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The Rihanna generation: How black immigrants are reshaping America
How black immigration is quietly reshaping America
How black immigration is quietly reshaping America
It was a six-second clip that sent Black Twitter into a frenzy.
President Obama, while on a visit to Jamaica last year, greeted a gym packed to the brim with students with a few words in Jamaican patois.
“Greetings massive! Wha gwaan Jamaica?” the president asked.
After a round of applause, and another few words in patois (“big up!”), Obama chuckled to himself. “Yeah, I’ve been making myself at home here,” he said.
It was a feel-good cultural moment, reflecting a major shift that is quietly sweeping across black America.
On one side, there was President Obama, the son of a Kenyan immigrant and the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. On the other, a growing Caribbean-American population watching at home, happy to see the president talking to them in their vernacular, in their own language.
The black immigrant is on the rise in America. Likewise, so are their children and grandchildren. A full 9% of black Americans are immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center study published last year. That’s nearly triple what it was in 1980.
By 2060, the Census Bureau projects that number will rise to 16.5%. In other words, in the not-too-distant future, nearly 1 in 5 black Americans will have been born abroad.
Across the country, this shift is already reshaping huge chunks of black culture. In the Miami metro area, about 34% of the black population is foreign born. In the New York metro area, it’s about 28%, and in Washington D.C., it’s about 15%.
It means that we have to move away from this view of ‘monolithic blackness’ in this country
- Onoso Imoagene, assistant professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
“It means that we have to move away from this view of ‘monolithic blackness’ in this country,” Onoso Imoagene, a Nigerian-born assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “With the continuing immigration out of Africa and the Caribbean, we’re seeing groups that are holding onto their ethnic identities very strongly — not just in the first generation but the second generation, and their children.”
As a group, foreign-born blacks outperform native black Americans in key categories. They are more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree (26% versus 19%), have higher household income, are more likely to be married (48% for those 18 and older versus 28%), and are less likely to live in poverty (20% versus 28%), according to Pew.
“You cannot conflate race and ethnicity for black people any more,” Imoagene said. “These groups are chipping away at that notion all the time.”
But that’s easier said than done. Official data of second- and third-generation immigrant groups relies on self-identification, and often, the children of black immigrants just assign themselves into the black category, said Imoagene.
One way to track the rising influence of black immigrants is by considering their contributions to culture, politics, and academia in the U.S. over recent years.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s family emigrated from Barbados, before he became the first black man to hold the position. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s parents are from Jamaica. He too was the first black man to serve in that position. Barbados native Rihanna and Trinidad-born Nicki Minaj are running the pop charts. The president of Howard University, the nation’s most prestigious historically black university, is Trinidadian. President Obama’s origin tale also fits into this narrative.
Another way to track the spread of immigration from the West Indies in particular is to look at the growing prevalence of steelpan drum groups in the U.S., suggested William Howard, president of the West Indian Carnival Association, which organizes over 60 Carnival parties around the country every year.
“It’s the only instrument of this century,” Howard told me of the quintessential West Indian instrument, which came into its modern form in Trinidad and Tobago, in the early 1900s. “And right now, there are steel bands at Ivy League schools, they’ve got them at NYU, Rutgers and Northwestern; it’s just flourishing.”
By his estimate, there are currently over 3,000 steel pan bands across nation, from Washington state to Florida.
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Erendira Mancias/ Fusion
Another marker of a population that’s growing: the West Indian Carnival celebrations that Howard’s nonprofit helps to organize. “We just had the carnival here in New York, and now all of a sudden we have a Carnival in New Jersey, a Carnival coming up in Babylon, Long Island, and another Carnival coming up in Nassau,” he said, speaking during this month’s celebrations. “These Carnivals weren’t here five years ago, but all of a sudden we have Carnivals everywhere.”
In Miami, the metropolitan area with the largest percentage of its black population born abroad, the cultural impact of largely Haitian immigration is prevalent in the city’s daily life. Almost every Friday, a traditional Haitian marching band– called a Rara– parades through the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood for hours at a stretch. As the band passes, residents come out of their homes, joining in on the parade.
“People think that when you come to Little Haiti, that it’s like a ghetto side where everything bad is happening,” said Emile Wilnord, while preparing his band Rara Lakay for a march through the neighborhood on a recent Friday. “That’s why we do it, we do it to make everybody happy, give them some of the ambiance like they know back home.”
With him was eleven-year-old son Armani, who has been marching with the band since he was about 4 years old, and who is now an official member of the group. “He got that in his blood,” his father said.
When asked what instruments he played, Armani smiled. “All of it. Drums, horns and some other things,” he said.
