Revisiting Proximal Host: Adding to the Conversation

• In Event: Understanding [Racial] Identity Formation Among African Immigrant Youth and Emergent Adults

Abstract

Objectives

The identity formation of African immigrants in the United States is often understood in relation to their proximal host, African Americans. But what happens when there are no African Americans around? How do these contexts shape the racial and ethnic identities of these African students? This paper looks at how and why West African immigrant high school students (WAISs) self-identify. The study occurred in two schools, one with majority African Americans and the other with majority Dominican students. This paper argues that WAISs identity formation is shaped by the context within which they spent most of their time.

Data, Methods and Theoretical Framework

This paper draws from a larger multi-sited critical ethnographic research on how perceptions of Blackness and Africanness influence school experiences and academic achievement of WAISs in high school. It was conducted during 2016-2017 at two New York City public non-charter high schools that I pseudo-named Bronxville Academy and Bronxville International during the 2016-2017. The study includes participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 28 students and 16 teachers and counselors, and an analysis of school demographics and student academic data. The study uses postcolonial theory and anti-Blackness as frames to understand the experiences of WAISs as past colonial subjects and current residents of a racist, anti-Black nation.

Findings

The study found that WAISs identities and experiences are shaped by how Blackness is understood by students in relation to themselves and each other, and by teachers and counselors in relation to their students, all of which are shaped by the racial and ethnic demographics of the students within these schools. In Bronxville Academy, with an African American majority, African immigrants emphasized their need to distinguish themselves from their African American counterparts, and thus opted to identify as African and with their national identity. However, at Bronxville International, where there were no African Americans, WAISs embraced their Black identity even with the knowledge of what the larger U.S. society thinks about African Americans, e.g. Black population. Therefore, these school contexts both contain and shape multiple, relational understandings of who is Black, what makes a person Black, and when African students choose to identify as Black.

Significance

This article builds upon past research which has highlighted the struggles that African students endure in the United States because of the negative perceptions attached to the Black and African identity, and also their relationship with their co-ethnic proximal host African Americans (Asante, 2012; Awokoya, 2012; Ibrahim, 2014; Imoagene, 2017; Okpalaoka, 2009; Traore & Lukens, 2006). The findings in this proposal add to this body of work, and highlight a relationship that is missing from the literature, that is, the relationship between African students and other racial-ethnic groups, in this case, Dominican students. Given that the Latinx population continues to grow exponentially in the U.S. and in public schools (De Brey et al., 2019), it is important to examine how this population shapes the educational experiences of other racial-ethnic groups.

Author

• Mercy Agyepong, New York University