The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  But most black immigrants needed no primer on race. Racial denigration was familiar, especially to those who had been subject to European colonial rule and, for some, whose country had experienced slavery. Yet the confrontation with white America was different from anything most had previously experienced. For the most part, the immigrants came from societies with overwhelmingly black majorities, and they dealt with race from a position of numerical—and generally political—superiority. Holding the reins of power had enabled some to obtain privileged places within the social hierarchy. The sting of second-class citizenship and derision heaped upon minorities had never been felt, and race never attained the central place in their lives. Having lived within a black majority—where ancestry or tribal affiliation, facial features, hair, and wealth were as much a determiner of status as skin color—immigrants arrived in a society where pigmentation was paramount.30

  The standard American definition of race—the one-drop rule—also perplexed the new arrivals. So too did the absence of a middle group—a third caste generally described as “colored”—and the lack of privileges accorded people of mixed racial origins. The redrawing of the color line to create a two-caste system often alienated those who had been neighbors, friends, and even kin. A few discovered, for the first time, that they themselves were black. If immigrants were confused by the redefining of racial boundaries, so too were African Americans, who were both confounded and offended by the assumptions implicit in racial regimes where lineage and money could whiten.31

  Differences created by the racial regimes were further befuddled by mutual ignorance. Although African Americans have long celebrated their connection with Africa—at least since Paul Cuffe began trading on the west coast of the continent in the 1790s—ties between African Americans and Africans had always been problematic. While black nationalists celebrated the link, others frankly admitted the “closest they’ve ever come to Africa is Busch Gardens.” To these, the nature of slavery outside the bounds of the United States, the worldwide struggles against colonialism, and the origins of independence in the Caribbean or Africa constituted unknown territory. Some dismissed Africa as a primitive place bereft of civilization—a place where, in the satirical formulation of comic Eddie Murphy, people “ride around butt-naked on a zebra.” Likewise, the Caribbean was merely a vacation spa. Others celebrated a mythological Africa, wrapping themselves in kente cloth and observing Kwanza, but with small appreciation of the continent itself. In the words of one Nigerian American, who found himself the target of racial slurs by native blacks, “just because African-Americans wear kente cloth does not mean they embrace everything that is African.”32

  Black immigrants, for their part, held a similar battery of stereotypes of black Americans. Gleaned in part from American movies, TV sitcoms, and music, such superficial fragments offered contradictory images of African Americans: on the one hand, as being hyper-sexed and superrich, and on the other hand, as being impoverished, impotent, and much abused.33 Selecting from these conflicting portrayals, immigrants’ conceptions of black Americans often had no more connection to reality than the African Americans’ view of the immigrants.

  Others saw the connection all too clearly. Given the choice of aligning with a minority burdened by the weight of discrimination or maintaining a separate identity, they tried to create an identity “which would separate them from the group they [were] closest to,” stressing differences-be they linguistic, religious, cultural, or political-which distinguished them from African Americans. A sociologist of Haitian descent noted that the “Haitian flags on cars and in store windows have become not only symbols of ethnic pride but also a message to the white community that they expect to be treated differently because they are not African Americans.” Haitians were not the only ones to wrap themselves in the flag to emphasize their difference from African Americaris.34

  The unforgiving character of the two-caste system that jumbled all black people together mitigated distrust and debunked stereotypes among people of African descent. But shared oppression no more created a shared politics in a twentieth-century city than it did in a nineteenth-century plantation or an eighteenth-century slave ship. Those who had long enjoyed the benefits of majority status had difficulty seeing an advantage in defending minority rights. “I don’t want to be Black twice,” asserted a Haitian immigrant. Some, while cognizant of the reality of American racism, quietly accepted it as part of a Faustian bargain in which economic opportunity and material prosperity were exchanged for silent assent.35 Still others saw their national origins providing immunity from the problems that dogged black Americans. They had once been Ghanaians and Barbadians and relocation did not change that. In fact, the denigration of blackness in American society made it imperative to maintain the customs of the homeland. Although outraged by racial discrimination, they nonetheless turned a blind eye, conceiving themselves as sojourners whose future lay elsewhere or as a people apart.36

  Behind these differences, according to one political scientist, stood a radically different understanding of the racism of white Americans. Whereas recent African and Caribbean immigrants tended to view racism as a barrier to be overcome, African Americans saw it more as systemic and so deeply entrenched that it is nearly impossible to breach.37

  The latter views had little attraction for many—perhaps most—black immigrants. If such unspoken bargains that exchanged silence for economic advancement existed, they repudiated them. Newcomers instead found common cause with African Americans and embraced long-established African-American political traditions. Pushing to the forefront of the struggle for equality, they seized the banner of racial justice and demanded an end to inequality. African American heroes from Nat Turner to Martin Luther King, Jr., became their heroes and Black History Month their commemoration, as newcomers refit their own abolitionist and anticolonial politics to the circumstances of American life. “I would not be here had it not been for the black civil rights activists who cleared a pathway for blacks in America by standing up against racial and ethnic discrimination and inequality,” declared one Ghanaian immigrant. African Americans, for their part, generally welcomed their black brothers and sisters to the fray. “There are old African Americans and new African Americans,” declared one African American leader, “but we’re all African Americans.”38

  But not all brothers and sisters became family. Some of the newcomers continue to think of themselves in terms of their former nationality. Asked why he and other Caribbean immigrants do not share the racial sensibility of American-born blacks, a Guyanese man responded, “We’re immigrants. So we come here to uplift ourselves and go back home. We don’t focus on that.” Even among those whose long-term residence gives them more common ground with black natives, differences—rooted in circumstances and aspirations—remained. Language, dress, food, and music, along with attitudes toward family, gender conventions, religious practice, work ethic, and patterns of recreation—among other matters—separated them from African Americans. In a perceptive essay entitled “‘Black Like Who?,”’ a leading scholar of African American life found the largest division within black society was “between native- and foreign-born.”39

  Differences expressed themselves in a variety of ways, many of which resonated beyond a preference for basketball over soccer or for fufu over fries, or even in an exchange of mean-spirited schoolyard epithets. Practices like female circumcision or animal sacrifice offend many African Americans. Others have more material concerns, fearful that new arrivals would take their jobs, a suspicion compounded by the view—articulated by many white employers—that immigrants were more industrious and disciplined than nonimmigrants. The ability of some immigrants to transport their wealth, education, and connections from their homelands to the United States affirmed African American suspicions that the newcomers desired to elbow them aside. In the competition with newcomers, many natives saw themselves falling behind in the struggle for everything from sexual partners to education. When Harvard
University gathered black students to celebrate its expanding black enrollment, university officials were surprised and a bit taken aback to discover that they were not celebrating the success of black students with long American lineages so much as they were that of Africans and West Indians with more recent immigrant roots.40

  The sense of being outpaced stoked jealousies that led to the denial of a common heritage. New arrivals were seen as acting white, not really being black. The newcomers’ desire to maintain ties with their countrymen—for example, their own churches and associations, endogenous marriages, culinary preferences, frequent returns to their homelands, and celebrations of their own holidays and heroes—suggested a sense of difference in the eyes of many African Americans. While they shared a similar complexion and African roots, they had little else in common. “A shared complexion does not equal a shared culture,” observed Kofi Glover, a native of Ghana and a professor at the University of South Florida. Even the recognition of similar circumstances and an appreciation of common ancestry does not always draw natives and newcomers together. Differences, upon occasion, turn violent. Under the headline “Tensions between Africans and African Americans Surface Again,” New York’s Amsterdam News reported, “Some of the more than 4,400 Africans living in Central Harlem have been routinely targeted and singled out for discrimination and abuse, both verbal and physical....” The abuse could be deadly. In the summer of 2006, following the murder of an East African man by an African American woman in Seattle, leaders from the African and African American communities aired their differences. “I think a lot has to do with the appearance of success [among recent African immigrants],” declared one longtime resident. “Some African Americans see themselves as having been left out, and people who have been in Kenya (and other African countries) don’t understand the African American struggle.” The differences festered, so that qualities African Americans celebrated in their own community, they condemned in the newcomers’. The solidarities of immigrant life were at times viewed as arrogance—a conceit embodied by their distinctive food, dress, accents, and institutions that distanced them from African American traditions. African leaders agreed: “These people, they don’t like us; that is why they kill us.”41

  While violence is a rare occurrence, some newcomers returned African American condescension in kind, displaying their own brand of xenophobic intolerance. They boasted of their work ethic, comparing it as favorable to that of African Americans. Laboring at several jobs, attending school at night, and rising early the next day to work, they ridiculed the knots of unemployed men who occupied the street corners of black neighborhoods and the women who queued for food stamps. Advancing their children’s education or assuring higher SAT scores with private tutors and other academic supplements, upward-striving immigrants looked askance at the large number of African American high school dropouts. Giving voice to traditional stereotypes of African American economic dependency and criminality that white Americans had long employed, they condemned unsuccessful African American neighbors in ways that infuriated natives.

  The distance—physical and social—that new arrivals placed between themselves and African Americans was enlarged by the violence and disorder of the inner-city neighborhoods that they often shared. Newcomers feared not only for their lives and property, but also for their children, who they worried would embrace a culture foreign to their own. “We tend to raise our children differently,” declared one Haitian immigrant. “African American kids do not respect their parents who let them talk to them any kind of way. They don’t teach them the meaning of respect for adults.” Rather than trust what they understood as the failures of inner-city school systems, some immigrants sent their children back home to be educated, believing schools in Bridgetown, Lagos, Port au Prince, and elsewhere would better inculcate their values.42

  Yet these very same inner-city neighborhoods in which natives and newcomers awkwardly confronted one another also became sites where they began to create a new African American culture. As with earlier passages, the most visible manifestations of the transformation of black life could be found in the sounds emanating from the shared quarters. Much as the spirituals arose from the transcontinental transit from the seaboard to the black belt and jazz emerged amid the movement from south to north, so hip-hop grew amid the fourth great migration.

  In the late 1970s, the impoverished African American community in the South Bronx seemed an unlikely spot to nurture a new musical form. But as Caribbean immigrants entered the old, established neighborhood, a new sound emerged. Hip-hop drew upon the mixing of mainland and island music traditions with shared rhetorical conventions of toasting (self-aggrandizing, rhymed praise poems), from the islands, and playing the dozens or capping (competitive exchanges of insults), from the mainland. It drew on a variety of expressions from diverse forms, such as break dancing (or b-boying and g-girling), graffiti art (“masterpieces” spray-painted on the sides of building and subway cars), and recorded and live music mixes, but it made its most powerful statement in the aggressive rhetorical style of MCing or rap.43

  In the Bronx and later Harlem and Queens, the origins of hip-hop took root before audiences of young African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, on the street and in clubs. Pioneers of the genre— Jamaican-born Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, Bronx-born Afrika Bambaataa, and Barbados-born Grandmaster Flash—midwifed the new sound by fusing these musical and rhetorical forms at local dance halls and public outings. Drawing on the island tradition of mobile DJs and splicing together multiple recorded songs with drum machine sounds in electronic samplers (or sometimes playing two turntables simultaneously), they created a pulsating rhythm that looped around in repeated phrases and rhymed poetics. DJs broadcasted on massive speakers, or ghetto blasters—Kool Here called his “Herculords”—with an emphasis on bass, making for an overwhelmingly loud sound.

  The new music emerged quickly in neighborhoods in which people of African descent mixed. By the late 1970s, the Bronx would boast several hip-hop groups, among them the Funky Four Plus One and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Within a decade, entrepreneurs—many of them black—had discovered the popularity of the innovative music and its commercial possibilities. Before long, they began to construct a national and then an international market for hip-hop that extended far beyond New York City. New superstars like LL Cool J and groups like Public Enemy emerged, but they never lost touch with the early themes and sounds that had sparked the genre.

  From the beginning, MCs, many of them immigrants from the Caribbean, drew on traditions of rhyming, a tradition they shared with other African Americans: “Kool Here is in the house and he’ll turn it out without a doubt.” They also shared traditions of verbal dueling—the dozens or capping—that often exaggerated muscular strength and sexual prowess, frequently through the figure of an admired baaad man. But raps always identified with life in the inner city—including various urban sounds, like the wailing sirens and rattling trucks on urban streets—suggesting how movement was again giving way to place as the central theme of African American life. Rap depicted in harsh, unforgiving terms the disorder and violence all too familiar to inner-city neighborhoods, where employment was short and poverty widespread. It reflected a society in which injustice could be seen as legitimizing the most antisocial behavior. Often rappers did so with a sharp political edge, critiquing American society. They also lionized the “coolness” of young black men who had been denied access to meaningful work and the possibility of supporting a family. Amid the disorder and decay, artists like Run-D. M.C. celebrated blackness in songs like “Proud to Be Black.” They also identified an oppositional authenticity as the sine qua non of black manhood. Building on such themes, some hip-hop artists expressed more directly a radical egalitarianism, as with Brand Nubian’s “One for All” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” But even this had limits. The antiauthoritarian hypermasculinity was also by turns misogynis
tic, depicting a world peopled by parasitic bitches and hos and trailing off into nihilistic sexual fantasies.44

  During the 1980s, hip-hop leaped across the country from New York to California, often propelled by the new MTV and often taking root in neighborhoods with mixed populations much like the Bronx. New hip-hop artists like Ice-T, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dogg celebrated South Central and Compton much as the first generation of hip-hop artists had set their music in the Bronx and Harlem. Often they competed with each other—sometimes to murderous effect—emphasizing the superiority of the local brand of rap. As the East Coast-West Coast rivalry dominated the early world of hip-hop, people in other localities—Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, and dozens of other places—joined the fray and developed their own styles. Although the moguls of the corporate entertainment business tried to curb the destructive violence that pervaded hip-hop, it continued to reflect the harsh realities of urban life, particularly with N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) and Public Enemy.

  Place, it appeared, was ousting movement as the central theme of black life in the United States, as hip-hoppers told unvarnished stories of life in the hood, often using the language of the street.45 Rap videos firmly rooted hip-hop—the spray-painted masterpieces and the break dancing as well as the music—in the inner city. They depicted urban street corners, playgrounds, rooftops, abandoned buildings, subway stations, giving an unmistakable sense of place. “I want my shit to be in my hood,” declared one video director.46

  But by the end of the twentieth century—perhaps even before—the cosmopolitan roots of hip-hop’s South Bronx beginnings had expanded outward. Rapping and hip-hop more generally had become a global medium (along with its signature dress of hoodies, snooties, and oversized pants) that was as much at home in Accra and Cape Town as it was in Bridgetown and Salvador. It had taken on a life of its own, often influencing white suburban teenagers as well (the phenomenon of the so-called wiggers, or white niggers, was an example of white youth emulating blacks as portrayed in hip-hop imagery). The dynamic combination of natives and newcomers who had been hip-hop’s founding fathers had faded, swallowed—sometimes literally—by the violence of inner-city black life about which they sang and the commodification of their music. New arrivals, with their ambitions for self-improvement, were often appalled at the lyrics, which spoke of and sometimes celebrated the meanness of the inner city they entered with grand hopes of remaking their lives. Ironically, the Afro-centrality embedded in hip-hop seemed to have little appeal to Africans, at least on the east side of the Atlantic. Rather than provide cohesion to black life, the new culture seemed to be a divisive force.