Making Moral Migrants? Black African and Caribbean Boys Negotiating Antiblack and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments

• In Event: The Back of Blackness: Critically Examining the Construction of Blackness in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Drawing predominantly from 48 in-depth interviews, this paper emerges from a three-year ethnographic study exploring the contrasting educational experiences of working-class and middle-class second-generation Black African and Caribbean boys within one large public high school (“Bridgewood High”) in New York City. Bridgewood High is a highly purposeful educational context for studying the complexity of Blackness as it hosts the largest numbers of first-, second- and third-generation Black African and Caribbean youth in its borough.

All interviews utilized in this paper were audiotaped, transcribed, and analysed using the qualitative software program, NVivo. Analysis employed a modified grounded theory approach in two related phases (Strauss and Corbin, 1998): (1) Open coding to identify broad categories; and (2) focused coding to add richness and depth to the analysis.

The author predominantly made use of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Developed in the 1970s as a response to Critical Legal Studies’ reductive analyses of racial inequality, CRT is an influential emancipationist theoretical framework that centers racism as a permanent and pervasive feature of society (Treviño, Harris, and Wallace, 2008). Although CRT remains an evolving paradigm sensitive to twenty-first century changes in legal doctrines, systems and policies, there are emerging and intersecting principles and theories that inform CRT research. These include, but are not limited to: (1) the centrality of racism, which recognizes racial inequality and racial animus as nuanced cultural and political norms in society (Soloranzo, 1998); (2) White Supremacy, understood as a system of thought and practice that normalizes White privilege, control of power and ownership of material and intellectual resources (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995); (3) voices of People of Color, centering the experiential knowledge of racially minoritized groups as credible counter-narratives rooted in the historical, social, and political realities of Women and Men of Color that are useful for locating the limits of policy prescriptive often shaped by the White middle classes (Gillborn, 2005); (4) interest convergence, which holds that racial progress often occurs when aligned to the self-interests of White people (Bell, 1992); and (5) intersectionality, coined to identify the consistently complex relationship among race, class, gender, sexuality and other social categories that have long been explored as separate features of social life in traditional anti-racist and feminist scholarship (Crenshaw, 1993).

This paper explores how Black African and Caribbean boys strategically express their high educational aspirations as part of an ethnic project to counter anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Black racism in US society. In the context of rising xenophobia, alongside historical and ongoing stereotypes of Black people in the US, African and Caribbean boys’ aspirations for an elite higher education served as a tactic to enhance their individual and ethnic reputations as Black migrant youth. At its core, this paper illustrates how participants mobilized aspirations to represent themselves as moral migrants and “worthy” ethnic minorities in anti-Black and anti-immigrant contexts. The author problematizes these moral claims and ethnicity-based campaigns associated with their educational aspirations because they reinforce stereotypes of an ethnic “African Americanness” in the U.S. racial order.

Author

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University