Candis Watts Smith - Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity

BLACK MOSAIC

The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity

Candis Watts Smith

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

2014 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Smith, Candis Watts.

Black mosaic: the politics of Black pan-ethnic diversity / Candis Watts Smith.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-2354-3 (cloth: acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-1-4798-0531-0 (paper: acid-free paper)

1. African AmericansRace identity. 2. African AmericansRelations with Africans. 3. African AmericansRelations with Caribbean Americans. 4. African AmericansRelations with Hispanic Americans. 5. BlacksUnited StatesPolitics and government. 6. ImmigrantsPolitical activityUnited States. 7. Pan-AfricanismPolitical aspectsUnited States. 8. Cultural pluralismUnited States. 9. United StatesPopulation. 10. United StatesRace relations. I. Title.

E185.625.S63 2014

305.800973dc23

2014018127

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Andr

I think about the butterfly effect quite a bit. It is the idea that a minute change in one point in time could lead to an incredibly different outcome much later. As far as this project goes, I would say that the first flap of the butterflys wings was my acceptance and participation in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, which was at the time and still is gracefully run by Debbie Wahl. I started this project when I was a Mellon fellow in college. Then in an accidental conversation with Kerry Haynie, I learned about the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, headed by Paula McClain and Scott DeMarchi. I was considering graduate school before I went to RBSI, but that program helped me to solidify my decision. And now here we are. Apparently, there are just over 9,300 political science faculty in American colleges and universities; of those, 461 are Black political scientists, and among those, 161 of them are Black women. I am a statistical outlier. The thing about these types of programs is that they are trying to put themselves out of business; they try to make people like me the norm rather than the exception. I hope, in some way, this book serves as a small testament to the good programs such as MMUF do and RSBI can do when given the opportunity.

With that said, let me acknowledge those people who helped me write this little testament. Kerry Haynie, Paula McClain, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and John Aldrich were my advisers and guided me through the initial writing process. Both Kerry and Paula have been and continue to be wonderful mentors, and I am certain that I will always feel deeply indebted to them.

Jim Rogers and Ken Meier invited me to come for a year to Texas A&M, where I worked on transitioning my research into a book manuscript. Actually, I invited myself, but thankfully, Jim and Ken welcomed me and provided the resources I needed. During my year at TAMU, a number of people helped me to step back and see the project from a new perspective: Jure Capers, Kim Yi Dionne, Francisco Pedraza, Misha Taylor-Robinson, Breanca Thomas, and Joe Ura. Thank all of you for making my time in College Station fruitful and, dare I say, fun. I also received helpful feedback and encouragement from a number of fantastic individuals: Portia Cropper, Chryl Laird, Taeku Lee, Natalie Masuoka, Shayla Nunnally, Efrn Prez, Gabe Sanchez, Karthik Ramakrishnan, and Neil Roberts. When I got to Williams College, Lori DuBois and Sharron Macklin helped me with some of the very technical aspects of the manuscript. I appreciate them for sharing their time with me. Thanks to Ilene Kalish, Caelyn Cobb, and their editorial team at New York University Press. I especially want to thank Andrew Katz for his meticulous copyediting. Thanks to the reviewers who remained anonymous for their excellent and helpful critiques on various versions of the manuscript. Also, I must thank my respondents. I wish I could name them.

It turns out that all of my closest friends are brilliant and also very gracious. Thank you, Kim Bickham, Rose Buckelew, Sarah Mayorga-Gallo, and Danielle Spurlock for reading this book in manuscript and providing feedback. Thank you for your kind words and for using lots of exclamation marks along with those words. Finally, I would like to thank my family Anthony and Sheila Watts, my parents; and Terrell Smith, my husband for all of their love and support, and Andr, who took just enough naps and gave more than enough smiles for me to put the finishing touches on this project.

Many people have some of their first interactions with groups of people they have never met before during their first year in college, and these interactions often lead people to think more deeply about their own identity. Mary Waters, in Ethnic Options, discusses this phenomenon for white college students who, for their entire life, may have identified as Irish or Italian and then go to college and realize that there are actually people from Ireland and Italy who would use the same ethnic labels; this experience leads these people to reassess their identity in the face of authentic ethnic white international or immigrant students. This was true for me as well as for a number of other people in my incoming class. A Trinidadian friend of mine, for example, told me that I was the first Black friend she had that was actually from the United States that is to say, someone who had a long African American lineage. She lived in Miami and mentioned that all the Black people she knew were from one island in the Caribbean or another. And I met two Afro-Latina women who were best friends. One of them had a Black father and a Mexican mother. The other had a Black mother and a Puerto Rican father. They were connected at the hip and identified as Black (both pledged a historically Black sorority), but when they fought (in Spanish), they would make remarks about the others Mexican or Puerto Rican roots. I realized that my ideas concerning who was Black were actually very limited and constrained.

My undergraduate institution, like other elite schools in the U.S., had a large proportion of Black students who were first- and second-generation immigrants; the exact numbers are undocumented by the institution, but with a group of friends and a yearbook, we approximated that 30 percent or so of the Black students in our incoming class were immigrants or had at least one parent who was an immigrant. While almost all the Black students belonged to the Black Student Alliance, many of them also belonged to clubs particular to their ethnic group. Black students were proud of where they came from, but at times you could feel a tension between the various Black ethnic groups. I can recall quite clearly a time when a woman asked me, Where are you from? I replied, My family lives in North Carolina a response that I used because my family was an Army family. She, in turn, asked, No, where are you