 "Photo: Ray Tyler/Echo staff photographer")
Widespread immigration of blacks from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America raises an interesting question: Will black immigrants eventually move away from their ethnic identities and acquire the racial identity of African Americans?
And what processes might lead black immigrants to embrace or reject a shared racial identity with African Americans?
In her presentation, "Black Mosaic: Black Immigrant and African American Racial Identities," Candis Watts posed these questions after showing a brief clip from The Colbert Report.
In the clip, Debra Dickerson, author of "End of Blackness," states that Barack Obama, since his father is Kenyan, is not truly African American, but rather African African-American. Or, as Stephen Colbert put it "nouveau black."
Watts, a political science Ph.D. candidate at Duke University, gave her talk in Sunday's panel session "Shifts in the Construction of Black Identities," at NCCU's Third African Diaspora Studies Symposium.
She said she got interested in the issue when a friend asked her to trace her roots.
"I was born in Chicago and my grandparents lived in Mississippi, that's the furthest I could go," answered Watts.
She also said an article in the New York Times sparked her interest. The article questioned the eligibility of first generation Africans to receive affirmative action scholarships to elite universities.
Ethnic and racial identities constantly change, argues Watts in her paper, which she summarized as a theory of diasporic consciousness.
"Diasporic consciousness would lead African Americans and Black immigrants to become cognizant of ethnic differences but also realize that racially Black people share a rung in America's racial hierarchy," writes Watts.
"This mutual recognition has the potential of fostering a sense of connectedness among Black people of various ethnicities, consequently broadening both African Americans' and Black immigrants' conceptualization of who belongs within their in-group's boundaries."
Watts' study, which relies on data from the National Survey of American Life and interviews with black immigrants, finds that second-generation black immigrants are likely to acquire a stronger sense of racial, not ethnic, identity as a result of discrimination.
Watts suggests that while black immigrants have a different relationship to American's racial history, minor and major acts of racial discrimination lead second-generation black immigrants to begin to feel more connected to African Americans and psychologically attached to black racial identity.
One Nigerian Watts interviewed captures the richness of the black immigrant experience:
"I think that's my personal dilemma as a Nigerian immigrant in the United States .. [I'm] presumed most of the time to be just Black, ... but then there's this like ambivalence because I feel part of me is an immigrant, and that's a particular identity. ... And a part of me is American ... so there are multiple things ... I identify ... with those three different things."
But if Watts' thesis is accurate, his children, should he decide to raise them in the United States, might think differently.
They might see their experience in a more racialized manner. They might, in response to their experience of discrimination, acquire a stronger sense of connectedness to African Americans.
They might, in other words, acquire a self-image, or identity, similar to those of African Americans.
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