The Making of African America (31 page)

The men and women who stood behind the counters of these small enterprises found advantage in maintaining the old ways in the new world. Ethnic solidarity proved to be good business, and some articulated a fierce nationalism. But ethnic entrepreneurs also found benefit in easing the path of new arrivals by acting as a bridge between their homelands and their new homes, serving as agents of Americanization. Most found no contradiction between the two roles.
²⁵

Community formation became the occasion for men and women to clarify the multiple identities they carried to the United States, or at least to sort them out. Mary C. Waters, a Harvard sociologist who studies late-twentieth-century West Indian immigrants, tells of a clerk of Barbadian origin who distinguished herself from an African American by asserting her Caribbean heritage, only to be reprimanded by her Jamaican superior that she was not Caribbean but rather West Indian, meaning Anglophone Caribbean. Yet, upon further investigation, Waters discovered that a mere 3 percent of the Jamaicans living in New York described themselves as West Indian, while some 80 percent continued to call themselves Jamaicans. Waters concluded that “it appears the identity adopted by the first generation is in part a learned response to American categories and ways of defining people.” Indeed, another immigrant told Waters that before she “came here I used to be Jamaican. But now I am West Indian.”
²⁶

As Waters's interview suggests, the process by which immigrants reinvent themselves amid the fourth great migration does not differ substantially from that of earlier arrivals, forced or free. Just as Igbos and Hausas became Africans in the eighteenth century, so those same ethnic groups made themselves into Nigerians at the end ofthe twentieth. The nation-state—although new—often had a more powerful pull on the west side of the Atlantic than on the east, if only because the American government recognizes nationality and not ethnicity. A sense of how the migratory process has sharpened national allegiances can be garnered by the calendar of some of the fetes celebrated in Chicago. There, on April 20 Cameroonians mark their nation's independence day; soon after, the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts the Nigerian Festival, which is followed in late July by the Liberian Independence Day Parade, the celebrations of Angolan and Ghanaian independence (November II and March 6), and finally by Jamhuri Day (December 12), when Kenyans mark the British withdrawal from their native land.
²⁷

Nationality, however, does not always trump ethnicity. Yorubas—who came from all parts of the Atlantic world—found that they had more in common with each other than they did with their putative countrymen. They established distinctive neighborhood enclaves, along with associations that reflected the transnational character of African ethnicity, as with the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America) which drew its membership not only from west Africa but also from the Caribbean and portions of South America. Similar transnational, rather than national, entities emerged among Ewes from Benin, Ghana, and Togo, as well as the Jollas from Gambia and Senegal. Moreover, if Yorubas, Jollas, Ewes, and others reestablished their transnational ethnicity on the west side of the Atlantic, they were joined by others to create new forms of solidarity, like the African National Union, an association that claimed to speak for all Africans in the United States. The process whereby Igbos and Angolans, Mandes and Mandinkas had joined to establish African churches, schools, and burial societies at the end of the eighteenth century was repeated two hundred years later. In much the same way, the diverse peoples of the Caribbean not only celebrate Dominican or Jamaican independence but also march in local Caribbean parades.
²⁸

Such connections suggest that rather than become African Americans, immigrants of African descent manufactured new nationalities distinctive from that of native black Americans. Angolans, Kenyans, and Somalis became Africans, and Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Trinidadians became Caribbeans—not necessarily African Americans—as a result of their experience on the mainland.

Whether understood in transnational, national, or ethnic terms, the ability to create new ties or maintain old ones complicated the process of identity formation. Old allegiances have perhaps been strongest among political refugees, awaiting regime change before returning home. But attachments to the homeland affected nearly all newcomers, creating a farrago of multiple identities while birthing yet a new one.

As African and Afro-Caribbean people—along with the scattering of black people from other parts of the globe—forged new selves, they also discovered a common experience as immigrants of African descent in the United States. In centuries past, Africans and African Americans, Virginians and Mississippians, and Southerners and Northerners had little choice but to find common ground. Differences between Africans and creoles had disappeared quickly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as slaves from the seaboard had been silently incorporated into the plantations of the interior in the nineteenth century and just as Northerners and Southerners eventually had joined together in the cities of the North in the twentieth century. The often intense conflict that accompanied the confrontation of distinctive cultures rarely lasted more than a generation, as African American society achieved remarkable unity. Africans became African Americans in mainland North America, slaves from the seaboard became Southerners in the black belt, and black Southerners became urbanites in the cities of the North. The places they created in eighteenth-century Virginia, nineteenth-century Alabama, or twentieth-century Chicago were the products of the intermixture of natives and newcomers.

The unity of past centuries proved more elusive for black men and women journeying in the fourth great migration. To be sure, from the time of their arrival in the United States—and, for some, even before—immigrants of African descent confronted the realities of American racism—a reality made visible by the global reach of American culture, tourism, and military interventions. Primed to expect the worst, black immigrants nonetheless were outraged at the harassment, denigration, and physical abuse many experienced. Primal moments—like the death of Amadou Diallo, a west African student and street merchant, at the hands of the New York City police—starkly revealed the dangers all black people, regardless of origins, faced in the United States.
²⁹

But most black immigrants needed no primer on race. Racial denigration was familiar, especially to those who had been subject to European colonial rule and, for some, whose country had experienced slavery. Yet the confrontation with white America was different from anything most had previously experienced. For the most part, the immigrants came from societies with overwhelmingly black majorities, and they dealt with race from a position of numerical—and generally political—superiority. Holding the reins of power had enabled some to obtain privileged places within the social hierarchy. The sting of second-class citizenship and derision heaped upon minorities had never been felt, and race never attained the central place in their lives. Having lived within a black majority—where ancestry or tribal affiliation, facial features, hair, and wealth were as much a determiner of status as skin color—immigrants arrived in a society where pigmentation was paramount.
³⁰

The standard American definition of race—the one-drop rule—also perplexed the new arrivals. So too did the absence of a middle group—a third caste generally described as “colored”—and the lack of privileges accorded people of mixed racial origins. The redrawing of the color line to create a two-caste system often alienated those who had been neighbors, friends, and even kin. A few discovered, for the first time, that they themselves were black. If immigrants were confused by the redefining of racial boundaries, so too were African Americans, who were both confounded and offended by the assumptions implicit in racial regimes where lineage and money could whiten.
³¹

Differences created by the racial regimes were further befuddled by mutual ignorance. Although African Americans have long celebrated their connection with Africa—at least since Paul Cuffe began trading on the west coast of the continent in the 1790s—ties between African Americans and Africans had always been problematic. While black nationalists celebrated the link, others frankly admitted the “closest they've ever come to Africa is Busch Gardens.” To these, the nature of slavery outside the bounds of the United States, the worldwide struggles against colonialism, and the origins of independence in the Caribbean or Africa constituted unknown territory. Some dismissed Africa as a primitive place bereft of civilization—a place where, in the satirical formulation of comic Eddie Murphy, people “ride around butt-naked on a zebra.” Likewise, the Caribbean was merely a vacation spa. Others celebrated a mythological Africa, wrapping themselves in kente cloth and observing Kwanza, but with small appreciation of the continent itself. In the words of one Nigerian American, who found himself the target of racial slurs by native blacks, “just because African-Americans wear kente cloth does not mean they embrace everything that is African.”
³²

Black immigrants, for their part, held a similar battery of stereotypes of black Americans. Gleaned in part from American movies, TV sitcoms, and music, such superficial fragments offered contradictory images of African Americans: on the one hand, as being hyper-sexed and superrich, and on the other hand, as being impoverished, impotent, and much abused.
³³
Selecting from these conflicting portrayals, immigrants' conceptions of black Americans often had no more connection to reality than the African Americans' view of the immigrants.

Others saw the connection all too clearly. Given the choice of aligning with a minority burdened by the weight of discrimination or maintaining a separate identity, they tried to create an identity “which would separate them from the group they [were] closest to,” stressing differences-be they linguistic, religious, cultural, or political-which distinguished them from African Americans. A sociologist of Haitian descent noted that the “Haitian flags on cars and in store windows have become not only symbols of ethnic pride but also a message to the white community that they expect to be treated differently because they are not African Americans.” Haitians were not the only ones to wrap themselves in the flag to emphasize their difference from African Americaris.
³⁴

The unforgiving character of the two-caste system that jumbled all black people together mitigated distrust and debunked stereotypes among people of African descent. But shared oppression no more created a shared politics in a twentieth-century city than it did in a nineteenth-century plantation or an eighteenth-century slave ship. Those who had long enjoyed the benefits of majority status had difficulty seeing an advantage in defending minority rights. “I don't want to be Black twice,” asserted a Haitian immigrant. Some, while cognizant of the reality of American racism, quietly accepted it as part of a Faustian bargain in which economic opportunity and material prosperity were exchanged for silent assent.
³⁵
Still others saw their national origins providing immunity from the problems that dogged black Americans. They had once been Ghanaians and Barbadians and relocation did not change that. In fact, the denigration of blackness in American society made it imperative to maintain the customs of the homeland. Although outraged by racial discrimination, they nonetheless turned a blind eye, conceiving themselves as sojourners whose future lay elsewhere or as a people apart.
³⁶

Behind these differences, according to one political scientist, stood a radically different understanding of the racism of white Americans. Whereas recent African and Caribbean immigrants tended to view racism as a barrier to be overcome, African Americans saw it more as systemic and so deeply entrenched that it is nearly impossible to breach.
³⁷

The latter views had little attraction for many—perhaps most—black immigrants. If such unspoken bargains that exchanged silence for economic advancement existed, they repudiated them. Newcomers instead found common cause with African Americans and embraced long-established African-American political traditions. Pushing to the forefront of the struggle for equality, they seized the banner of racial justice and demanded an end to inequality. African American heroes from Nat Turner to Martin Luther King, Jr., became their heroes and Black History Month their commemoration, as newcomers refit their own abolitionist and anticolonial politics to the circumstances of American life. “I would not be here had it not been for the black civil rights activists who cleared a pathway for blacks in America by standing up against racial and ethnic discrimination and inequality,” declared one Ghanaian immigrant. African Americans, for their part, generally welcomed their black brothers and sisters to the fray. “There are old African Americans and new African Americans,” declared one African American leader, “but we're all African Americans.”
³⁸

But not all brothers and sisters became family. Some of the newcomers continue to think of themselves in terms of their former nationality. Asked why he and other Caribbean immigrants do not share the racial sensibility of American-born blacks, a Guyanese man responded, “We're immigrants. So we come here to uplift ourselves and go back home. We don't focus on that.” Even among those whose long-term residence gives them more common ground with black natives, differences—rooted in circumstances and aspirations—remained. Language, dress, food, and music, along with attitudes toward family, gender conventions, religious practice, work ethic, and patterns of recreation—among other matters—separated them from African Americans. In a perceptive essay entitled “‘Black Like Who?,”' a leading scholar of African American life found the largest division within black society was “between native- and foreign-born.”
³⁹