The Making of African America (32 page)

Differences expressed themselves in a variety of ways, many of which resonated beyond a preference for basketball over soccer or for fufu over fries, or even in an exchange of mean-spirited schoolyard epithets. Practices like female circumcision or animal sacrifice offend many African Americans. Others have more material concerns, fearful that new arrivals would take their jobs, a suspicion compounded by the view—articulated by many white employers—that immigrants were more industrious and disciplined than nonimmigrants. The ability of some immigrants to transport their wealth, education, and connections from their homelands to the United States affirmed African American suspicions that the newcomers desired to elbow them aside. In the competition with newcomers, many natives saw themselves falling behind in the struggle for everything from sexual partners to education. When Harvard University gathered black students to celebrate its expanding black enrollment, university officials were surprised and a bit taken aback to discover that they were not celebrating the success of black students with long American lineages so much as they were that of Africans and West Indians with more recent immigrant roots.
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The sense of being outpaced stoked jealousies that led to the denial of a common heritage. New arrivals were seen as acting white, not really being black. The newcomers' desire to maintain ties with their countrymen—for example, their own churches and associations, endogenous marriages, culinary preferences, frequent returns to their homelands, and celebrations of their own holidays and heroes—suggested a sense of difference in the eyes of many African Americans. While they shared a similar complexion and African roots, they had little else in common. “A shared complexion does not equal a shared culture,” observed Kofi Glover, a native of Ghana and a professor at the University of South Florida. Even the recognition of similar circumstances and an appreciation of common ancestry does not always draw natives and newcomers together. Differences, upon occasion, turn violent. Under the headline “Tensions between Africans and African Americans Surface Again,” New York's Amsterdam News reported, “Some of the more than 4,400 Africans living in Central Harlem have been routinely targeted and singled out for discrimination and abuse, both verbal and physical....” The abuse could be deadly. In the summer of 2006, following the murder of an East African man by an African American woman in Seattle, leaders from the African and African American communities aired their differences. “I think a lot has to do with the appearance of success [among recent African immigrants],” declared one longtime resident. “Some African Americans see themselves as having been left out, and people who have been in Kenya (and other African countries) don't understand the African American struggle.” The differences festered, so that qualities African Americans celebrated in their own community, they condemned in the newcomers'. The solidarities of immigrant life were at times viewed as arrogance—a conceit embodied by their distinctive food, dress, accents, and institutions that distanced them from African American traditions. African leaders agreed: “These people, they don't like us; that is why they kill us.”
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While violence is a rare occurrence, some newcomers returned African American condescension in kind, displaying their own brand of xenophobic intolerance. They boasted of their work ethic, comparing it as favorable to that of African Americans. Laboring at several jobs, attending school at night, and rising early the next day to work, they ridiculed the knots of unemployed men who occupied the street corners of black neighborhoods and the women who queued for food stamps. Advancing their children's education or assuring higher SAT scores with private tutors and other academic supplements, upward-striving immigrants looked askance at the large number of African American high school dropouts. Giving voice to traditional stereotypes of African American economic dependency and criminality that white Americans had long employed, they condemned unsuccessful African American neighbors in ways that infuriated natives.

The distance—physical and social—that new arrivals placed between themselves and African Americans was enlarged by the violence and disorder of the inner-city neighborhoods that they often shared. Newcomers feared not only for their lives and property, but also for their children, who they worried would embrace a culture foreign to their own. “We tend to raise our children differently,” declared one Haitian immigrant. “African American kids do not respect their parents who let them talk to them any kind of way. They don't teach them the meaning of respect for adults.” Rather than trust what they understood as the failures of inner-city school systems, some immigrants sent their children back home to be educated, believing schools in Bridgetown, Lagos, Port au Prince, and elsewhere would better inculcate their values.
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Yet these very same inner-city neighborhoods in which natives and newcomers awkwardly confronted one another also became sites where they began to create a new African American culture. As with earlier passages, the most visible manifestations of the transformation of black life could be found in the sounds emanating from the shared quarters. Much as the spirituals arose from the transcontinental transit from the seaboard to the black belt and jazz emerged amid the movement from south to north, so hip-hop grew amid the fourth great migration.

In the late 1970s, the impoverished African American community in the South Bronx seemed an unlikely spot to nurture a new musical form. But as Caribbean immigrants entered the old, established neighborhood, a new sound emerged. Hip-hop drew upon the mixing of mainland and island music traditions with shared rhetorical conventions of toasting (self-aggrandizing, rhymed praise poems), from the islands, and playing the dozens or capping (competitive exchanges of insults), from the mainland. It drew on a variety of expressions from diverse forms, such as break dancing (or b-boying and g-girling), graffiti art (“masterpieces” spray-painted on the sides of building and subway cars), and recorded and live music mixes, but it made its most powerful statement in the aggressive rhetorical style of MCing or rap.
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In the Bronx and later Harlem and Queens, the origins of hip-hop took root before audiences of young African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, on the street and in clubs. Pioneers of the genre— Jamaican-born Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, Bronx-born Afrika Bambaataa, and Barbados-born Grandmaster Flash—midwifed the new sound by fusing these musical and rhetorical forms at local dance halls and public outings. Drawing on the island tradition of mobile DJs and splicing together multiple recorded songs with drum machine sounds in electronic samplers (or sometimes playing two turntables simultaneously), they created a pulsating rhythm that looped around in repeated phrases and rhymed poetics. DJs broadcasted on massive speakers, or ghetto blasters—Kool Here called his “Herculords”—with an emphasis on bass, making for an overwhelmingly loud sound.

The new music emerged quickly in neighborhoods in which people of African descent mixed. By the late 1970s, the Bronx would boast several hip-hop groups, among them the Funky Four Plus One and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Within a decade, entrepreneurs—many of them black—had discovered the popularity of the innovative music and its commercial possibilities. Before long, they began to construct a national and then an international market for hip-hop that extended far beyond New York City. New superstars like LL Cool J and groups like Public Enemy emerged, but they never lost touch with the early themes and sounds that had sparked the genre.

From the beginning, MCs, many of them immigrants from the Caribbean, drew on traditions of rhyming, a tradition they shared with other African Americans: “Kool Here is in the house and he'll turn it out without a doubt.” They also shared traditions of verbal dueling—the dozens or capping—that often exaggerated muscular strength and sexual prowess, frequently through the figure of an admired baaad man. But raps always identified with life in the inner city—including various urban sounds, like the wailing sirens and rattling trucks on urban streets—suggesting how movement was again giving way to place as the central theme of African American life. Rap depicted in harsh, unforgiving terms the disorder and violence all too familiar to inner-city neighborhoods, where employment was short and poverty widespread. It reflected a society in which injustice could be seen as legitimizing the most antisocial behavior. Often rappers did so with a sharp political edge, critiquing American society. They also lionized the “coolness” of young black men who had been denied access to meaningful work and the possibility of supporting a family. Amid the disorder and decay, artists like Run-D. M.C. celebrated blackness in songs like “Proud to Be Black.” They also identified an oppositional authenticity as the sine qua non of black manhood. Building on such themes, some hip-hop artists expressed more directly a radical egalitarianism, as with Brand Nubian's “One for All” and Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” and “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” But even this had limits. The antiauthoritarian hypermasculinity was also by turns misogynistic, depicting a world peopled by parasitic bitches and hos and trailing off into nihilistic sexual fantasies.
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During the 1980s, hip-hop leaped across the country from New York to California, often propelled by the new MTV and often taking root in neighborhoods with mixed populations much like the Bronx. New hip-hop artists like Ice-T, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dogg celebrated South Central and Compton much as the first generation of hip-hop artists had set their music in the Bronx and Harlem. Often they competed with each other—sometimes to murderous effect—emphasizing the superiority of the local brand of rap. As the East Coast-West Coast rivalry dominated the early world of hip-hop, people in other localities—Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, and dozens of other places—joined the fray and developed their own styles. Although the moguls of the corporate entertainment business tried to curb the destructive violence that pervaded hip-hop, it continued to reflect the harsh realities of urban life, particularly with N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) and Public Enemy.

Place, it appeared, was ousting movement as the central theme of black life in the United States, as hip-hoppers told unvarnished stories of life in the hood, often using the language of the street.
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Rap videos firmly rooted hip-hop—the spray-painted masterpieces and the break dancing as well as the music—in the inner city. They depicted urban street corners, playgrounds, rooftops, abandoned buildings, subway stations, giving an unmistakable sense of place. “I want my shit to be in my hood,” declared one video director.
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But by the end of the twentieth century—perhaps even before—the cosmopolitan roots of hip-hop's South Bronx beginnings had expanded outward. Rapping and hip-hop more generally had become a global medium (along with its signature dress of hoodies, snooties, and oversized pants) that was as much at home in Accra and Cape Town as it was in Bridgetown and Salvador. It had taken on a life of its own, often influencing white suburban teenagers as well (the phenomenon of the so-called wiggers, or white niggers, was an example of white youth emulating blacks as portrayed in hip-hop imagery). The dynamic combination of natives and newcomers who had been hip-hop's founding fathers had faded, swallowed—sometimes literally—by the violence of inner-city black life about which they sang and the commodification of their music. New arrivals, with their ambitions for self-improvement, were often appalled at the lyrics, which spoke of and sometimes celebrated the meanness of the inner city they entered with grand hopes of remaking their lives. Ironically, the Afro-centrality embedded in hip-hop seemed to have little appeal to Africans, at least on the east side of the Atlantic. Rather than provide cohesion to black life, the new culture seemed to be a divisive force.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, tensions between American-born and foreign-born blacks remained. Even the most routine interactions could reveal that distrust overwhelmed camaraderie. One authoritative survey of American-born blacks and West Indian and African (Ghanaian and Nigerian) immigrants concluded that while these groups shared appreciation of a common African heritage, “preconceived notions and myths about each other ... allowed only a surface cordiality.” These groups “remained suspicious that each wanted to get what was the other's just due.”
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Such conflicts produced different strategies for addressing the omnipresent matter of race. While American-born blacks continued to press for equality, immigrants often dismissed the African American protest tradition as a self-defeating culture of complaint. Meanwhile, they looked inside their own nationally or ethnically defined communities and bolstered their ties to their homelands. Often they greeted what they saw as an African American preoccupation with “their rights” with a shrug or a curt “get over it.” Asked how the newcomers' perspective differed from that of African Americans, one West Indian put the matter this way: “We are concerned about racism. But basically we don't walk around with a chip on our shoulders like African Americans, although ... we experience a lot of racial prejudice. America owes African Americans something ... opportunity. We feel less owed.” Such views imply another, often unspoken, belief that black Americans have not taken advantage of the opportunities available if they worked hard and took responsibility for their families and for each other.
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Tensions between peoples with diverse African roots have continued to linger in the twenty-first century in part because immigrants have more options than earlier arrivals. Many immigrants continue to be more engaged with the politics of their old homeland rather than their new one. Others find no necessity to choose between them. The ease of international travel and communication, the possibilities of dual citizenship, and the autonomy of ethnic neighborhoods—refreshed and revitalized by new arrivals from the homeland—have allowed immigrants to maintain multiple identities. Immigrants thus can conceive of themselves, for example, as being both Nigerian and African American. Many newcomers see no conflict between membership in both their own national associations and the NAACP. On college campuses, the offices of the African American Student Association and the African Student Association stand side by side. Sometimes African Americans of all backgrounds stand together and sometimes they maintain their distance. Men and women who demonstrate against police brutality and racial profiling often maintain membership in different churches and insist their children marry within their group.
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