Becoming Black and African-American: Race, Ethnicity and the Children of African Immigrants

• In Event: 2207 - Racialized Assimilation of Immigrants and their Children

Abstract

This paper examines the ethnic and racial identity-work of the children of African immigrants in New York City. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 71 West African high school students in New York City, I find that their African ethnic identities are significantly more central to their understandings of themselves than their racial and American affiliations. In addition to family, school and neighborhood characteristics, transnational landscapes and sociopolitical contexts (e.g. President Trump, de-stigmatization of African ethnicity in mainstream popular culture) crucially shaped identity. West African youth’s ethnic and racial identity-work underscores the situational nature of Black immigrants’ ethnic options and highlights the necessity of locating understandings of immigrant integration in broader transnational exchanges. These findings have important implications for understandings of America’s changing racial order, Blackness and African-Americanness, immigrant integration and sense of belonging in the United States.

Author

• Dialika Sall, Columbia University