhelmingly the second- and third-generation descendants of people who came to the United States between 1900 and 1930, were obviously members of what the Canadians call a “visible” minority. To the extent that the group was  primarily marked by its “racial” (in this case meaning phenotypical) identity as people of African descent,2 West Indian immigrants had come to share Ellison ’s African American paradox of stigmatized physical visibility and social invisibility. For West Indians, Bryce-Laporte argued, incorporation into the larger African American community carried with it an additional layer of invisibility : invisibility as immigrants or as “ethnics.” Although most West Indian Americans were, or were descendants of, early-twentieth-century immigrants to New York City—that is to say, immigrants in the quintessential immigrant town—their racial identity obscured their ethnic distinctiveness. A quick look back at the literature confirms Bryce-Laporte’s point. In 1920, West Indian immigrants constituted about a quarter of New York’s black population . Over the next five decades their numbers would fall relative to those of native-born African Americans. They would, however, continue to play a disproportionately prominent role in the political and social leadership of New York’s African American community (Kasinitz 1992). Yet, in both the social scientific and journalistic accounts of New York’s pre-1965 immigrant groups, West Indians are rarely seen.3 On the rare occasions when the mainstream press noticed West Indians prior to the 1970s it was usually in the context of mildly humorous human interest stories, underlining the fact that, for most white readers, the very fact that black people might play cricket or celebrate the birthday of the British monarch was amusing.4 It should be noted that West Indians do appear prominently in both fiction and nonfiction about pre–World War II New York written by African Americans . Both during the Harlem Renaissance and in the later memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, West Indians play a noteworthy role.5 Yet the general thrust of this literature is that West Indians should and inevitably would become part of an African American melting pot, in parallel to the mainstream melting pot bubbling away downtown. While they might add a bit of Caribbean seasoning to the African American cultural melange, West Indians were, these writers noted, rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the black community. Attempts to assert otherwise were often derided as dangerously divisive and ethnocentric (see, for example, DuBois 1920). West Indian immigrants and their children probably also contributed to their own invisibility. However much early-twentieth-century West Indian New Yorkers and their children may have...

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