race and national identity in the americas || west indian identity in the diaspora: comparative and...

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West Indian Identity in the DiasporaComparative and Historical Perspectives

byNancy Foner

When West Indians’ move abroad, they begin to see themselves and othersin new ways. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergence of newracial and ethnic identities. As West Indians travel abroad in search ofeconomic opportunities and resources, all too often they find themselvesliving in societies in which blackness is more devalued than it was at home,and they face significant barriers because of their race. Being black and beingWest Indian take on new meanings in the immigrant situation and form thebasis for new alliances as well as new divisions with people of other racialand ethnic groups they come into contact with away from home.

Just what kinds of ethnic and racial identities-and racial and ethnic

relations-develop among West Indian migrants depends on the particularcontext into which they move. This may, at first glance, seem obvious. Afterall, English-speaking West Indians have migrated in significant numbers,over the years, to a variety of different places, including other Caribbeanislands, Central America, the United States, and Britain. One would expectWest Indians who move to the United States, for example, to have a differentsense of racial consciousness from West Indians in Britain. But there is muchthat is not obvious. Although we may expect to find contrasts between WestIndians who go to different destinations, we certainly cannot always predictwhat the differences will be. Nor are the structural features of the receivingsociety that shape West Indian identity always immediately apparent. Indeed,it is only through careful cross-national comparisons that we can begin tounderstand the complex, sometimes subtle, and often surprising ways in

Nancy Foner is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Purchase.Her books include Jamaica Farewell: Jamaican Migrants In London (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978), the edited volume New Immigrantv In New York (New York: ColumbiaUmversity Press, 1987), and The Caregiving Dilemma : Work In an American Nur.cing Home(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). She is currently completing a book thatcompares recent immigrants m New York with immigrants at the turn of the century.

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which the racial context in different receiving societies leads to specificresponses among West Indian migrants.

Looking back in time as well as across cultures also gives us a betterappreciation of the processes and dynamics of West Indian identity formationand racial relations. The past, as David Lowenthal (1985) reminds us, is aforeign country; the racial context and hierarchies in different historical erasmay provide radically different contexts for West Indian arrivals. In someplaces, for example, within the Caribbean itself, West Indian immigration hascontinued for many years. Elsewhere, as in the United States, there have beendistinctive waves of West Indian migration at different historical moments.Within the same country, West Indian identity has often changed in significantways from one historical period to another, and therefore historical compari-sons offer another opportunity to grasp the underlying structural determinantsof racial and ethnic consciousness.

The basic argument of this article is that the comparative method is apowerful tool for deepening our understanding of the way in which WestIndian migrant racial and ethnic identities are formed and change. Compara-tive studies, as Reinhard Bendix has written, &dquo;increase the ’visibility’ of onestructure by comparing it with another&dquo; (quoted in Skocpol and Somers,1980: 180). They bring into sharper focus the factors determining racial andethnic identities that might be taken for granted if West Indians in only asingle setting or time period were considered in isolation.2 Broadly speaking,the article is couched in terms of a theoretical perspective that views race andethnicity as socially constructed. While West Indian migrants bring with thema racial sensibility that is nurtured in their home societies, they develop newimages of themselves, as blacks and as West Indians, in response to theparticular nature of ethnic and race relations and hierarchies they encounterin the new setting.

The analysis focuses on two destinations for West Indian migrants-theUnited States and Britain-that have, in the post-World War II period, beenthe major places of settlement for West Indians abroad. The cross-nationalcomparison draws on my earlier research on Jamaicans in London and NewYork,’ Jamaicans being the largest West Indian group in both countries andLondon and New York the main areas of settlement. Between 1955 and 1968

(after which Jamaican immigration dropped to a mere trickle), some 200,000Jamaicans moved to Britain; between 1966 and 1992, more than 400,000Jamaicans legally emigrated to the United States.’ Because large-scale WestIndian migration to Britain is only a post-World War II phenomenon, thehistorical comparison is restricted to the United States, where the massiveinflux of West Indians goes farther back. It examines issues of identity amongWest Indians who came to New York in this century’s two great waves, that



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of the first three decades of the century and that since 1965. As will becomeclear, the racial context in each country and in each historical period has beencritical in shaping migrants’ racial and ethnic identities. Particular featuresof the American racial hierarchy, most important the presence and residentialsegregation of the enormous African American population, mark off theexperience of West Indians in New York from those in Britain. Within theUnited States, the changing role of race helps to account for the increasinglypublic role of ethnicity in the lives of West Indian New Yorkers.

JAMAICANS IN NEW YORK AND LONDON

Difficult as it is for Jamaicans in both London and New York to adjust tobeing black in a white-dominated society, it is in many ways more of a

problem in London. Paradoxically, in New York, where segregation of blacksis more pronounced, being part of the large and residentially concentratedlocal black population cushions Jamaicans from some of the sting of racialprejudice and has given them certain advantages in the political and educa-tional spheres.

There are, of course, similarities in the kinds of racial consciousness that

have developed among Jamaicans in London and New York. In both places,being black has taken on a new and more painful meaning. As members of aracial minority group, Jamaicans in both cities have found that they aresubject to prejudice and discrimination of a sort they had not encountered athome. &dquo;I wasn’t aware of my color till I got here,&dquo; said one New York man.In nearly identical words, a London man told me that he had never known hewas black until he came to England. Both men, of course, had known thatthey had black skin when they lived in Jamaica, but there they had had goodjobs (one was a medium-sized farmer, the other a policeman) and had beenrespected in their communities. What had counted there was their income,occupation, living standards, and associates, not their skin color. Granted, theslavery legacy lingers on in Jamaica; white skin is still associated with wealth,privilege, and power, and people are still conscious of shade distinctions (thelighter the better). Yet, blackness is not in itself-and has not been for thepast few decades-a barrier to upward social mobility or to social acceptanceat the top. &dquo;In Jamaica,&dquo; one New York migrant said,

&dquo; we didn’t have color

prejudice, we had class prejudice.&dquo; Black and colored Jamaicans now domi-nate public affairs, and it is they who fill the prestigious, lucrative, andprofessional positions on the island. Indeed, blacks are an overwhelmingmajority, with less than 1 percent of the population classified as pure whiteor European.



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The situation in New York and London is very different. There, as blackmen and women, Jamaicans are members of a disparaged minority. Educa-tion, income, and culture do not, as in Jamaica, partially &dquo;erase&dquo; one’sblackness. Nor are whites sensitive to shade differences. Whatever theirachievements or their shade, Jamaicans, as blacks, find themselves subjectto prejudice and discrimination of a sort they had not encountered back home.They come up against racial barriers in housing, employment, and educationand confront hostility from sections of the white population. Thus, for thefirst time, they become acutely and painfully aware that black skin is asignificant status marker.

Although being black is more of a stigma in London and New York thanin Jamaica, the meaning and effects of blackness are not the same amongJamaicans in the two places. Partly it is a matter of expectations. WhenJamaicans left for London in the 1950s and early 1960s, they had little ideaof the prejudice and discrimination that awaited them. Jamaica was then aBritish colony, and they thought of themselves not just as Jamaican but asBritish citizens. Brought up with a respect for British culture and people and&dquo;a lingering faith in British fairmindness&dquo; (Sutton and Makiesky, 1975: 124),most expected to have the right to live and work in Britain and to be treated,as they had been taught, on the basis of merit rather than color. They were infor a rude awakening. They soon realized that to most English people theywere, as blacks, considered lower class and inferior to whites. &dquo;We had been

taught all about British history, the Queen, and that we belonged,&dquo; one mantold me. &dquo;When I got here I discovered we weren’t part of things. My loyaltyat age 15 was to England. I felt that Jamaica was part of England. The shockwas to find I was a stranger.&dquo;

Jamaicans who came to New York were not so shocked by the racialsituation. They knew about U.S. racism before they came; most migrants hadlearned about it through the mass media as well as from friends and relatives.In quite a few cases, they had even seen it firsthand on previous visits. Butit is one thing to hear about racial prejudice or even experience it on a shortvisit and quite another to live with it as a fixed part of one’s daily existence.Indeed, whatever the migrants’ expectations of life abroad, the reality of thestructure of race relations is what ultimately determined their experiences asblacks in their new home.

The crucial factor explaining the different meanings of blackness in NewYork and London is that in New York, in contrast to London, there is a largeresidentially segregated native African American population. New YorkJamaicans, submerged in the wider black community, move in a blackersocial world than their London counterparts. At the same time, however,



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Jamaicans in New York differentiate themselves from African Americans.The net result is that their position as black Jamaicans is less painful, andtheir contacts with whites are more limited than in London. I found thatJamaicans in London expressed more bitterness about racial prejudice anddiscrimination than their counterparts in New York. When the latter did talkabout race relations, differences from and interactions with African Ameri-cans were often uppermost in their minds.

For one thing, the presence of the African American population in NewYork has meant that Jamaican New Yorkers are less visible to the native- bom

white population than their counterparts in London. (Blacks now representabout a quarter of New York City’s population.) When I did my study ofJamaicans in London, in the early 1970s, Jamaicans were a highly visibleminority. Along with other immigrants from India and Pakistan, they movedinto a society that in racial terms was homogeneous and white. The termimmigrant, in fact, was a code word among the English for the large numberof nonwhites who were now living in their midst. In the course of politicaldebate, in the treatment of topics connected with them in the media, and instatements by public officials, black immigrants were stigmatized as inferior.

Whereas West Indians in London were constantly in the public eye as asocial problem or a threat to the British way of life, in New York the statusof West Indians as immigrants is often invisible to the white population.Large-scale immigration is nothing new in New York, and there is a longtradition of ethnic diversity. Far from being the center of public attention,West Indians are often ignored. To most white New Yorkers, they are largelyinvisible in a sea of anonymous black faces.’ Interestingly, several majorracial incidents in the city, including the killing of Michael Griffith (Trini-dadian) by a group of white men in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 and thekilling of a child (Guyanese) by a Hasidic driver that sparked the CrownHeights riots of 1991, were defined by the media (as well as the AfricanAmerican community) in black-white terms; the West Indian origins of thevictims went largely unnoticed. White New Yorkers are usually surprisedwhen they read about the extent to which the city’s black population isbecoming Caribbeanized. In 1990, about a quarter of New York City’snon-Hispanic black population was foreign born.

When West Indians do come to the attention of white society in New York,they are often compared with African Americans rather than with the whiteimmigrant or total population. In Britain, West Indians as well as the Britishoften measure West Indians’ achievements against those of the white major-ity, and this comparison puts them at a clear disadvantage. In the UnitedStates, their achievements are viewed by the dominant white majority and



178

come to be viewed by West Indians themselves in the context of AfricanAmericans (Sutton and Makiesky, 1975), and this comparison often putsthem in a relatively favorable light.

In contrast to the situation in London, where &dquo;West Indianness is seldomaffirmative&dquo; (Lowenthal, 1978), in New York it has advantages. West Indianshave come to New York to get on, and stressing their distinctness fromAfrican Americans often brings benefits (see Coombs, 1970). One is a senseof ethnic pride. A common theme among them is that West Indians are moreambitious, harder workers, and greater achievers. Jamaican immigrants feelthat they save more and are more likely to buy homes than African Americansand are less likely to go on welfare. (In fact, 1990 census figures show a muchhigher percentage of West Indians in New York in the labor force than AfricanAmericans: 89 percent of foreign-born West Indian men and 83 percent offoreign- born West Indian women compared with 77 percent of AfricanAmerican men and 69 percent of African American women. West Indianhouseholds in New York also have higher incomes than those of AfricanAmericans. In 1990, the median West Indian household income in New Yorkwas $37,000 compared with $34,939 for African Americans [see Kasinitz,1992; Kasinitz and Vickerman, 1995; Model, 1995].) Many Jamaicans say thatthey are less hostile to whites than African Americans but, at the same time,have more dignity and greater assurance in dealing with whites. Indeed, theyfeel that setting themselves apart from African Americans brings bettertreatment from whites-that they are more respected and more readilyaccepted than African Americans. &dquo;You’re black, but you’re not black,&dquo; is theway one Jamaican put it. Another man told me, &dquo;Once you say somethingand they recognize you’re not from this country, they treat you a littledifferent.&dquo;

That New York Jamaicans live out much of their lives apart from whites

obviously has drawbacks. In New York, for example, Jamaicans have to sendtheir children to ghetto schools that are more racially segregated and moreplagued by serious drug and crime problems than is the case in London. Thereis much less tolerance for interracial unions in New York, too. The prevalenceof white-black intermarriage in the United States remains exceedingly low,at 3 percent for married blacks by 1990 and far less than 1 percent for whites(Sanjek, 1994). According to the 1991 British census, of the households inwhich the ethnic group of either the head or partner was black Caribbean, 15

percent were mixed Caribbean black-white couples (Peach, 1995).~Yet, at the same time, Jamaican New Yorkers’ social separation from

whites reduces opportunities for racial tension and conflict. Although Jamaicansin New York have contacts with whites at work, they live mainly in areas ofblack residence in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Rarely



179

are they found living outside the usual neighborhoods of West Indian resi-dence or of the African American population. Roger Waldinger’s (1987)analysis of 1980 census data revealed that West Indian New Yorkers werejust as residentially segregated as their African American counterparts. InNew York City, the index of dissimilarity for Jamaicans vis-h-vis non-Hispanic whites (calculated at the community board level) was 70 percent.In other words, 70 percent of Jamaicans would have had to move to be evenlydistributed among whites; similar proportions held for African Americansand other West Indians. When Jamaicans in New York walk in the street, goto the shops, talk to neighbors, worship, and send their children to school, itis, on the whole, other black people whom they see and deal with. And whenthey compete for housing and, especially in the case of service workers, forjobs, their rivals are apt to be African Americans and members of otherminorities rather than whites.

Although Jamaicans in London, too, move in Jamaican (and West Indian)social circles, they are less insulated from contact with whites. In spite of thefairly dense concentration of West Indians in particular areas and in particularstreets, there is not the same pattern of residential segregation found in NewYork City. Ceri Peach’s (1995) analysis of the 1991 census found that theindex of dissimilarity for London’s black Caribbean population at the enu-meration district level (the smallest census unit of about 700 people) was 49percent; only 3 percent of the black Caribbean population of London lived inenumeration districts in which they formed 30 percent or more of thepopulation. Many incidents that London migrants told me to illustrate theirexperiences with racial prejudice involved contacts with whites in the neigh-borhood-for example, queuing for buses, buying groceries at the comershop, speaking to neighbors, or observing fights between local white andblack children (Foner, 1978).

The presence of the large native African American population also affectsthe way in which West Indians in New York participate in the politicalprocess. Even though most Jamaicans in New York cannot vote because theyare not naturalized citizens, from the very start, in contrast to their Englishcounterparts, they have tended to live in districts where black voters predomi-nated and where they were represented in city, state, and federal legislativebodies by black politicians who spoke for black interests. Increasingly, WestIndian politicians in New York play the ethnic card to appeal to the growingnumber of West Indian voters, but the fact is that race, not ethnicity, emergesas key in many elections and on many political issues. West Indians in NewYork often unite with African Americans in a black bloc, especially whenblack and white interests are seen as being in conflict (Kasinitz, 1992). Asthe political scientist John Mollenkopf (1994) notes, blacks are the most



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reliably Democratic of any voting group and the largest single racial/ethniccomponent of the electorate in New York City. Both West Indians and AfricanAmericans enthusiastically responded when Jesse Jackson ran for the presi-dency in 1988, and the black community united, too, to help elect DavidDinkins mayor in 1989. West Indian New Yorkers have benefited, in thepolitical arena, from alliances with African Americans and from politicalinitiatives put in place as a result of the American civil rights movement. Theyhave also reaped some rewards from affirmative action programs and policiesdesigned to assist African Americans in gaining access to governmentemployment as well as entry and scholarships to colleges and universities.

Clearly, relations with African Americans are of major importance to WestIndians in New York, something that distinguishes their experiences fromthose of West Indians in London. In New York, West Indians and AfricanAmericans, in Alex Stepick’s apt phrase, stand at arm’s length from each otherrather than warmly embracing (Stepick, 1993). Ethnicity drives a wedgebetween them. West Indians strive to differentiate themselves from AfricanAmericans and show the white majority that they deserve to be viewed assuperior and granted respect. At the same time, a powerful racial conscious-ness-of being a black minority &dquo;enclosed within a sometimes menacing,sometimes friendly, world of more powerful whites&dquo; (Sutton and Makiesky,1975: 130)-provides a potential bond with African Americans in politicaland social movements and, at the individual level, in interpersonal relationson the job, in the neighborhood, and at school (see Foner, 1987),

WEST INDIANS INNEW YORK, PAST AND PRESENT

The recent West Indian migration to New York, which I have studiedfirsthand, is of course not the first large wave. New York City has long beena mecca for Caribbean migration, in Bryce-Laporte’s (1979) words, thespecial object of the &dquo;dream, curiosity, sense of achievement, and drive foradventure&dquo; for many Caribbean people. In the first three decades of thiscentury, there was an enormous influx of West Indians, beginning about 1900and peaking during the early 1920s, before 1924 immigration restrictionseffectively ended the movement. In 1930, the census counted close to100,000 foreign-born blacks in the United States, the vast majority WestIndian; more than half of all black immigrants lived in New York City(Kasinitz, 1992). The second large wave of migration from the West Indiesbegan in the 1960s, after the 1965 amendments to the Immigration andNationality Act, and continues to this day. By 1990, according to the census,



181

New York City was home to close to 300,000 people bom in the West Indies.Indeed, if all 14 Commonwealth Caribbean nationalities are thought of asone group, they become by far the largest immigrant group in New York City(Kasinitz and Vickerman, 1995).

In the past as in the present, West Indians in New York emphasized theirdistinctiveness from African Americans and maintained a strong devotion toWest Indian culture. &dquo;From the talk which circulated around our kitchen,&dquo; the

second-generation Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall (1987: 90)remembers, &dquo;it was clear ... that my mother and her friends perceivedthemselves as being more ambitious than Black Americans, more hardworking.&dquo; The first cohort of immigrants, according to the sociologist OrlandoPatterson (1995), was highly visible both to African Americans, because ofcultural differences, and to whites, who came to view them as more adaptableand hardworking than native-born blacks.

If West Indians’ ethnic identity in their private lives is not much differenttoday, this cannot be said of the role of ethnicity in the public sphere. Theimmigrants of the first cohort played down their ethnic distinctiveness in theirpublic activities, whereas today’s arrivals often highlight it.’ In his analysisof ethnic identity in New York’s West Indian community, Philip Kasinitz(1992) argues that for the large wave of immigrants who came before theDepression, identification with African Americans was the key defining factof their public activities. Entering the United States at the height of racialsegregation, West Indians in New York immersed themselves in the NorthAmerican black community. Being black in the 1920s, writes Kasinitz (1992:8), determined where Caribbean immigrants &dquo;lived and could not live, wherethey could and could not go to school, what type of job they could get andthe way they were treated by Americans of all colors.&dquo; West Indians andAfrican Americans shared geographic communities and therefore interests atthe political level.g There was no ethnic press then, no ethnic politicalleadership. Although the Amsterdam News, New York’s leading blackweekly, was owned by a West Indian, this fact could not be discovered byreading it. West Indians rose to positions of political and economic promi-nence, but few claimed to be Caribbean leaders, and they deliberately mutedtheir West Indianness in public life. Indeed, as Irma Watkins-Owens (1996:170) notes, Caribbean immigrant politicians appealed to and were supportedby a predominantly native African American electorate. They consideredthemselves-and were considered by others-to be representatives of thebroader black community. Ethnic ties, which threatened racial unity andmight lead others to question their position within the African Americancommunity, largely remained private.



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Today, there has been a transition to a far more vocal West Indian ethnicity.A new group of what Kasinitz calls ethnicity entrepreneurs has emerged thatmakes its living by bridging the gap between the Caribbean community andthe New York political establishment. And, increasingly, West Indian politicalleaders are turning to classic ethnic politics as they appeal to voters on thebasis of ethnicity. There is a new breed of politicians who represent distinctlyWest Indian, as opposed to African American, interests. The importance ofethnic politics was clearly in evidence in 1991 when Una Clarke, a Jamai-can-bom educator, was elected to the city council to represent a newly createdCaribbean district and a year later when another Jamaican, Nick Perry, waselected to the state assembly from a heavily Caribbean Brooklyn district.

One key factor in the change has to do with basic demographics. Althoughin both 1920 and 1990 about a quarter of New York’ s black population wasCaribbean-born, today’s population of West Indian immigrants is more than10 times larger. (Indeed, the city’s black population as a whole has mush-roomed, going from 152,000 or about 3 percent of the city’s population in1920 to 1.8 million or about 26 percent of the city’s population in 1990.) Arelated point is that continued immigration with fresh recruits helps maintainethnic identities in the Caribbean community; the first wave of Caribbeanimmigration was relatively brief, cut to a trickle by restrictive legislation.

At the same time, many of the older, blatant forms of segregation havebeen replaced by forms of discrimination that are more indirect and subtle,and there are more places in the city where it is possible for blacks to live.During the first three decades of the century, southern African Americans andWest Indians alike found themselves confronted with a tightly segregatedhousing market. Few areas were open to blacks; after 1920 New York’sblacks, whatever their ethnicity or class, were largely concentrated in centralHarlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Distinctly WestIndian neighborhoods are a new phenomenon. Although the city is far fromdesegregated, nonwhite zones of settlement have grown to the point thatmany distinct neighborhoods are possible within them. West Indians havefounded their own neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, the northeast Bronx,and southeastern Queens. By the 1980s, New York’s West Indian neighbor-hoods supported a lively West Indian press and gave a Caribbean flavor totheir educational, social, and religious institutions. These neighborhoods alsoprovided a potential power base for a more ethnic politics.

In addition, by Kasinitz’s account, West Indian ethnic politics has beenencouraged in present-day New York by white politicians who have courtedCaribbean leaders and would-be leaders. In fact, local white politicians inBrooklyn have made use of Caribbean symbolism as a way to get votes.Moreover, redistricting for the New York City council deliberately created



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two predominantly Caribbean districts in Brooklyn. There have been changesin New York’s African American political structure, too, partly in responseto the emergence of a new generation of leaders thrown up by the civil rightsmovement and an enlargement of the political arena for blacks as a result ofelectoral redistricting. In recent years a new group of African Americanactivists have come to the fore, creating a drop in the number of West Indianofficeholders at the very moment the West Indian community was growingmost rapidly.

This is not to say that race is still not critical for West Indians in their publicas well as private lives. Ethnic politics may be more central today, but thehard realities of race often overpower ethnicity in the public realm: on manyoccasions, coalitions with African Americans are the key fact of West Indianpolitical life. As Kasinitz (1992: 252) sums up,

_

For the first major wave of West Indian immigrants to the city, an ethnic ratherthan a racial politics would have been impossible.... During the 1980s, a moreself-consciously ethnic politics arose ... made possible by changes within theblack community. Nevertheless ... [if] Caribbean political actors now havemore latitude in defining the community, the impact of race on the daily livesof community members continues to revitalize the political agenda.... Thus,today both race and ethnicity have a role to play in shaping black immigrantpolitics; indeed, the same individuals use both in different contexts.

CONCLUSION

Whether we look back in time or across cultures, it is clear that the racialand ethnic identities that develop among West Indian migrants depend, inlarge part, on the social and cultural setting into which they move. I havetraced some of the contextual factors that have made being black moredifficult in many ways in London than in New York and that help to explainwhy today, in New York, we find a more vocal West Indian identity in publicthan was true earlier in the century.

In looking at the effects of race on West Indian migrants’ identity, I haveanalyzed the West Indian experience in London and New York separately, butin fact there is considerable movement between the two places (as well asbetween these cities and the home society). Many West Indians who went toLondon in the 1950s have since migrated to the United States in search ofbetter incomes and to join relatives. The racial and ethnic identities andunderstandings that develop among these &dquo;twice migrants&dquo; in New York areundoubtedly influenced and complicated by their earlier experiences inBritain. Clearly, we need studies of West Indian identity among those who



184

have lived for extended periods in different receiving countries.9 And becausethe structure of race and ethnic relations differs from one region to anotherwithin the United States, we also need studies of West Indian identity amongthose who have migrated internally in the United States from, say, New Yorkto Florida (a not-uncommon pattern).

This article has focused on first-generation immigrants. Acrucial questionis how the structure of race relations in Britain and the United States affectsthe migrants’ children. Although my own research did not include the secondgeneration, being black and of West Indian descent clearly means somethingvery different to second-generation West Indians in the two cities. Numerousstudies have argued that the racial structure of British society puts second-generation West Indians in London in a kind of limbo. On one hand, they areless likely than their parents to identify themselves-or see their primaryidentity-in terms of their island origins. On the other hand, encounters withdiscrimination undermine their belief that they are British. &dquo;You feel as if

you’re in a no-man’s-land because you have an English accent... but you’vegot a black skin,&dquo; said a 21-year-old Londoner of Jamaican descent. &dquo;I wasbom here, but I don’t feel British.... But the West Indies isn’t home either,it’s some place thousands of miles away&dquo; (quoted in Lowenthal, 1978). Allof the young black informants in the anthropologist Claire Alexander’s(1996) recent London study expressed a sense of doubt in describing them-selves as British, perhaps because, as one young man indicated, &dquo;black&dquo; and

&dquo;British&dquo; are often seen as mutually exclusive. &dquo;English history doesn’tinclude black people,&dquo; said one informant. &dquo;Black people were only intro-duced to this country 20 or 30 years ago&dquo; (Alexander,1996: 48). The responseof many has been to focus on their blackness as a basis for identification. Asan informant in Alexander’s study put it, &dquo;I do see myself as British, but I seemyself as Black British. There is a difference&dquo; (Alexander, 1996: 49).Scholarly accounts of the 1980s have written of a distinctive lifestyle thathad come to symbolize an identity as British-born blacks, including dress,music, religion, and black British vernacular (Cashmore and Troyna, 1982;Peach, 1984; Sutcliffe, 1982).

What about the second generation in New York? For the children of WestIndian immigrants who came early in the century, the tendency was to mergeinto and intermarry with the African American population. Whether this willhappen for the current second generation is as yet unclear. The sociologistMary Waters (1991) suggests that today, the effects of race seem to bemediated by class and residence. Waters studied ethnic and racial identitiesin a small sample of adolescent second-generation West Indians and HaitianAmericans in New York. She found that second-generation West Indians fromless well-off families in racially segregated inner-city areas stressed that they



185

were American. Unlike their parents, they embraced many aspects of theAfrican American subculture in their neighborhoods and schools, which, ineffect, became their peer culture.&dquo;’ By contrast, children of well-off immi-grants who lived in white upper-middle-class neighborhoods tried to avoididentification with poor blacks, stressing their ethnic identity and, like theirparents, continuing to emphasize their differences from African Americans.

Still, Waters (1994) cautions that the ethnic-identified teens she studiedmay not continue to identify with their ethnic backgrounds. The secondgeneration does not have an accent or other clues that immediately telegraphtheir status to others. They are aware that, unless they are active in conveyingtheir identities, they are seen as African Americans and that the status of theirblack race is often all that matters in encounters with whites. It could be, shewrites, that by the time they have their own children, the ethnic-identifiedteens will have decided that the effort not to be seen as black American isfutile.

Whether we look at first- or second-generation West Indians, it is plainthat the meaning and effects of blackness vary considerably from one countryand one time period to another. Further comparative studies will doubtlessshed additional light on the significance of race and ethnicity to West Indians-and their children-on both sides of the Atlantic. And, in the United States,where West Indian immigration shows no signs of abating, researchers in theyears ahead will be able to conduct new historical analyses as they compareissues of race and ethnicity among West Indian immigrants who arrived inthe 1980s and 1990s with the experiences of those who arrive in the nextcentury.

NOTES

1 The term West Indian is used here to refer to those from the English-speaking Caribbean,including those from the mainland CARICOM nations of Guyana and Belize.

2. On the value of the comparative method in migration studies, see Baily (1990), Foner(1998), Green (1994), and Truzzi (1997)

3. My research among Jamaican immigrants in London, conducted in 1973, includedin-depth interviews with 110 respondents as well as follow-up interviews with 20 people fromthe original sample and participant observation (see Foner, 1978). My research among Jamaicanimmigrants in New York in the early 1980s, based on in-depth interviews with 40 immigrantsand participant observation, is fully reported elsewhere (Foner, 1983; 1985; 1986; 1987). In bothstudies, respondents were chosen so that all had spent the first 18 years of their lives in Jamaicaand had lived in New York or London for 7 to 20 years. In the late 1980s, I also conductedresearch among health care workers, largely Jamaican immigrants, in a New York nursing home(Foner, 1994)



186

4. Large-scale Caribbean migration to Britain did not start until 1948; Britain effectivelycut off immigration from the West Indies in 1962. Meanwhile, in 1965, the United States openedits doors to mass migration from the West Indies with the passage of the Hart-Cellar reforms.The U.S. census reports that in 1990 there were about 334,000 foreign-born Jamaicans in thecountry, about half of them in the New York region. In 1990, Jamaica was one of the top 10countries sending legal immigrants to the United States.

In 1971 the British census put the total Caribbean-bom population at 304,070, an enormousincrease over the 17,218 of 1951; this population declined, largely through retirement to theCaribbean and onward migration to North Amenca, to about 263,000 by 1991 (Peach, 1995)The total black Caribbean population in 1991, however, including the large numbers born inBritain, was about 500,000. In the United States, according to the 1990 census, the numbers offoreign-born in the three largest West Indian groups were 115,710 from Trinidad and Tobago,120,698 from Guyana, and 334,140 from Jamaica.

5. This invisibility as blacks in racially divided Amenca has negative consequences forWest Indians. As Bryce-Laporte (1973; 1979) points out, their "distinctive problems and uniqueproclivities" are generally overlooked. Their demands and protests as blacks are also neglectedby whites.

6. In 10.1 percent of cases, there was a black Caribbean male with a white female partner;in 4.8 percent of cases, there was a black Caribbean female with a white male partner (Peach,1995).

7. This analysis and much of what follows draws on Philip Kasinitz’s (1992) argument inCaribbean New York.

8 For a detailed historical account of Caribbean immigrants and the Harlem community inthe first decades of this century, including the close ties that developed with native-born AfricanAmencans, see Watkins-Owens (1996).

9 Frances Henry (1994) briefly touches on this issue in her study of Caribbean immigrantsin Toronto. She estimates that there are some 10,000 to 15,000 "double lap migrants" inCanada—people of Caribbean origin who initially went to England and then later migrated againto Canada. Better economic opportunities in Canada, as well as racism in Britain, are largelyresponsible for double-lap migration. From her small number of case studies, she concludes thatWest Indians who have remigrated from England are more satisfied with their lives in Canada,although how much this has to do with their improved economic standing and how much withthe different racial situation is unclear.

10 At the same time, the large number of West Indians and children of West Indiandescent—sometimes a majority—in many New York City schools has doubtless had the effectof Caribbeanizing the peer culture in some ways, a subject that clearly calls for further study.

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