"What, then, is the African American?" African and Afro-Caribbean identities in black America

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 77-103

  Johnson, Violet M Showers ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349128384     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. Everett Hughes, "Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status," American Journal of Sociology 50 (1945): 353-59.
2. The term "voluntary" is problematic, especially when it is used to describe refugees forced from their homes. In this essay, it describes the immigration of people of African descent to the U.S. as free persons since the 1860s.
3. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959).
4. Quoted in Rachel Swarns, "'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate," New York Times, August 29, 2004.
5. See Rachel Swarns, "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted" New York Times, February 2, 2007.
6. For an analysis of Obama's postracial politics, see Janny Scott, "A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line," New York Times, December 29, 2007.
7. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC, 1900-1933).
8. Ira Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustments, 1899-1937 (New York, 1939), 244.
9. For more on Hart-Cellar, especially its revolutionary outcomes, see David M. Reimers, "An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States," Journal of American Ethnic History 13 (Fall 1983): 9-28.
10. See Michel S. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York, 1998), 86.
11. John Logan, "Who Are the Other African Americans? Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States," in The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, ed. Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven Tuch (Lanham, MD, 2007), 49-53;
12. Mary Mederios Kent, "Immigration and America's Black Population," Population Bulletin 62, no.4 (2007): Table 3.
13. Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1985 (Urbana, IL, 1993).
14. Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of Ghana, were among the first sub-Saharan Africans to study in the United States, doing so in the 1920s and 1930s.
15. For more on the new African diaspora to America, see April Gordon, "The New Diaspora: African Immigration to the United States," Journal of Third World Studies 15, no. 1 (1998): 79-103;
16. Khalid Koser, New African Diasporas (London, 2003);
17. Sylviane Diouf, "The New African Diaspora," in In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, ed. Sylviane Diouf and Howard Dodson (New York, 2005);
18. and Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang, Baffour K. Takyi, and John Arthur, eds., The New African Diaspora in North America: Trends, Community Building and Adaptation (Lanham, MD, 2006).
19. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, various years, http://www.dhs.gov (accessed January 29, 2008).
20. Logan, "Who are the Other African Americans," 56;
21. Kent, "Immigration and America's Black Population," Table 4;
22. Jill H. Wilson, "African-Born Black Immigrants in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area," 13;
23. For more on the brain drain from Africa, see Aran Peter Lobo, "Unintended Consequences: Liberalized U.S. Immigration Law and the African Brain Drain," in Konadu-Agyemang, Takyi, and Arthur, eds., The New African Diaspora in North America, 168-88.
24. In his ethnographical study, sociologist John Arthur recounts numerous stories of how Africans pooled resources together to educate family members in the United States. See John A. Arthur, Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (Westport, CT, 2000). Oral history collected for this essay and a larger, ongoing study, with Marilyn Halter, on West Africans in America offers many insights into the emphasis on education at home and in America.
25. Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? (New York, 1995), 11.
26. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944);
27. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New York, 1966);
28. Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA, 1993);
29. Peter Rose, They and We: Racial and Ethnic Relations in the United States (New York, 1997);
30. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA, 2000);
31. Stephen Steinberg, ed. Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Issues and Debates (Maiden, MA, 1994);
32. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, 1993).
33. Holt, Problem of Race, 8.
34. Stephan Themstrom, The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 176-219.
35. For more on the Sweet episode and its relevance for explaining race and race relations in the 1920s, see Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York, 2004).
36. See Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington, IN, 1996);
37. Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, NY, 1992);
38. and Violet Showers Johnson, The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900-1950 (Bloomington, IN, 2006).
39. Boston Chronicle, February 15, 1936.
40. An excellent study of Caribbean activism in the first half of the twentieth century is Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London, 1998).
41. Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé), at the age of eleven, emigrated with his parents from Trinidad. He is best known in the history of the black straggle as one of the founding members and leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as an honorary figure in the Black Panther Party.
42. Kelly Miller, Watchtower, New York Amsterdam News, September 15, 1934.
43. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid;
44. Cose, Rage of a Privileged Class, 1;
45. In the fall of 2006, racial tensions at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, exploded into a schoolyard fight between white and black students. The white students got away with lenient punishments because their actions, including a display of nooses, were seen as a "prank." The black students, dubbed the Jena Six, on the other hand received harsh punishments, including an attempted murder charge for some. This twenty-first-century version of Jim Crow justice unleashed a national uproar and protest reminiscent of the civil rights era.
46. Patrick Grant, "Coming to America with Eyes Wide Shut," in Foreign-born African Americans: Silenced Voices in the Discourse of Race, ed. Festus E. Obiakor and Patrick A. Grant (New York, 2005).
47. Kofi Konadu Apraku, Outside Looking In: An African Perspective on American Pluralistic Society (Westport, CT, 1996), xiii;
48. Sabella Abidde, "Wind of Change?" Nigerians in America, http://www.nigeriansinamerica.com/articles/597/1/Africans-At-Home-and-Abroad, March 21, 2005, (accessed March 31, 2005);
49. Cheikh T. Sylla is quoted in Tracie Reddick, "Africans vs. African Americans: A Shared Complexion Does Not Guarantee Racial Solidarity," Tampa Tribune, May 15, 1998.
50. Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about America (New York, 2002), 129-30.
51. Stephen Steinberg, "Immigration, African Americans, and the Race Discourse," New Politics 10 (2005), http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue39/ steingerg39.htm (accessed October 12, 2005).
52. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1850-1925 (New York, 1976);
53. John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics (Albany, NY, 1991).
54. For an analysis of the killing of Mulegeta Seraw and its aftermath, see Elinor Langer, A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America (New York, 2003).
55. th Precinct," Vanity Fair, December 1997.
56. For an account of the Diallo killing and aftermath, including the friction between Diallo's family and African American leaders over how to protest, see Kadiatou Diallo and Craig Wolff, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou (New York, 2003).
57. The Haitian American community got some of its early training in American activism from responding to the brazen AIDS stigmatization in the mid-1980s and in 1990. In 1985 Haitians came out en masse and successfully demanded that they be removed from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) list that singled them out as a national group most likely to have HIV. In 1990 another federal agency, the Food and Drag Administration, attempted a repeat stigmatization by cautioning that Haitian blood donors were potential HIV carriers. This assault was met with rage, protest, and ultimate victory for the Haitians, reminiscent of the 1980s showdown with the CDC.
58. Frankie Edozien, "Remembering Amadou Diallo," The African, February 2002.
59. A. Olubode, interview by Violet M. Showers Johnson, May 17, 2003, recording in possession of Johnson.
60. Ruel R. Rogers, "Race-Based Coalitions among Minority Groups: Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and African-Americans in New York City," Urban Affairs Review 39, no. 3 (January 2004): 283-317.
61. Mark Bixler, "Across Metro Atlanta, African Immigrants Gather around Their Radios," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 29, 1999.
62. On March 3, 1991, Los Angeles police brutally beat Rodney King, an African American, after a high-speed pursuit. The videotape of this incident convinced many that it was racially motivated. The outcry became louder when, a year later, the officers involved were acquitted. The "race" riots sparked by this episode remain one of the most glaring illustrations of America's enduring race problems.
63. Elizabeth Alexander, "Can You Be Black and Look at This? Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, by the Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago, 1995), 82.
64. Emmet Till was an African American teenager from Chicago who, on a visit to Mississippi in 1955, was brutally murdered for allegedly insulting a white woman. His death is now acknowledged as one of the catalysts for the modern civil rights movement.
65. Manthia Diawara, We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (New York, 2003), ix.
66. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess., vol. 52, pt. 1, December 31, 1914, S 1134.
67. For example, in the early 1920s, a group of Anglican West Indians in Boston held services in the predominantly white Church of the Ascension. The white members flagrantly displayed racism, bigotry, and contempt by fumigating the church after the black foreigners left. See Robert Hayden, Faith, Culture and Leadership: A History of the Black Church in Boston (Boston, 1983), 50-53.
68. See Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 56-65;
69. Showers Johnson, Other Black Bostonians, 55-59.
70. Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity, 148-50.
71. Yanick St. Jean, "Contrasting Religious Preferences between Catholic African Americans and Haitian Americans," in Shaw-Taylor and Tuch, eds., The Other African Americans, 154.
72. Soliny Védrine, "The History off the Haitian Church in Boston: 1969-2004," Emmanuel Research Review 1 (2004), http://egc.org/ research/issue-l.htm#Hatians-Boston (accessed August 17, 2006).
73. Regine Jackson, "Beyond Social Distancing: Intermarriage and Ethnic Boundaries among Black Americans in Boston," in Shaw-Taylor and Tuch, eds., The Other African Americans, 217-53.
74. PhD candidate Mark Gornik counted 110 African immigrant churches in New York alone in 2003. See Daniel Wakin, "Where Gospel Resounds in African Tongues," New York Times, April 18, 2004.
75. The history of independent African churches in America, still unfolding, is only just being researched. Jacob Olupona, professor of African and African American Studies, received a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation to study African immigrant religious communities in major U.S. cities. The project yielded conferences; symposia; and most recently, an anthology. Jacob K. Olupona and Regina Gemignani, eds., African Immigrant Religions in America (New York, 2007).
76. From blog comments responding to article on African immigrant churches, "Christianity Turns Brown," October 2002, http://www.amren.com/news/ o4/o4/20/africanchurches.html (accessed February 27, 2006).
77. See Robert L. Boyd "The Storefront Church Ministry in African American Communities of the Urban North during the Great Migration: The Making of an Ethnic Niche," Social Science Journals 35, no. 3 (1998): 319-32.
78. See Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. (New York, 1998), chapter 2.
79. Yoruba Islamic organizations in major American cities offer a good example of Islam and African ethnicity. See Yushau Sodiq, "African Muslims in the United States: The Nigerian Case," in Olupona and Gemignani, eds., African Immigrant Religions.
80. For more examples, see Linda Beck, "West African Muslims in America: When Are Muslims Not Muslims?" in ibid.
81. For a description of the 2003 visit of the spiritual leader, the eighty-three-year-old sheik, Mourtada Mbaké, see Susan Sachs, "In Harlem's Fabric, Bright Threads of Senegal," New York Times, July 28, 2003.
82. For more on Senegalese Murids in America, see Cheikh Anta Babou, "Brotherhood Solidarity, Education and Migration: The Role of the Dahiras among the Murid Muslim Community of New York," African Affairs 101 (April 2002): 151-70.
83. Kwasi Kwakye-Nuako, "Still Praisin' God in a New Land: African Immigrant Christianity in North America," in Konadu-Agyemang, Takyi, and Arthur, eds., New African Diaspora in North America, 122.
84. For a scholarly examination of the Caribbean carnival in the diaspora, see Philip W. Scher, Carnival and the Formation of a Caribbean Transnation (Gainesville, FL, 2003).
85. Kasinitz, Caribbean New York, 159.
86. Paul T. Adujie, "Nigeria's National Independence Day Celebrations, New York," African Abroad-USA, October 6, 2005.
87. John H. Mc Whorter, "Why I'm Black, Not African American," Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2004.