Interrogating Segmented Assimilation Theory's Anti-Blackness

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Immigrants, Assimilation, Disjunctures, Racial Formations

Abstract

TITLE: Interrogating Segmented Assimilation Theory's Anti-Blackness: How the Black Poor & Working Class Help Poor Immigrants Attain Upward Mobility

This paper advances the efforts of a new wave of sociologists to challenge anti-Black epistemologies that have structured American sociology from its founding. It does so through a critical analysis of segmented assimilation theory (SAT) and the proximate fields of urban sociology, the sociology of education, race relations, and social problems research that undergird SAT’s ontology of race and Blackness. I argue that SAT is premised on an ontology of Black deficit that obscures the theory’s neo-liberal bourgeois premises and causes sociologists to emphasize corrosive and antagonistic relations between immigrants and native-born Blacks. I draw on scholarship on Black survival strategies, urban informality, and on Africana Studies critiques of racial capitalism to develop an Black asset-based framework that offers a productive counterpoint to SAT’s deficit model. I provide an empirical demonstration of the utility of my Black-asset model for the sociology of immigration using the case of Indo-Caribbean immigrants (West Indians of South Asian descent) in New York City. In so doing, I demonstrate a variety of overlooked ways that native-born, working-class and poor Blacks help immigrants attain social integration and upward mobility in American society.

Author

• Anjanette M Chan Tack, Northeastern University